Salesforce and Workday have announced a collaboration to create an AI-powered employee service agent developed to help businesses improve employee experiences and support.
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Summary
Salesforce and Workday have announced a collaboration to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered employee service agent developed to help businesses improve employee experiences and support. By integrating the Salesforce and Workday platforms, data, and AI capabilities, the new agent can support employees in areas such as onboarding, task management, and career development.
Empowering employees with AI: The rise of the intelligent support agent
AI-powered intelligent employee support agents are a nascent solution, but one that businesses are becoming increasingly interested in as they explore how to deliver more value and ROI with AI investments. Employees interact with many different processes and technologies to get work done. These extend across different business functions, including HR (people support), IT (technology support), and core operational and role-based systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. There is a wealth of data, insights, and support resources available across these ecosystems, but accessing them in a way that is based on the specific needs of employees is difficult.
For example, onboarding questions and tasks that new starters must complete often require employees to communicate with different people and technologies that exist across different areas of a business. Intelligent employee support agents bring this data and actions together in a federated fashion and make it easy for employees to interface with it via natural language processing (NLP). The collaboration between Salesforce and Workday is notable because it involves two enterprise IT behemoths that collectively bring a strong dataset and AI capabilities.
The new Salesforce and Workday solution
The partnership between Salesforce and Workday integrates the data and AI capabilities from both vendors and makes the new agent accessible across both platforms. The resulting AI employee service agent is powered by the Salesforce Einstein 1 Platform and Workday AI. Underpinning the solution is a shared data foundation combining the Salesforce Data Cloud and Workday. This foundation provides secure and integrated access to HR, CRM, and financial data with no need for custom integration. As part of the announcement, Workday also highlighted how it will enhance its Slack integration with a conversational interface that will enable employees to access and collaborate on this federated dataset within the Slack solution. For example, HR staff will be able to manage employee details, pay, and other elements within the Slack platform. This comprehensive integration of collaboration and role-based workflows has huge potential to improve employee sentiment and task efficiency.
Businesses are looking to harness AI tools for productivity and profit
In the realms of employee experience and support, there is massive potential for AI. The technology will have an enormous impact on improving employee productivity over the next few years. As such, the application of AI in this area is an attractive proposition for business leaders that are already experimenting with the technology. For example, over 1,500 business and IT leaders that Omdia surveyed for our 2024 employee productivity and collaboration survey indicated that their businesses are at various stages of implementing generative AI (GenAI) tools, including Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Zoom AI, etc.
Figure 1: Businesses are at different stages of GenAI adoption
Source: Omdia
However, a key challenge highlighted by businesses is how (and where) to apply the technology in delivering impactful value and ROI. Businesses are keen to use the technology, but they need to do it in areas where it can have a significant productivity and financial impact, as it is these returns that C-level executives focus on. Using AI to improve employee support and experience is an area of potential due to the diversity and large number of questions, requests, and tasks the technology can help with. For example, the Salesforce and Workday AI agent will help businesses with the following:
- Automation of routine tasks: The AI agent will free up employee time by managing routine tasks, including data entry, request management, and scheduling, in addition to basic customer inquiries. This automation will enable employees to focus on higher value activities that help improve overall productivity.
- Personalized employee support: The AI agent will be able to leverage a wealth of Salesforce and Workday data to provide tailored and contextualized assistance to employees. This capability will lead to more personalized services and support, which can lead to higher job satisfaction and reduced employee turnover.
- Data-driven insights: By analyzing the large volume of data that Salesforce and Workday collectively bring, the AI agent can offer actionable insights and guidance that help businesses and employees make more informed decisions. This guidance will help improve business and customer operations while also helping organizations identify new opportunities for innovation and growth.
- Cost savings: By automating repetitive employee tasks and improving efficiencies, businesses can experience significant cost savings. Such savings are achieved by reducing the need for additional support staff, lowering operational costs, and minimizing manual errors that could result in financial losses.
Competition in this area is heating up
The development of AI solutions focused on improving employee support and experiences is something multiple enterprise IT vendors are focused on, so the Salesforce and Workday collaboration faces competition. Notably, competition will come from vendors such as ServiceNow, with its domain-specific and open model AI-powered employee support capabilities, in addition to Microsoft’s continued investment in Copilot for the enterprise. There are also other solutions focused on this area.
While the category is still relatively nascent, it is also one witnessing a surge of new capability and solution releases. (Omdia’s soon-to-be-published Market Radar report on intelligent employee support agents will share more details on this emerging ecosystem.) The value of this solution will be in the strength of the data it is built upon. Workday and Salesforce are leaders in the human capital management (HCM) and CRM spaces, respectively, so an agent that can tap into the wealth of data and insights across these platforms is an attractive proposition. Customers of these solutions should stay ahead of developments here. Service provider partners that deliver digital workplace services must also recognize the growing importance of intelligent employee support agents in their offerings. Partnering with Salesforce and Workday to leverage and offer a solution like this to clients is something those service providers should explore.
Appendix
Further reading
“Salesforce and Workday Form Strategic Partnership, Unveil New AI Employee Service Agent,” Workday press release (retrieved July 24, 2024)
Author
Adam Holtby, Principal Analyst, Workplace Transformation
