Workday Unveils New AI and ML Services to Enhance the Developer Experience and Power the Future of Work

Workday a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, announced significant enhancements to Workday Extend aimed at improving the developer experience and driving business and IT efficiency and innovation.

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These new capabilities are being showcased at Workday Rising, the company’s annual customer conference, and include Workday AI Gateway, advanced developer technologies provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), and a no-code/low-code toolset.

“At Sun Life, we believe technology plays an integral role in supporting our mission to drive client, business, and employee success,” said Eric Chung, director of HR systems management, Sun Life. “With Workday Extend, our developers can build and maintain our own apps in HR, enabling us to support important business needs quickly. And now with Workday AI and ML services, we will further grow our toolbox of capabilities to build new apps faster and with less risk because they’re on the Workday platform.”

Ushering in a New Level of Intelligent App Creation With Workday AI Gateway

Workday Extend helps organizations build customized capabilities, applications, and solutions for finance and people processes. To enable developers to create apps that drive business growth, while continuing to innovate in a secure and responsible way, Workday Extend is opening the power of AI and ML through Workday AI Gateway. Workday AI Gateway will provide developers with access to Workday AI and ML services, with planned services including:

• Skills Analysis. Leverages Workday Skills Cloud to compare and contrast skills to help developers quickly extract relevant skills from text to continue to grow internal skills and developer capabilities.
• Sentiment Analysis. Supports analyzing digital text to determine if the emotional tone of a message is positive, neutral, or negative.
• Document Intelligence. Leverages Workday’s curated ML models to help users extract business-relevant fields from business documents like resumes, receipts, and generic documents.
• ML Forecaster. Provides developers with a time series forecaster to make seasonal and non-seasonal predictions. The API accepts a list of historical values along with the start date of the historical series and a time horizon for the number of future forecasted intervals and optionally (e.g., seasonality), and responds with predictions for future dates.

Because AI and ML are embedded in the core of the Workday platform, developers can build and deliver trusted finance and people apps.

Accelerating Innovation With Advanced Developer Technologies

To empower developers to accelerate their app innovation, Workday plans to support several AWS AI services natively in Workday Extend to enable developers to create Workday Extend apps with advanced features derived from using these hyperscale innovations.

In addition to planned offerings of event-processing capabilities powered by Amazon EventBridge, customizable functions using AWS Lambda, and storage with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Workday plans for Workday Extend to support AI services powered by AWS, including Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Textract, and Amazon Translate. With these services planned to be available within Workday Extend, developers can gain deeper insight within text – including sentiment, key phrases, images, videos, and across various languages – to rapidly build customized apps that support their unique and evolving business needs.

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Connectors from Workday Orchestrate to AWS services will enable developers to easily interact with AWS services while remaining protected with Workday security controls.

Faster App Development With No-Code Building and Generative AI

To enhance no-code experiences for developers and increase collaboration between the business and IT teams, Workday introduced new capabilities to App Builder, its no-code/low-code web-based developer toolset. These include code generation from data, which enables developers to generate code from a Workday business object using a visual experience; and page builder, which is a planned no-code visual experience that will help developers build full apps with clicks.

In addition, Workday plans on further enhancing the developer experience with Developer Copilot, a new human-machine teaming capability that will leverage the power of generative AI to support the development lifecycle. Developer Copilot will be natively embedded into App Builder and will provide text-to-code generation capabilities to improve developer productivity and customer time-to-value by turning natural language into app code.

These innovations will provide Workday Extend business developers with an intuitive, visual experience to create new apps faster while enabling the organization to consolidate systems, adapt to changing business needs, and deliver a more connected experience.

“Workday Extend is the essential platform enabling customers and partners to build apps that support their unique finance and people needs,” said Matt Grippo, general manager, cloud platform, Workday. “Our new Workday AI Gateway and native AWS integration opens the door to a world of new possibilities that allow developers to move fast, accelerate innovation, and deliver deep business value securely and responsibly at scale.”

Availability

In late 2023, Workday will provide customers with new ways to get started with Workday Extend with the following offerings: Workday Extend Essentials and Workday Extend Professional.

Workday AI Gateway will be available with Workday Extend Professional. AWS AI services are planned to be available to Workday Extend Professional customers in the first half of 2024. The code generation from data capability for App Builder is currently available as part of Workday Extend. The page builder capability for App Builder is planned to be available to early adopters in the first half of 2024 and generally available later that year.

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