Workday introduces new capabilities for building and verifying AI agents

Workday Inc. today announced new capabilities aimed at providing developers new ways to build on top of its platform using their own tools.

During DevCon 2026, the company’s annual developer conference, Workday unveiled a new Developer Agent and Agent-Ready Tools to take developers from simple requests directly to working apps or agents within minutes. The new Agent Passport provides independent, third-party verification for agents, showing that they’re safe to deploy.

“Agentic AI is not incremental change for developers; it’s permanently rewriting the playbook,” Jay Wieczorkowski, vice president and general manager of developer platform, told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

This makes for the largest update to date to Workday Build, the company’s developer platform, since the company baked low-code and no-code development tools into its tooling. Wieczorkowski pointed out that modern-day developers do more than just write code; they must maintain enterprise truth anchored in the artificial intelligence agents that they’re building.

Unlike pure coding agent vendors, Workday provides a way for enterprise companies to keep their “secret sauce” locked up while also provisioning it safely to their developers. In human resources, finance and payroll systems, agentic speed is not enough. Agents must preserve business logic, rules, user roles, company context and compliance restraints.

“As you start getting deeper and deeper into the core of the enterprise, and you’re working on areas like payroll and benefits and the ledger, there’s zero room for error,” Wieczorkowski added.

Traditionally, this is handled by putting agent development as close to enterprise tooling as possible. Workday’s new tools unlock this for developers by allowing them to bring it into any independent editor, tool or agentic coding agents. Developer Agent fits into how developers work every day, by appearing working in agentic tools such as Cline, Claude Code, Cursor and Google Antigravity.

Developer Agent pulls from a large library of more than 50 reusable agent skills based on the AgentSkills standard, providing a framework for developers to quickly build in enterprise knowledge.

In addition to the skills, the new Agent-Ready Tools is a set of connectors that expose agents via Model Context Protocol, Agent to Agent and other open-source protocols so that developers can hook them into third-party systems. When an external system uses these new tools, its actions inherit the data governance, security frameworks and business processes managed by Workday.

“We want to give the customers the option to be able to use our tools in lots of different platforms, and not just in Workday,” Vice President of AI Platform Dean Arnold told SiliconANGLE.

Taming the wild west of AI agents

Agentic AI is a new paradigm that has multiple third parties and vendors creating agents that do a multitude of jobs across a variety of roles. Many of those roles place agents into sensitive situations with business information, finance, employee records or even just working directly with customers.

Agents can also be hijacked as a result of vulnerable code, making them targets for hackers to cause them to misbehave, steal sensitive information or take control of networks.

This is where Agent Passport steps in. It’s a new security framework that validates an agent’s safety before it hits production and shows which security and compliance tests the agent has passed, who verified them and which standards were used. This allows security audit teams to quickly identify which agents are up to date and can be trusted in production environments.

Workday already provides governance controls and guardrails as firewalls to protect agents in production, but this gives an additional layer of defense to show that a third-party has vetted the agent to say that it has been run through a battery of tests.

“This is like red-teaming up front,” Arnold said. “It’s doing the analysis before you actually ship it, and then making sure that stays up to date.”

Cisco Systems Inc. joined as a launch partner to power the initial “stamps” that will appear on AI agents as part of Passport. This will provide independent third-party verification that agents meet agreed-upon security and compliance standards.

At the end of the day, Workday wants its tooling to allow developers to pick and choose how they use AI coding agents in their work. Expert engineers and business coders alike have seen disruption in their jobs when it comes to new coding technology that allows them to increase the velocity of code, from editors that autocomplete, to vibe coding tools that generate entire apps from prompts.

“It doesn’t remove developers from the equation, it just makes them superheroes,” said Wieczorkowski.

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