Workday Rising 2025 @ San Francisco - Workday Illuminate and Updates for Adaptive

I was lucky to attend Workday Rising 2025 with 2 other awesome colleagues. This year, we had the chance to celebrate Workday's 20th birthday, hear the talented and genuine researcher Brené Brown, witness a superb drone show and... I discovered that I actually knew more than 1 song from Duran Duran •ᴗ•

The focus was on Workday Illuminate, Workday's agentic AI platform, which is set to transform how HR, Finance, and Accounting operate. With this platform, you can now automate routine tasks, request (basic) analyses, explore your data more efficiently, and get assistance with formulas, logic, and guidance on training and learning.

AI is poised to revolutionize the way we work. Personally, I don't view it as a threat, rather, I see it as a giant boost to my productivity. This aligns perfectly with Workday's motto: "AI Powered, Human Centric."

AI functionalities, whether it is Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, Workday Illuminate, Otter.AI, or Synthesia.IO, whatever-AI-tool-I-Use... feel to me like having 3 smart and polite interns and unlimited on-demand espresso shots. Since I started using these tools, I was able to accomplish tasks (e.g. programming, integrations, documentation, processes, video editing, brainstorming...) in just a few hours, tasks that used to take me several days! Yes, it's that transformative! (I almost feel like Xena sometimes!) 

The AI that is arriving in businesses and infiltrating our personal lives is like a big wave: you can either ride it or crash into it. And this is where the risk lies; I've already started noticing the growing gap around me:

On one side: people who embrace it, curious minds, eager learners & active users. 

On the other side: those who are frightened, struggling to understand how it works, feeling  overwhelmed and (what's worse): not even open or interested in learning about it. 

This is where the big clash will occur: those who want to and can use AI versus those who don’t want to or can’t. The divide will be brutal. I truly hope people have a wake-up call and show interest in learning, because without it, this gap, whether professional, personal, or economical, will only continue to widen and split even more our society.

The good news is that AI can help you learn about AI! 

It’s reminiscent of the 70s and 80s, when some chose to stick with snail mail and calculators, while others embraced email and Excel. But here the leap is even wider. AI won’t replace all the jobs, but it will replace people who aren’t using it, and it will wipe out companies that lag behind in adopting it.

AI will help us save a lot of time and headaches... Does it mean I will have more time to play  pickleball? 😁

Enough of my rambling!

Let's dive into the SUPER COOL FEATURES coming into Adaptive. I am focusing solely on Adaptive, not the entire Workday Platform (HCM, Financials, Prism etc.)

ADAPTIVE @ Workday Rising: what's coming in future releases?

I had the privilege of attending some amazing sessions and engaging in insightful discussions with several incredible PMs: AJ Christon, Jacob Susskind, Andrew Setness, Dan Slamowitz, Cody Johnson, Marlon Sims and Ravi Patel. You likely have heard their names & voices in release videos!

Before I reveal some of the awesome features (and thank you Otter.AI for transcribing the sessions!), I have to mention the fun duo AJ Christon and Jacob Susskind (AKA the comedians?) who kicked off  their session by explaining how they decide which features to work on... Apparently their process involves a little bit of art and a little bit of science: AJ wears a big truck hat at work... He puts some random ideas on little papers, curls them up and dumps them into the hat. Then, Jacob draws a random feature from the hat and... only if Jacob can read what AJ wrote, that's the feature they will work on!

This hilarious explanation really helped me understand why some of my old submitted ideas never got picked up! I just was not lucky enough! Maybe if I submit them 300 times, my odds will improve?

Just in case you're not getting it: this was a joke! One minute of comedy by Jacob and AJ! Thank you!

Alright.. here are some key features in the pipeline: 

Future features in Adaptive

- Collaboration features with tagging in dashboards (for example you can tag a user to ask them a question on a specific number, or a reminder to update something).

- Notifications within Adaptive (top right mailbox)

- Slack integration for notifications

- Enhanced cell explorer with multi dimensional support

- Google Sheets integration: Office Connect equivalent 

- And the submission of data back to Adaptive from G Sheets!

- Planning hubs for consolidating planning activities (super cool feature): you can have everything in 1 place: reports, processes and workflows, dashboards, notes & comments --> For example you will create 1 planning hub for expenses, 1 for headcount, 1 for revenue, etc.

- Agent! (see next section)

Ask Workday (conversational UI) & WAP*  Agent capabilities:   

*WAP: Workday Adaptive Planning (not talking about the song from Cardi B)

You can ask things to the agent. It is like your virtual butler... When you go to Adaptive, check the navy blue chat icon on the top right:

What does the agent offer:

- Natural language interaction with the agent 
- Contextual assistance: meaning, the agent knows where you are in Adaptive and will adapt its answer.
- Can explain system features and processes
- Is accessible across different skill levels
- Embodies four personas: Analyst, Planner, Modeler and Administrator
- Can automate some manual planning processes
- Can automate model building
- Provide intelligent insights and analysis with detailed driver breakdown (for ex: breakdown of revenue variance by product)
- Ability to generate visualizations (mini charts)
- Can offer formula generation, optimization and explanation (great if you need to understand a model so you don't have to bug your Admin or Architect 😁)

For Workforce Planning

- Headcount planning by cost centers and custom organizations, easy input of incremental hires, directly in an org chart!

- Aggregate headcount planning for bulk position hiring

- Real time refresh of actuals from HCM

Additional Technical features

- Cloud Data Connector (CDC) drill through capabilities! --> more on CDC here.

- Scheduling pipeline tasks for data integration

- Unified user provisioning, authentication and access management (for platform customers)

Predictive Forecasting and Anomaly detection Key features 

(amazing session with duo: Dan Slamowitz + Cody Johnson)

- 8 different AI/ML algorithms for forecasting (use their AI to understand which one to choose!) depending of your industry, forecast methodology and type etc.- Automatic Seasonality detection

- Ability to include external and internal regressors*
*Regressor = In statistical analysis and machine learning, a regressor is an independent variable (or predictor variable) used in a regression analysis to predict the outcome or dependent variable. It provides information about the relationship between an input and an output, helping models to make forecasts or understand patterns. Examples include factors like fertilizer levels to predict crop yield, or a company's marketing budget to predict sales.

- Automatic predictive update of your Rolling Forecast

Anomaly detection: 

- Alerts planners to data pattern variations
- Gets smarter with continued use
- Highlights significant deviations from historical trends

Looking ahead...

As businesses navigate increasingly complex financial landscapes, tools like Workday Illuminate, and Agentic AI represent more than technological advancement. They are a strategic imperative for a company's survival and stay in the competition. By combining AI with user friendly UI, the platform empowers organizations to move from reactive reporting to proactive, insight driven planning. 

I’m thrilled to see Workday releasing these incredible features! For a while, I was starting to worry that Workday was falling behind competitors like Pigment, but it’s clear now that they were hard at work developing these innovations, and they’ve finally delivered. The new capabilities not only cement Workday Adaptive's place as a leader in planning and analytics but also showcase their commitment to empowering businesses with robust and cutting-edge tools.

With these new developments, there’s no doubt that Workday Adaptive is pushing boundaries, ensuring users stay ahead of the curve in a fast-changing world. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities these features will bring!

To read more on Workday Illuminate platform, check their last year's Investor's relation announcement here.