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Humans work. Very logically, the processes related to people management in the workplace are known as Human Resources (HR), or Human Capital Management (HCM) if you wish to broaden the discipline to the wider organization of systems that employees circulate within. Ask anyone who’s been in a job that makes them unhappy inside an organization of any reasonable size and they’ll often tell you that the HR function is a human-centered portal of compassion and understanding. Generally, HR managers are really nice people and we like them.
But, like all things, people management needs to evolve. The rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (gen-AI) that draws predictive inference and knowledge from so-called Large Language Models (LLMs) composed of open data pools is impacting every aspect of business life from cake baking to the petrochemicals business (for want of two diametrically opposed disciplines) and HR has not been left out.
Finance & Human Resources
Specializing in a platform designed to serve both HR & finance, Workday has now brought forward multiple new generative AI capabilities designed to help increase productivity, grow and retain talent, streamline business processes and drive better decision-making. But do we really want computers taking over the ‘my manager doesn’t understand me’ role and automating-out the empathy factor that we value so much in HR?
Justifiably, Workday doesn’t see it that way. The company is founded on an information technology platform strategy that draws upon what it calls an ‘unrivalled dataset’ (i.e. a pool of workplace datasets, data-flows, data shapes and plain old databases that enable it to straddle and manage work-related IT functions for just about every imaginable task, process, occurrence or happening) and a commitment to delivering trustworthy solutions that demonstrate the power of human-machine teaming.
The application of gen-AI (as we have seen in every enterprise technology vendor worth its salt this year) is a natural enough progression for Workday, so in reality, there is little automated HR fearmongering to deal with here. In fact, AI and ML are already embedded in the core of the Workday platform, the company’s AI models are powered by more than 625 billion transactions processed every year – creating what is claimed to the the ‘world's largest and cleanest’ set of financial and HR data – which allows the models to consistently generate accurate, meaningful, trustworthy results.
"Generative AI has the potential to completely transform work as we know it," said Sayan Chakraborty, co-president, Workday. "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."
Chakraborty used five very important words there: responsibly, trustworthy, transparent, safe and driver's seat. This is not gen-AI designed to digitally track employee behavior and root out people working at -1% of their potential productivity levels as they become candidates for redundancy. This is gen-AI designed to help create job descriptions (Workday users create 30 million job descriptions per year, which take on average two hours to create), this is gen-AI designed to analyze and correct employee work contracts, this is gen-AI designed to support the core (and often quite complex) administrative sub-layer that drives an HR function and its related financials.
Automated tasks
The argument here is simple enough, if drafting job descriptions and contracts takes hours of work and this is a process that we can automate down to seconds, then human HR managers can spend more ‘people time’ looking for and interacting with quality candidates. It’s called HR for a reason i.e. humans are a resource and we can digitize the resource management aspect of their existence, but only if we define the human interactivity level via which we actually speak to people.
By using information already stored in Workday as the single source of truth for people data – such as the skills needed for the role and job location details – users can create precisely targeted job descriptions to help find the best candidates.
According to Chakraborty and team, “Sales teams negotiate and win contracts - and finance teams then have to ensure the company is paid via accurate billing and revenue recognition. But contracts can be lengthy and information embedded within them can easily be missed. With Workday's contract analysis generative AI capability, customers will be able to compare signed contracts against contracts in Workday Financial Management and integrated CRM data in record time. The feature will alert the user to any discrepancies early in the process and propose corrections, then confirm when discrepancies are fixed.”
This early analysis and correction capability helps eliminate downstream accounting errors, saving considerable time trying to reverse and correct downstream transactions.
Digitizing tasks
Thinking about the application of gen-AI in the workplace and exactly which software services can be accelerated for what Workday has called human ‘amplification’, we can see that creating content to keep employees informed about company policies and updates can be time-consuming, often requiring the author to search, read and synthesize multiple sources to draft an article for employees' understanding.
The company promises new generative AI capabilities that will enable content creators to draft articles that are highly personalized and tailored to their audience – such as talking points for managers about a new company bonus policy, or key takeaways from company videos. These new capabilities can help the author improve the tone or length of the article, iterate on particular sections, or even translate the article to different languages to support a global workforce, saving users time.
Human digital HR?
Just how human can digital HR be? Workday insists that gen-AI will be able to provide recommendations on the ‘tone of correspondence’ when it is used by finance teams to draft past-due payment notices. Whether that ends up being more than word recognition and sentiment tracking in its initial deployment is unclear (words that express anger and aggression are not that hard to fathom), but when used to automated bulk mailing exercise (as is the suggestion here), Workday says its technology will be ‘based on configured rules’, so again, the parameters will be set by human beings.
Developer Copilot is a new human-machine teaming capability for Workday Extend app development, that will use gen-AI to support the the creation of finance and people management apps. Natively embedded into Workday's App Builder, Developer Copilot will provide text-to-code generation capabilities to improve developer productivity by turning natural language into software application development code. Developer Copilot will be contextually aware, providing curated content and search results that meet developers where they are, upskilling them and elevating the development experience.
"We recognize that generative AI is a powerful technology with the potential to have great impact on conversational experiences, and you will see us apply it in ways that generative AI is uniquely suited for," said Jeff Gelfuso, chief design officer, Workday. "We are incredibly excited about the possibilities at the intersection of conversational UI and generative AI, and you can expect Workday to deliver capabilities in the future that will unlock endless possibilities for reimagining how to interact with our products."
AI transparency
Gelfuso and team remind us that talent retention is a top priority for organizations everywhere and managers are responsible for their direct reports' growth and development. This capability is said to enable managers to create a summary of employees' strengths and areas of growth, pulling from Workday's database of insight such as performance reviews, employee feedback, contribution goals, skills etc.
Workday says its technology is well suited to support this use case as an organization's single source of truth for people data and, since Workday is transparent about how its AI models are designed, managers can easily understand how the data inputs contribute to a strength or area of growth. This capability will make the career check-in process more personalized and effective, empowering both managers and employees.
This whole process of employee amplification might sound a little sterile to those of us whose first interaction with an HR manager was probably back in the 1980s (or even before that time), but for digital natives, this kind of functionality will be standard, accepted and - if anything - probably very welcome. Those that baulk at the prospect of digital employee services should probably be thinking about moving to Florida and slowing down. Workday appears to have thought about empathy from the start of its efforts to bring gen-AI forwards into its platform, so your future HR function may well have a more digitally-empowered infrastructure now.
What was that - you want two weeks off next July? Let’s just check the system first.
