Hey everyone – as I wrote here, I am very excited about Techtember and Techtober with all of its conferences and announcements. And I think so far it did not let us down. We had Workday Rising US (I will only visit Rising EMEA later in November – please join me as I will be on stage) as well as SAP SuccessConnect so far.
Workday Rising
Workday Rising had as I expected a full bouquet of AI announcements. They announced the addition of generative AI across its platform and enhanced other, already built-in AI capabilities. They also opened up a Workday AI Marketplace for partners to add solutions and for customers to take advantage of them. As I was already alluding to in my article here, Workday is finally at the table and fully in the AI game. And at the same time Workday stays true to its security and privacy focus in only allowing it to be on your data and within your tenant structure. So you can harness everything without the worry of exposing data. I believe that is the right balance. Openness and inclusiveness of other data sources to read and feed potentially provides better results (which needs to be proven) but it for sure gets you into more difficult conversations around privacy, security and actually IF you can enable it at all.
These AI additions will bring massive improvements as well as will make sure that Workday stays ahead of the pack of the current competition – and as there is still no new AI-powered contender start-up at present, it might be able to keep its rank for this wave of tech innovations. Some of the functionalities include the ability to generate job descriptions (which already many solutions do – but again, here you can benefit from privacy, security – as well as consistency across the company), compensation related features – and of course the turbo for your developers the “Developer Co-Pilot” that will turn text into code. I am the most excited about their pipeline on improving UI through conversational UI and Generative AI. I believe we all can agree that the current Workday UI/ UX is everything but modern – and so a refreshed look with the infusion of a more conversational approach powered by Generative AI sounds very promising for Employee Experience, for our end-users that today still need to think in HR terms if they want to get anything done. That could be a game-changer.
SAP SuccessConnect
And of course, SuccessConnect also featured AI big time. Some interesting announcements – but all in line with a strategy we already knew before – in the AI space were made. The less interesting are the “me too” ones like Job Descriptions and personalized learning recommendations. Let’s see how they compare. More exciting though was Joule – SAPs natural-language, generative AI copilot. What is so far though announced is not much more than what e.g. Workday already offers in their Workday everywhere spaces like Slack and Teams, e.g. approvals, finding information, etc. – but what is exciting about it is the concept that we know already from Microsoft – an App-wide Co-pilot that can span across and help (in the best case in the future) with any kind of (t)ask one might have. It is great that it is focused again on the end-user experience. This is where we need to see more focus from these companies and having them all push in that direction will bring great new ideas and concepts that I am looking forward to test.
Not least, let me talk about the Talent Intelligence Hub. With the focus on a skills based organization this comes at the right time and is all about skills and how to make the most of it, e.g. uniting skills and other data to create a holistic picture of your workforce, making it easy for employees to build their individual skills portfolio, finding the right candidates quickly, or enabling relevant learning and development – in essence an empowerment for managers and employees to take career and progression into their own hands. We need to see how this plays out, but this sounds very exciting.
On both, we must wait and see how presentation and show compare to reality in your own tenants/ implementations. But for sure the announcements have not let me down. It is a big step forward on the road to a democratised HR experience for Managers and Employees. And this is just the beginning – I believe we are still at the top or just past the top of the hype-cycle for AI and the solutions offered seem already very pragmatic and useful – are already addressing real business problems. – and more is still to come.
Chief HR Officer 