Workday & AWS expand partnership to enhance AI capabilities

Workday and AWS have disclosed an expanded collaboration aimed at developing generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. This partnership seeks to innovate new customer experiences and invest in joint go-to-market initiatives, thereby accelerating customer cloud transformation and aiding clients in enhancing productivity, managing talent, and streamlining business processes.

"This expanded partnership combines the power of Workday AI and AWS to deliver AI features to our customers faster and more efficiently," stated Shane Luke, Vice President of Product and Engineering and head of AI and ML at Workday. "With Workday AI, we're focused on delivering value for our customers through the use of enterprise data in their Workday applications. By leveraging AWS, we can focus more directly on that goal, while using the tools and services they provide for a range of model management and operations."

Workday utilises AWS technologies such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker JumpStart to develop generative AI tools designed to assist customers in managing their workforce and financial assets. Workday is implementing these AI capabilities to expedite processes like job description creation, contract analysis, and the generation of personalised employee talent highlights.

Furthermore, Workday is collaborating with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to pilot new applications for generative AI capabilities and explore additional use cases. By deepening the usage of Amazon SageMaker, Workday aims to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) through the application of model guardrails and responsible AI policies.

The partnership also includes expanding native integrations with AWS. This expansion will enable Workday developers and customers to leverage AWS technologies for building custom applications. These technologies include AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon S3, Amazon Textract, and Amazon Translate. Customers will be able to use Workday Extend to create customised apps for finance and human resources processes more securely and at greater scale.

Workday and AWS will also invest in joint sales and go-to-market initiatives to enhance new customer acquisition and raise awareness of Workday’s presence on the AWS Marketplace. Running Workday on AWS is expected to provide customers with near-zero downtime maintenance windows and compliance with regional data residency laws and regulatory requirements.

"Since 2008, AWS and Workday have worked together to help thousands of customers across every industry accelerate cloud migrations and drive faster, more intelligent financial and workforce decisions," said Kathrin Renz, Vice President of AWS Industries. "With AWS as a preferred cloud services provider, Workday can quickly develop new ways to help organisations around the globe become more responsive and data-focused. We look forward to deepening our partnership across joint customer workstreams and new innovations and developing generative AI capabilities to help companies around the world move faster and with greater certainty."

Workday revealed a suite of generative AI capabilities designed to boost productivity and facilitate better decision-making during Workday RISING last September. At that time, Sayan Chakraborty, Co-President of Workday, commented, "Generative AI has the potential to completely transform work as we know it. When applied responsibly, it has the power to elevate performance and to free up time to focus on the valuable work we really want and need to be doing. At Workday, we build solutions for business challenges where we can deliver clear and transformative benefits. We build enterprise-grade capabilities that are trustworthy, transparent, safe, and that keep the user in the driver's seat at all times. Workday, our customers, and their employees are writing the playbook for how the future works together."

The generative AI features offered by Workday are poised to benefit businesses in multiple ways, including the generation of job descriptions, contract analysis for revenue recognition, and the creation of personalised knowledge management articles. Moreover, the capabilities extend to automating finance processes, such as crafting overdue notices, and providing text-to-code functionality for Workday Extend application development, thereby enhancing developer productivity.