Workday has unveiled a big move to harness machine learning in product announcements at its annual Workday Rising conference today. Highlights include new automation tools for finance teams, a personalized user experience in its people tools, a new talent mobility offering based on a skills graph, and a blockchain-based system for automatically verifying credentials.

1. Workday Rising 2019 - Machine
learning holds the key to a changing
world
Workday has unveiled a big move to harness machine learning in
product announcements at its annual Workday Rising conference
today. Highlights include new automation tools for finance teams, a
personalized user experience in its people tools, a new talent mobility
offering based on a skills graph, and a blockchain-based system for
automatically verifying credentials.
In the event's opening keynote, CEO Aneel Bhusri reiterated his view
that adoption of machine learning is becoming an existential
imperative for enterprises:
It's very clear that this is the way the world's headed. [Machine
learning] will automate tasks and save time.
If you don't embrace it as a company, I personally believe your
companies will be left in the dust, this is such an important
technology. If your competitor's using machine learning to make
better business decisions, better product decisions, moving faster,
and you're not, you're going to have a hard time competing. For
more info Workday Training
In a fast-paced, one-hour keynote interspersed with prerecorded
customer testimonials on video, Bhusri and colleagues proceeded to
explain how the new machine learning capabilities built into

2. Workday's forthcoming products would help save its customers from
that fate.
Big data and machine learning in finance
and HR
Several announcements bring the fruits of Workday's big data
analytics platform, Prism Analytics, into its core applications to help
automate repetitive processes, along with machine learning.
 Workday Accounting Center is based on an accounting rules
engine that will automatically post operational transactions from
third party applications such as loan origination or claim systems
into the GL as journals. Reports and analysis can be run with full
access to associated data from the external system.
 Discovery Boards will be made freely available to both Financials
and HCM customers. This drag-and-drop data discovery capability
makes it easy to create reports. Early adopters report that it cuts
the amount of time it takes to create a report by three quarters,
says Pete Schlampp, General Manager of Workday Analytics.
 Several traditionally labor-intensive processes in finance are
automated using machine learning, including supplier invoice
automation, applying OCR to identify data in expenses submitted
via Slack, or detecting anomalies in accounting entries as they
occur. Learn more from Workday HCM Online Training
 New features in Adaptive Insights use machine learning to catch
potential data entry errors in plans.
 There's also deeper integration with Adaptive Insights, allowing
the publication of budget plans direct to Workday Financials, or
the automatic creation of open positions in Workday HCM once
headcount budgets are approved.
 Planning has also been boosted by new elastic cube infrastructure
so that analysis can scale to match the needs of Workday's larger
customers.
 Workday People Analytics, first announced last year, builds on
Prism to deliver insights from data using natural language. A
similar capability is in the works for Financials.

3. People Experience and a skills graph
A new adaptive user experience in Workday HCM called People
Experience uses machine learning to personalize what a user sees at
any time, and which learns from interactions to improve the accuracy
and relevance of the experience over time.
It provides contextualized information, including guidance in career
development and personalized content.
There is also a digital assistant which provides answers to questions
directly from an integrated knowledge base or can create tickets in a
built-in case management system. Building on previously announced
integrations, the UX can also be accessed from within Slack or
Microsoft Teams.
There's a big emphasis on providing help and guidance in the form of
short video clips.
Two new applications build on a skills graph that Workday has been
building out over the past few years.
Skills Insights is a new feature in Workday HCM that lets HR
managers evaluate the skills they have available within their
organization and what gaps exist.
Early adopter Patagonia reports a rise from 28% to 73% in skills
information on its employee population as a result of using the
machine learning built into the application. Learn more from
Workday Course
A second app, Talent Marketplace, facilitates internal mobility by
matching employee skills gaps and interests with potential
opportunities within the organization.
At launch the application supports temporary assignments to internal
projects, with plans to extend it in the future to add internal job
transfers and connections into external talent communities.
Building the muscle of continuous
adoption
As trailed earlier this year, Workday has also introduced Workday
Credentials, a blockchain-based platform for automating the
validation of an individual's credentials such as their qualifications
and experience.

4. Workday customers can now use the platform to issue credentials to
employees, enabling validation of their qualifications, identity and
experience. When moving to another employer who uses the same
platform, individuals will be able to have those credentials
automatically validated.
Workday also launched the Wayto application, which gives individuals
control over who can access to credentials. All Rising attendees are
able to download and try out the app, with their Rising attendance as
their first credential. This is notable as Workday's first venture into a
consumer application. It already has 13,000 users and a potential user
base of 40 million in the Workday ecosystem.
The keynote ended with Emily McEvilly, SVP Global Customer
Services, announcing new initiatives to help customers "build this new
muscle of continuous adoption" so that they can get the most out of
their Workday instances. She spoke about new templates and
customer configuration in the Customer Central portal to help
jumpstart productive adoption.
She also revealed a new offering of Workday Success Plans, which will
help customers map a path towards achieving their goals with
Workday.
To get in-depth knowledge, enroll for a live free demo on Workday
Online Training