The News: Salesforce and Workday announced plans to launch a new AI employee service agent designed to automate time-consuming tasks, provide personalized support, and help surface insights for HR workers to address issues more quickly and effectively while ensuring that employees are properly supported. The AI employee service agent combines the capabilities of Salesforce’s new Agentforce Platform and Einstein AI with the Workday platform and Workday AI to create and manage agents for various employee service use cases.
You can read the press release detailing the announcement at Salesforce’s website.
Salesforce and Workday Unveil New AI Employee Service Agent
Analyst Take: Salesforce and Workday announced a strategic partnership under which the companies have unveiled a personalized, AI employee service agent that helps address use cases such as onboarding, health benefits, and career development within Salesforce and Workday.
Salesforce’s new Agentforce Platform and Einstein AI, combined with the Workday platform and Workday AI, is designed to help organizations create and manage agents for various employee service use cases. Powered by a customer’s Salesforce CRM data and Workday financial and HR data, the new AI employee service agents use a shared, trusted data foundation to communicate with employees in natural language, with human-like comprehension. See my colleague Paul Nashawaty’s research note covering the integration in detail.
The new combined AI employee service agent is designed to work with and elevate humans to drive employee and customer success across the business. When complex HR cases arise, the AI employee service agent will seamlessly transfer to the most appropriate worker to address the inquiry, maintaining all the previous history and context for a smooth hand-off. This is only possible by having the data, AI models, and apps deeply integrated, which is made possible by integrating the Einstein 1 Platform and Workday AI into a seamless employee experience accessible across Salesforce and Workday.
Workday will leverage the Salesforce Zero Copy Partner Network to make that possible. The Zero Copy Partner Network will allow customers to access and action financial, HR, and CRM data across Salesforce and Workday platforms without duplicating data or building custom integrations. This ensures secure data sharing, so users only see authorized information.
Furthermore, Workday will enhance its current integration with Slack, providing an elevated conversational interface for users to directly access and collaborate around Workday financial and HR records, such as tasks, pay, job requisitions, employee details, and general ledgers, in Slack. Slack preserves the conversations about these records, allowing information to be easily found, summarized, and acted upon in Workday at any time.
Driving More Efficiency, Collaboration, and Success through a Combined Tool
The current thinking within the enterprise application space revolves around driving greater employee efficiency and effectiveness. The goal is to use technology to reduce the friction, speed bumps, and hassles that often arise when carrying out everyday tasks as part of a worker’s duties, while also ensuring that these employees can quickly access and take advantage of programs and tools that impact their overall experience within the organization. Essentially, technology is seen as the catalyst to help improve both the operational and administrative experience for employees. This can only be achieved by ensuring that these tools leverage vast amounts of data held in both operational and administrative systems.
Offering Checks on the Boxes for Driving Efficiency and Effectiveness
The AI employee service agent from Salesforce and Workday addresses this challenge and appears to be checking all the correct boxes, in terms of providing efficient access to relevant data, allowing more significant levels of autonomy, enabling the use of AI across workflows, and letting employees access these tools within their natural flow of work.
- Data Access: Using the Zero Copy Partner Network, organizations can ensure workers have the relevant data they need without introducing security, privacy, or storage issues that can make it more challenging to integrate data held outside of an application.
- Supporting Autonomy: The combined AI agent is powered by generative AI models grounded in company data. This enables the agent to manage many use cases and functions without human intervention, enabling humans to focus on higher-value tasks.
- Enabling AI across Workflows: The ability to incorporate data from both Salesforce and Workday enables AI to be used across various data, helping to improve workflows and improving overall ROI from AI.
- Accessing Functionality within Natural Workflows: The integration with Slack enables users to access Workday records conversationally within the collaboration platform itself, eliminating the need to open a Workday session to access data.
The old adage that happy employees provide better service rings true; it’s virtually impossible to consistently have employees act in the best interests of the customer and company if they do not have access to the information and tools required to do their jobs efficiently and effectively or are preoccupied with their own HR issues. Salesforce’s Einstein AI platform, which is deployed across the company’s Salesforce Einstein 1 Platform, addresses the former issue, and this announcement with Workday effectively addresses the latter issue.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Salesforce $9.13B Q1 FY 2025 Revenue Narrowly Misses Estimates
Salesforce Debuts Einstein Service Agent
Employee Experience: A Look Back and A Look Ahead
Image Credit: Salesforce
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
