Workday's AI Features as of February 2025

Posted 3 months ago

During Rising 2024, Workday announced Illuminate, "The Next Generation of Workday AI." It was... frustratingly vague. Almost like Workday was suspiciously trying to sell a dream future state to the world and dodge discussing the current state of AI features.

So if you want a real list of Workday's AI features, where do you go? Out on Community, you can find the "Workday AI Data and Features". And within that, there are these Workday AI Fact Sheets that summarize each feature. Typically with an Overview, Setup Instructions, Model Description, Limitations, and Responsible AI Summary.

Most of the descriptions below are copy+paste directly from Community. Several have been edited by me for clarity or brevity.

Ad Hoc Worker Communications with AI Text Editor

When you set up Ad Hoc Worker Communications in Workday, you can communicate with workers through email, mobile push notifications, and SMS. To use the SMS communication channel, you must have access to the Workday Messaging SKU.

Adds a generative AI text editor using a Google Vertex AI model to assist with content refinement. With the AI text editor enabled, content for emails can be expanded to assist with suggestive message add-ons. Senders that need assistance creating shorter concise messaging for SMS and push notifications can use the AI text editor to summarize the message, ensuring the length is suitable for SMS and push notifications. More on Community.

Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is part of Intelligent Planning, and enables planners to identify anomalies in general ledger and custom accounts on standard sheets. The planners can also analyze comparisons between the Machine Learning (ML) prediction version and other planning versions for outlier reporting. More on Community.

Candidate Skills Match

Candidate Skills Match leverages machine learning to compare skills derived from the job requisition with the skills identified on candidates’ job applications. Based on the similarity between the job requisition skills and the job application skills, candidates’ applications are categorized into 4 match categories. These categories are intended to complement the recruiters’ efforts and increase the efficiency of identifying prospective candidates. This feature thereby allows recruiters to spend their highest-quality time on highly scored candidates.

The Candidate Skills Match category can be added to display in the candidate grid associated with the job requisition. By selecting the match category, a user is presented with a pop-up window that displays details about the match, including the skills identified as a match between the requisition and the application. More on Community.

Career Hub

Career Hub provides workers an application that empowers them to manage and plan their career development. Using machine learning (ML), Career Hub provides workers with suggestions to grow their skills and capabilities and encourages them to build a plan as they explore opportunities for continuing career development.

Career Hub helps workers consider their next career steps, such as (but not limited to) identifying skill interests and learning content, finding mentors and connections, and exploring opportunities such as Flex Teams (previously gigs) and jobs from within your organization. This functionality improves talent mobility, worker satisfaction, and engagement in your organization by giving workers the ability to find the internal opportunities that suit them best.

When workers enter Career Hub for the first time, they go through an initial assessment to create their Career Hub Profile by updating their skills, setting a career focus (grow in current role, grow beyond current role, or both), and identifying interested job roles, skills interests, and flex team availability. More on Community.

Cash Application Insights

The Customer Payment Matching feature addresses the problem of matching payments to invoices. It uses Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to predict the probability that a payment matches an invoice. More on Community.

Compensation Survey Job Match

Compensation Survey Jobs Recommendations provides you with recommended benchmark jobs to match with job profiles. This feature assists in matching market data from compensation survey vendors, and internally to Workday job profiles to compensate employees and candidates accordingly. More on Community.

Data Entry Check

The Data Entry Check feature monitors inputs entered in numeric and date prompts. It detects whether numeric values and date differences entered are within reasonable margins from historical values previously entered. It raises a warning message alerting of the low or high out of bounds value. It can also show the range of values it considers to be nonanomalous (in the context here, anomalous means uncommon, rather than incorrect). This feature is intended to prevent unintentional entry of values out of bounds. More on Community.

Expense Protect

Expense Protect automatically reviews expense reports for anomalous activity at the time they’re submitted. Expense Protect identifies amount outliers, misclassified expense items and duplicate expenses. Based on the frequency of these issues, Expense Protect flags each Expense Line and Expense Report with a High, Medium, or Low indicator. More on Community.

Fetching Capabilities

Fetch is a sourcing tool that helps organizations connect with potential talent by suggesting individuals for open job requisitions and surfacing relevant job opportunities to individuals. When a requisition is opened, posted or modified, the Fetching Capabilities incorporate 2 parsing models to match Warm Leads, Employees, and/or Candidates with open job requisitions. Recruiter and hiring manager end users can leverage these features to generate results targeting specific talent personas (leads, employees, and candidates). More on Community.

Form Completion Assistant

Form Completion Assistant speeds up data entry and improves end user experience by providing recommendations on fields in various reports and tasks across Workday. More on Community.

Intelligent Answers

When an end user has a question, they often search for an answer within Workday. For example, “How much time off do I get for paternity leave?” If they’re unable to find an answer to their question, they might need to open a Help ticket, which can take substantial time until the issue gets resolved. In response to end users’ search queries, Intelligent Answers identifies relevant questions and answers based on your Help Article library and surfaces them in search results or Assistant (if enabled). Consequently, this helps users spend less time searching for answers and opening Help cases, which can help customers save time and money. More on Community.

Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Customer Invoices

The Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Customer Invoices feature recommends up to 5 most likely Sales Items and Revenue Categories when you create or edit customer invoices. This feature can help reduce time spent on manual entry and miscategorization of the customer invoice line and associated rework. More on Community.

Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Customer Overpayment

The Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Customer Overpayments feature recommends up to 5 of the most likely Overpayment Reasons, Cost Centers, and Locations when you create or edit customer overpayments. More on Community.

Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Cash Management

The Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Cash Management feature recommends up to 5 of the most likely selections for various fields on Ad Hoc Bank Transactions, Ad Hoc Payments, and Miscellaneous Payment Requests. More on Community.

Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Tax Attributes on Supplier Invoice Lines

The Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Tax Attributes on Supplier Invoice Lines feature recommends up to 5 most likely Tax Applicability, Tax Code, Tax Recoverability, and Withholding Tax Code when you create or edit supplier invoices. More on Community.

Intelligent Recommendations and Defaulting for Expense Items

The Intelligent Recommendations and Defaulting for Expense Items feature recommends up to 5 of the most likely Expense Items when you create or edit quick expenses from a scanned receipt or a credit card transaction. More on Community.

Job Description Generation on Job Requisitions

Job Description Generation considers a customer's Job Posting Title, Company Name, and Skills, as indicated for a Job Requisition, and produces Job Description text for Job Requisitions that is relevant in terms of content and structure to serve as a starting point for the drafter to review. More on Community.

Journal Insights

The Journal Insights feature continually monitors accounting entries as they’re posted to detect and flag anomalies. It also provides a recommended correction whenever possible. This feature enables accountants and controllers to identify and correct potential reconciliation issues as they occur, rather than during the high-pressure month-end close. More on Community.

Learning Recommendations

Learning Recommendations improves the learner experience and promotes engagement by presenting users with suggestions of learning content they might want to enroll in. More on Community.

Learning Skills Tagging

Learning Skills Tagging improves the experience for learning administrators by providing skill suggestions for learning content. These suggestions can be found when creating or editing learning content and when reporting against learning content. More on Community.

Machine Learning Recommendations for Change Jobs

Provides recommendations for the following prompts of the Change Job task: job profile, location, cost center, reason, and compensation plan. This feature is intended to help reduce the need for manual data entry and improve accuracy. More on Community.

Pay Anomalies

Pay Anomalies continually analyzes payroll results processed during Pay calculation to predict potential abnormal Payroll results and provides real-time insights into these results. It enables administrators to find and review potential abnormal results through Pay Anomalies Results report with comprehensive filtering capabilities, improving payroll accuracy and reducing the amount of time and effort spent on identifying and reviewing payroll exceptions for workers. More on Community.

People Analytics - Top Drivers for Focus Insights

Top Drivers for Focus insights are designed to explain the driving forces behind the Focus Insights. It helps end users to understand why the Focus Insight is important and makes the Insights actionable. More on Community.

People Analytics - Trend and Gap Insights

Trend and Gap insights, Focus Insights, displays targeted insights by analyzing workforce data, to show you where and why the shifts are happening. Focus Insights answer over 30 business questions developed by Workday across 6 content areas (diversity and inclusion, organization composition, skills, talent and performance, retention and attrition and hiring). This feature surfaces relevant insights, which are updated based on changes across your organization on a monthly basis. More on Community.

Predictive Forecasting

Predictive Forecaster leverages historical data to populate specified forecast versions with Machine Learning (ML) predicted data. Forecasted data presents a starting point for budgets and plans. More on Community.

Quick Tasks

The Task Recommendation feature predicts what tasks a user will want to perform upon logging in to Workday. Examples of tasks that might be suggested include Submit Expense Report, Request Time Off, and Review Time Off Request.

The Task Recommendation feature can understand the user’s role in the system and the aggregate behavior of other users with that same role. For example, when a new user logs in to Workday, the system can understand the user’s role and predict their first actions. Recommendations take into account day of the week, and week in the month. The Task Recommendation feature shows up as Quick Tasks on the home page. More on Community.

Receipt Scanning for Expenses

Receipt Scanning for Expenses quickly populates expense details such as amount, currency, date, and merchant on a quick expense created when expense users scan receipts. Receipt scanning capabilities are available to all locales, thereby supporting increased efficiency and helping users prevent manual errors when they report expenses through Workday on Android, iPad, and iPhone. We also support this functionality on Workday for Slack and Microsoft Teams (customer opt in to the Workday Everywhere Innovation Service required). More on Community.

Search Insights

Search Insights allows you to report on search query trends based on search terms entered by end users in Global Search. The search data is augmented with Machine Learning (ML) fields such as a Topic Classifier, an Intent Classifier and a Spelling Corrector. More on Community.

Smart Search Suggestions

Smart Search Suggestions makes it easier to find tasks and reports in Workday by providing a greater level of understanding to search queries. While search previously only returned results based on direct keyword matches, users will now be able to find tasks and standard reports in typeahead using more generic queries. More on Community.

Spend Category Recommendation for Purchase Orders

This feature recommends up to 5 most likely spend categories when you manually create, edit, or adjust a purchase order. This feature helps reduce manual effort when selecting spend categories and minimize misclassification errors. More on Community.

Spend Category Recommendation for Purchase Requisitions

This is a Workday Procurement feature that uses machine learning to recommend spend categories when the user creates a noncatalog requisition. Recommendations are limited to spend categories that historically display in noncatalog requisitions. The recommendations are based on several transaction attributes. More on Community.

Suggested Jobs for External Candidates

Suggested Jobs for External Candidates improves candidate experience and engagement by presenting external candidates with suggestions of additional jobs they can apply to. Suggestions are based on the Job Requisitions a candidate applied to or their experience. More on Community.

Suggested Skills for External Candidates and Prospects

When an external candidate uploads a resume as part of the Quick Apply feature or similarly when a prospect uploads a resume as part of the Prospect Introduce Yourself form (PIY form), they’re shown a list of suggested skills. The suggested skills are either exact matches or related skills based on the relational mapping in Workday’s Skills Cloud ontology. More on Community.

Suggested Skills for Job Profiles

This feature suggest relevant skills using information captured on the job profile and common skills on recently created job requisitions under the job profile. Users can accept or ignore skills suggestions and can search for and select skills that are relevant to the job profile. You can use Suggested Skills for Job Profiles to generate skills suggestions for all job profiles, 1 job profile, all job profiles in a job family, or all job profiles in a job family group. You can share a skill suggestions report with stakeholders who don’t have all the details of a job profile. More on Community.

Suggested Skills on Job Requisitions

Suggested Skills for Job Requisitions augments the process of managing skills tied to a job requisition. Skills suggestions are displayed to users when creating or modifying a job requisition, where they can add as either required or optional for that particular role. This feature enables hiring managers and recruiters to identify relevant skills more efficiently More on Community.

Suggested Skills on Worker Profile

Skills suggestions are surfaced under Edit Skills on the worker profile and in Career Hub and Opportunity Marketplace. This reature helps workers keep their profile skills up to date and helps customers understand the skills possessed by their workforce More on Community.

Spotlight

Candidate screening (A-D grade). The Spotlight feature is a candidate review tool, where customers can view, prioritize, and take action on candidates who have applied to open requisitions. The Spotlight feature assists you in candidate screening by assigning a letter grade ranging from A to D based on how closely the candidate’s resume matches the job requirements, as defined by your organization. More on Community.

Supplier Invoice Automation - Scanning

This feature scans invoices for relevant information and then creates a pre-populated supplier invoice in Workday. This feature suggests field entries (for example, supplier), matches against existing Purchase Orders (PO) and links invoice lines to PO lines. More on Community.

Supplier Invoice Automation - Worktag Recommendations

The Supplier Invoice Automation - Worktag Recommendations feature recommends up to 5 of the most likely worktags when you manually create, edit, or adjust a supplier invoice and supplier invoice requests. More on Community.

P45 Tax Form Scanning

Uses optical character recognition to gather information from their P45. An updated Apply UK New Hire Tax Detailsenables you to process P45 information for new hires in the task. More on Community.

Skills in People Analytics

Adds a worker match score for skills to identify skill gaps and prioritize the best opportunities to upskill workers. More on Community.

Personalized Search improves the relevance of search results by suggesting Workday tasks and reports based on the user profile and historical actions. It ranks and orders search results to present the most likely relevant results first. More on Community.

Talent Marketplace

Adds 2 applications (which are highly dependent on skills):

  • Opportunity Marketplace for workers looking for job, flex teams (previously gigs) and learning content opportunity suggestions.)
  • Flex Teams for workers who are looking to assemble and reassemble teams in an agile way. More on Community.

Task & Report Search is designed to empower end users to quickly find relevant information and actions using natural language search queries in the global search bar in Workday. It tries to understand the intent behind search queries to help users discover relevant tasks and reports. More on Community.

Time Anomalies

This feature allows managers to more easily view anomalous time entries by referencing workers' prior entries and historical schedule blocks. More on Community.

Workday AI Gateway

Workday AI Gateway enables organizations to access certain APIs that provide AI capabilities to be used within applications developed by Extend customers pursuant to the Workday Developer Program. This document provides a list of full use Workday AI Gateway APIs that Extend customers can use to build their applications. More on Community.

Workday Assistant

Workday Assistant leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help users by returning Workday information, tasks, and reports most likely relevant to users’ search queries in the search bar and/or the chatbot. Workday Assistant can be found in Workday for desktop and mobile application, and is available through Microsoft Teams and Slack. More on Community.

Workday Extend Developer Copilot

Workday Extend Developer Copilot is an intelligent companion which is always available by the Developer’s side to assist throughout the app building journey. More on Community.

Workday Help AI in Knowledge Management

Workday Help offers both knowledge and case management capabilities. There are two AI features in Knowledge Management:

  1. AI Article Summarization: Uses AI to summarize help articles or policy documents into a summary, FAQ, or talking points.
  2. AI Article Translations: Uses AI to translate Help Articles into various languages. More on Community.

Workday Peakon Employee Voice Attrition Prediction

Attrition Predictions helps customers identify the likelihood of attrition risks among employee segments within their organizations, using survey and employee data. More on Community.

Workday Peakon Employee Voice Comment Summarization

Summarizes a large volume of comments into digestible summaries that surface the main themes from the comments. More on Community.

Workday Peakon Employee Voice Comment Translation

This feature translates Workday Peakon Employee Voice comments into the user’s preferred locale language. More on Community.

Semantic Search arranges all available comments in the order of probable relevance, based on the contextual meaning of the user's search query. More on Community.

Workday Peakon Employee Voice Semantic Topics

Semantic Topics surface meaning-based contextual themes from Workday Peakon Employee Voice survey comments to enable users (such as managers and administrators) to identify potential areas of focus. More on Community.

Workday Peakon Employee Voice Strengths and Focus Areas

Strengths and Focus Areas help customers understand which psychological drivers likely have the strongest connection with employee engagement and represent the most impactful opportunities for development. More on Community.

Workday Peakon Employee Voice Topics

The Topics feature surfaces relevant topics by performing thematic clustering of employees’ survey comments based upon keywords. More on Community.

Workday Peakon Employee Voice True Benchmarks

True Benchmark enhances the relevance and accuracy of standard benchmarks by modeling the demographics and employment characteristics of the population being benchmarked, and adjusting the standard benchmarks accordingly. More on Community.

Worksheets Formula Writer and Explainer

Formula Writer: Creates a Worksheets formula based on your description of what you need the formula to do with your live data. More on Community.

WSS Contract OCR

Strategic Sourcing Contracts Intelligence scans and stores the text of supplier contracts for Workday customers. This enables full text search of contracts directly from the Workday UI. Additionally, a set of data fields are identified from the contracts, extracted and stored within Workday. More on Community.