AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics
00:00:00 · Dan Turchin, Dan Turchin
[00:00:00] S0: Yo. It's the future. Don't hit the snooze. AIs here giving humans the boost. Team humans rolling. Brains in the game with Dan Turchin. Y'all remember the name. People ain't in the mix. [00:00:10] S1: No stopping the flow. Better work. [00:00:12] S0: Better life. Yeah. We're ready to go. Robots and humans are collab, you know Okay, let's start the show This
00:00:20 · S2
[00:00:20] S2: is Dan Turchin from AI and the Future of Work. Welcome to a special edition of the podcast featuring conversations recorded live at Workday Rising twenty twenty six in Las Vegas. As always, we're using ElevenLabs to digitize my voice for this compilation. The Real Me reviewed and approved the content and, of course, approved the digital twin. I joined the Workday executive team and customer community at Rising to discuss Workday's vision for AI and the future of work. We went beyond the headlines to understand how one of the world's leading HR tech companies is going through a refounding moment as co founder Aneel Bhusri returns as CEO for a second stint at the helm. I sat down with three leaders who see that moment from different perspectives. A customer putting agents to work, the product leader deciding what gets built, and the executive shaping the vision behind it. Today, we bring you the highlights. In the coming weeks, we'll release each of these conversations in full. Let's begin with John Bruce, VP of people innovation and technology at OneDigital, a company that helps employers with health benefits, retirement, insurance, and HR. John shares how his company is putting AI agents to work, including one that gives managers insights about their teams and another called ACE that is a general coworker available to answer employee questions. He also explains why his team has to teach its agents to push back and the human skill he hopes AI can't replace.
00:02:09 · John Bruce
[00:02:09] S3: I think, you know, we've we've taken an approach of going a lot deeper and wider at the same time. And and as these new agents have been coming out, coming online, we've been very fortunate that we've been included in a lot of the early adopter programs. Most notably, and what I'm gonna be talking about tomorrow is the talent sentiment agent. And that is, you know, a Pecan native agent, which takes the engagement data and can do sentiment analysis on it and surface insights for leaders and create this prompt question kind of thing where where it's, it's really giving the managers the insights that they need to be able to help them lead their teams more efficiently. I think some of the other agents they're doing, you know, really leaning into to this, like, ambient agents where they're just always on running in the background. They're not being prompted or triggered by anything. They're just looking. I think that's that's really exciting to see how that pans out, and, really excited to see how that all shakes out. And we're we're really fortunate that we, as an organization, lean really heavily into AI and AI usage, and we're really, really excited to partner with Workday on a lot of this stuff. And I think, you know, one of the things that I'm really even more excited about is the whole MCP layer that they're open... That they opened up, that they're exposing so that, you know, there's gonna be instances where we want people in Workday doing stuff, and then there's gonna be instances where it it just doesn't make sense. Right? And I think, you know, there's a lot of situations where managers just need to be able to do something where they're working. And, I always joke that, you know, ten years ago, if you told me people would be approving time off inside of Skype, I would have thought you were crazy and, you know, then Workday everywhere, and the Teams integration came, and that's what they're doing. And now this... As this iteration continues, like, of of really meeting people where they are, I think it's it's really exciting, and and we're really excited to leverage some of our homegrown agents to connect to an MCP layer to, leverage some of those skills.
00:04:16 · Dan Turchin, John Bruce
[00:04:16] S1: Will there be a time when the predominant usage of Workday is not through the Workday UI? [00:04:23] S3: I think it depends on what you define by predominant. Right? I think if we're talking about employee self-service, manager self-service, I'd say it's it's more probable than it is possible. Right? I think, you know, as as organizations, you know, I I think about us as an organization where we call our agents coworkers. Like, that's kind of our approach to them. They they go through, like, an intern apprentice coworker development phase. And I think about, you know, we have a general coworker called ACE, and that's, like, the one that everybody goes to to ask questions. And I think that 85 to 90% of an employee's usage of Workday would end up going through ACE at some point. Right? And that's a good thing. Right? Because it's it's it's reducing friction. It's making a better experience. I think there's still gonna be core things that we just have to do. Right? I think about onboarding as an example. I think about, you know, maybe benefit events where you have, like, life event changes or some of that stuff where, like, some of the decision support gets baked in. I think there's areas where it may make sense to not take that out of Workday because there's things you wanna preserve. [00:05:35] S1: What's the humanness that you never be outsourced to bots?
00:05:35 · Dan Turchin, John Bruce
[00:05:35] S1: What's the humanness that you never be outsourced to bots? [00:05:39] S3: That's a really good question. I don't think, at least what I've seen so far, that their AI is at a place where it's capable capable of replacing just natural human curiosity. Right? You know, even when we're developing agents, like, we have to tell it, like, don't just accept the viewpoint I have, push back, pressure test. Right? Because if I don't, like, if we... We're building a a coworker for HR right now for HR leadership to use. And one of the pieces of feedback I got was like, this coworker thinks I'm a genius because every idea I says it's great. And so we have to, you know, force the AI to push back. And so that that skill of asking follow-up questions, of hearing something and what someone's saying that says, you know, you're telling me you're... You have an issue with a, but I really think your problem is three. Right? And I and I don't... I I I really hope at least because that's like the the skill I've used to differentiate myself in the in the marketplace. I really hope we can't replace that with AI because then I'm in trouble. But I think I think that's the skill. Right? That just... That wanting to understand, solve, suss, root out a problem. I I I I just... I don't think we're at a place where AI can do that.
00:07:18 · S2, Max Wessel
[00:07:18] S2: Next, we hear from Max Wessel, SVP of product at Workday, who leads the company's applications teams. Max explains how his team decides what to build from Aneel's mantra to run Workday like the world's largest startup, to why taste and judgment matter when it's easy to generate code. He also shares the origin story behind the events, big product announcements. [00:07:41] S4: I lead our applications teams across Workday, so all of the applications that, folks know and love. And what Aneel has really set out as a mantra is we wanna be the world's largest startup. We want clear accountability, we want clear direction, we don't want decision fatigue, we want to empower people to move fast and build new things. And a lot of what you saw in our keynote today at Rising was about just that. How do we... When we emancipate teams to focus on the most exciting use of the technology in front of us, they can create. Whether it's turning a performance conversation into an actual coaching and and development conversation through what we release with Sonic Coach, whether it's putting a team of analysts in your pocket by activating an agentic analytics system that's connected to your core. All of that is the work of teams that are empowered to move fast independently inside of Workday.