Among the additions are some improvements to Workday’s Developer Copilot, which can now generate application code snippets, data queries, and functional orchestrations.
Workday (Nasdaq:WDAY) has presented new developer tools to help enterprises connect its HR and finance software with external agents.
The tools are an extension of the company’s Illuminate agentic AI platform, and include the Agent Gateway, AI Widgets, and expanded AI Gateway APIs.
Illuminate, rolled out in September 2024, is intended to accelerate common tasks such as writing knowledge-based text, job descriptions, or contracts, providing real-time AI assistance within workflows, and making a “team” of AI experts available to users. The models behind it are powered by the 800 billion business, HR, and financial transactions made by Workday customers annually.
AI Gateway targets governance of multi-agent applications
While some of the new tools are already available, even early adopters will have to wait until nearer the end of 2025 to get their hands on the new Agent Gateway.
The gateway will enable enterprises to connect their Workday agents with external agents and create advanced multi-agent applications across software platforms, Workday said
It works with Workday’s Agent System of Record (ASOR) — a layer inside its proprietary central platform intended at helping enterprises manage Workday agents and third-party agents in one place, while providing tools for governing, managing, and optimizing them. The ASOR, in turn, makes use of shared protocols, such as Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Google’s Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A), to collaborate with external agents.
For now, Agent Gateway and ASOR only support external agents that are built on vendor platforms in Workday’s Agent Partner Network. Currently, these partners include the likes of Accenture, Adobe, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Auditoria.AI, Compa, Deloitte, Glean, Google Cloud, IBM, Kainos, KPMG, Microsoft, Paradox, PwC, and WorkBoardAI.
The Agent Gateway, according to Abhigyan Malik, practice director at Everest Group, is Workday’s way of providing a mechanism that allows for governed, predictable orchestration of AI agents, not only within its core applications but also in conjunction with external systems.
Orchestration and governance is critical for enterprises working with advanced agentic applications across a heterogeneous technology stack as it allows them to have control agents in terms of their access to data, which is particularly relevant in HR and financial contexts, Malik said.
Workday Marketplace already includes a selection of agents developed by Workday itself, or on the platforms of vendors in its Agent Partner Network, that can be used with Agent Gateway.
More AI-based guidance for in-house enterprise applications
Workday also announced AI Widgets that enterprise developers can use to build more AI-based guidance into their in-house applications.They will be able to personalize the AI in these widgets with custom prompts for a particular team or even a single user, it said.
The company is expanding its AI Gateway APIs to help developers integrate Workday AI services natively inside applications. These services could range from natural language conversation ability to leveraging document intelligence in applications, it said.
And it is adding more capabilities to Developer Copilot, the conversational AI coding companion that is part of its Extend platform for building custom applications on Workday data. The additional capabilities of Developer Copilot includes generating application code snippets, generating data queries, helping find the right APIs for a particular use case, and generating functional orchestrations along with documentation.
The new Workday AI Services, AI Widgets, and Developer Copilot capabilities are currently available with Workday Extend Professional.
Workday is also working on a new command-line interface tool that it intends to make generally available by year-end. Workday Developer CLI will help automate development tasks, collaborate more effectively, and integrate Workday into DevOps workflows, the company said.
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