Workday brings AI agents to IT service management and travel

Enterprise management software company Workday Inc. is expanding beyond core human resources and finance with new artificial intelligence agents for information technology service management and travel.

In an announcement today, Workday launched two new AI agents for Sana, the company’s AI-powered platform for knowledge discovery and work automation. The offerings include the IT service management agent and travel management agent.

With this launch, the company is targeting the administrative work that surrounds employees and often spills across HR, IT, finance and operations. Instead of simply answering questions, the agents assist with booking travel, preparing expense reports, coordinating onboarding, provisioning access and organizing work across systems and teams.

“Just doing HR and finance, in my view, is not ambitious enough,” Vice President and Head of Agentic AI Jerry Ting told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

The IT management angle

Most service requests start with an employee change coming through HR. It’s often something simple: someone is coming into the company, changing teams or needs a role changed. HR is already at the center of this, but it can’t handle things such as equipment provisioning, software licenses, coordinating office space or setting up permissions and roles on the network alone.

All of that happens before the regular ho-hum everyday IT requests that come from employee needs such as password resets, software installations and other access issues that might crop up during the day-to-day. These often require navigating ticketing systems and waiting for the appropriate person from the support team to roll around to solve it.

The Sana ITSM agent short-circuits this by making as much as possible self-service. When an employee is being onboarded, it reaches across Workday’s ecosystem and touches every system that needs to be updated. The new employee gets a user name on the network, their roles are set up, an Outlook inbox is created, a PC or laptop is inventoried and software licenses are provisioned.

After all that is completed, the agent drafts emails to immediate management about the onboarding and creates calendar events for the introduction team that will coordinate everything.

“It’s HR driving it with IT being a support partner,” said Ting.

It’s not glamorous, but it’s the time and connection logistics that need to happen to put a new team member in place. The ITSM agent wraps all of this up quickly for HR in a nice bow. Then the new employee is ready to step into their day already knowing nothing was missed and nobody is scrambling to catch something that may have fallen through the cracks because the process was phone calls, clipboards and Excel spreadsheets.

“How did we do this before? And it was very manual,” Ting said. “Sometimes when you’re manual, these things get dropped.”

Travel and expense in the agentic breeze

Workday already handles 10 million active expense users. Now, with the Travel Agent, the company is moving upstream from reimbursement into booking, providing employees, management and HR a space where it can feel like it’s all part of the same thing.

When a team intends to go to a conference or take a trip to London for a retreat, this can become a circus to manage. With the new Travel Agent, however, it’s a breeze.

From the traveler’s side, the agent already has context about flight preferences, airline loyalty and company policy constraints. It can use this to suggest compliant flights, handle a request for early travel for personal reasons, check whether the change fits company policy and flag the extra hotel night as personal. Once flights and hotels are booked, the agent goes to work compiling expense reports automatically, with travel details added rather than manually entered later.

“It should feel like your expenses and your booking is the same thing,” Ting explained.

After the trip, the agent closes the loop by becoming an expense assistant. With data from hotel, flight and corporate cards, it can check up on reports, notice missing receipts and request them from users. Using AI vision, it can then extract receipt data from images, complete reports and match everything up with the finalized submission.

For management, HR and accounting, this “silent expense reporting” means fewer people get left in the dark. Although it might feel a little like there’s a digital nanny looking over everyone’s shoulder at times, it also means less is likely to be missed when audit time comes around, resulting in fewer headaches for everyone down the line.

Because the new agents are built directly into Workday, they engage with the same security and controls as every other piece of software. As Ting stressed, HR is in the “driver’s seat” and maintains guidance and governance over actions created and completed.

“Workday, in our view, shouldn’t just be like an HR finance company,” Ting said. “It started there, but if you think about the name Workday, like it’s all the stuff you do in your day that’s not your core job. We want to automate a lot of that.”

Image: Microsoft Designer/SiliconANGLE