When closing the books at the end of the month, quarter, or year, finance teams have to comb through all of the transactions to make sure everything is correct. Considering the human power this involves, achieving a consistent timely, accurate, and efficient financial close is a challenge. Short bursts of activity often take place throughout the year, but this limits visibility into the close process and often prevents the finance department from focusing on more strategic initiatives.

“An AI Agent can help reduce the scramble to get the books closed on time and without errors. It can do the grunt work—categorizing transactions, determining and raising journal entries, and generating financial statements—so that finance teams can focus on the bigger picture. With time, it might play a bigger role in managing the close process and in providing commentary on how the company performed.”
Rakesh Duggal, Workday Finance AI Leader at Deloitte.

Agentic AI effectively reduces repetitive tasks in HR and goes beyond simple automation. It adapts to new information and real-time data, enabling an AI Recruiting Agent to help HR managers streamline workflows and screen job applications. The AI continually learns from feedback to improve results.

Likewise, Generative AI can help in creating job descriptions.

“By automating labor-intensive tasks while keeping humans in control of all major talent acquisition decisions, AI can enable greater efficiency and stronger results. AI-embedded HR solutions can also be effective at helping humans to implement skills-based frameworks. This includes analyzing skills, understanding their relationships, mapping those insights to a workforce at scale, and ultimately connecting the right internal or external candidate to the right role,”
Omar Sihweil, Workday AI Leader, Deloitte.

Platforms powered by AI can review and analyze data, identify gaps and suggest ways to fill them, and provide leaders with on-demand insights. In Finance, they can improve expense tracking and anomaly detection, for instance, or create more detailed forecasts for accurate resource and financial planning. Or, in HR, they can present employee insights when they’re relevant, enabling business leaders to support talent at every stage of the lifecycle, from personalized employee onboarding to training and development.

Both finance and HR processes often involve repetitive tasks like tracking down information, reconciling data, and pulling reports. This often leaves little time to focus on the why behind the data or explore multiple what-if scenarios. An insights platform powered by AI can serve as a digital analyst, allowing leaders to ask questions in plain language, explore unlimited datasets, and receive custom reports that reveal business performance.

AI can also improve the ways in which the finance and HR teams collaborate with stakeholders across the business to find the right path forward. Previously, reaching out to the various business functions required not just a great deal of time, but also a lot of data analysis. Intelligent technologies, however, can look at all the available data in seconds and say, "When we did something like this in the past, this was the outcome.”

Everything starts with the use case. Is there a real business problem you are trying to solve with the use of AI and is there a clear understanding of how AI is going to solve it? For organizations at the lower end of the AI maturity scale, the business problem may not be lofty. For example, the goal may simply be to enhance the user experience by making people aware of existing AI-enabled capabilities in Workday.

“It is imperative that we continuously innovate and optimize our clients' daily operations for maximum accuracy and efficiency by leveraging Workday AI features. These capabilities, ranging from Workday Assistant to Workday’s available AI agents, can help employees find answers for simple to complex issues, automate routine tasks, and provide instant insights not only to reduce development time but also to boost employee productivity, empower them with self-service, and improve their overall experience.”
Atin Garg, US Workday HR Cloud Operate Leader.

While responsible AI developers like Workday design systems to allow for effective human oversight, Deloitte, as the deployment partner, is tasked with providing this oversight.

“Workday’s AI capabilities as delivered via IlluminateTM are available now, and clients should consider how to enable them in alignment with their corporate AI strategies. But, technology adoption is only one piece. Governance practices and measurement processes should also be deployed to evaluate how AI is impacting not only Workday usage but also the organization more broadly.”
Dan Sundt, US Workday HCM Market Offering Leader.

“Regardless of the use case, it is important to be transparent around the fact this is an AI solution; here’s what it does; here’s how it works; and here’s how we’re using it. Organizations also need to consider what responsible AI guidelines should look like for their AI usage and how to communicate them effectively.”
Kelly Trindel, Workday’s Chief Responsible AI Officer.

Having a policy in place about when and how AI technologies should be used and by whom is essential. Overall, survey respondents in Workday’s AI IQ report are fairly certain their AI investments will increase over time, and AI will bring tangible business benefits⁵. But, they’re not sure they can trust the data they use to power AI and machine learning (ML), or that they are deploying AI and ML in the right places, in the right way, and at speed⁶.

“Over and over again, research findings, as in Workday’s Closing the AI Trust Gap survey, indicate that trust can be a major barrier to scaling and deploying AI.”⁷
Kelly Trindel, Workday’s Chief Responsible AI Officer.

While some people are very excited about the potential opportunities that AI invites, others are concerned about the potential for unintended consequences. “Often, employees don’t trust AI because their company hasn’t shared responsible AI guidelines with them and clearly communicated how they’re utilizing intelligent technologies.” She goes on to explain that responsible AI is an approach that guides the design and development of AI systems in a manner that adheres to transparent and accountable standards for trustworthy and ethical technologies.

To get one’s head around risk identification and management, Trindel suggests that it all depends on the manner in which AI touches the users and the implications of those interactions. Will people be afraid they’ll lose their jobs? Does the technology introduce bias for certain demographic groups? Does it give some people opportunities and others not? Do customers think they are interacting with a human being when they are not?

“In evaluating an AI technology that you want to develop and/or deploy, you need to consider the users’ experience and the risks to their fundamental human rights, which can vary dramatically by use case,” she says. For example, an intelligent technology that identifies budget anomalies is lower risk than one that predicts who would be a good fit to hire for a particular role. Both are useful, but one has higher risk to fundamental human rights than the other. In practice, this means you would need to have more safeguards in place for the hiring use case than the budget anomaly example.

Beyond building trust, compliance concerns are also growing. Regulations in the AI space are developing rapidly, with the European Union AI Act often being perceived as the gold standard. The Act introduces “risk-tiering,” or different rules for different use cases, as illustrated in the previous example⁸.

“When you frame AI governance through the lens that some AI use cases present more risk than others, it becomes more manageable. AI regulations will fit reasonably into that structure as they evolve and you can focus instead on how to develop responsible AI guidelines that will serve your organization on multiple levels now and for some time to come.”
Kelly Trindel, Workday’s Chief Responsible AI Officer.

Data can be a major barrier to deploying and scaling intelligent technologies. It is a lifeblood of AI, but reliable data is often hard to find in many organizations today, due to a complex and often disjointed systems landscape. In fact, most organizations don’t fully trust their own data to provide the best-possible AI outcomes.

Among the respondents in the AI IQ report, 77% are concerned that their organization’s data is neither timely nor reliable enough to use with AI⁹. Similarly, insufficient data volume or quality was the top reason (29%) for their AI deployments falling short of expectations.¹⁰

To solve the AI data dilemma, start with the business outcomes and insights you want to deliver - then, and only then, you should start to identify what data will drive those business outcomes and insight.¹¹ Many companies do it the other way around. They start with the data and then try to use that date to drive insights. That approach often wastes time and doesn't deliver business value.¹²

Employees will experience AI features differently depending on the roles or personas they have in their organizations. For instance, a traveling salesperson may perceive an AI-enabled receipt scanning capability to be a lifesaver, but an internal administrator might find it harder to see the value.

Accordingly, determining the personas you’re looking to reach and what kind of messages resonate with them is one of the key aspects of managing change when rolling out AI programs.

“Once you’ve established the personas, then it’s important to determine what the value proposition is, either for existing AI functionality that you want them to take greater advantage of or for new features you’re planning to roll out in the future.”
Dan Siegel, Workday Financials Leader, Deloitte.

“In the end, it’s really less about the specifics of the functionality and more about the value it brings to the users based on their personas and how they engage with Workday. Value-based messaging is ultimately what is going to resonate with them. Also, you want the AI features you’re rolling out to be approachable and accessible. You don’t want anything in your messaging to be intimidating or confusing to users.”
Abbey Perkins, Change Management Practice Leader, Workday.

One way to do this is likening the Workday AI features you’re rolling out to those in consumer technologies. For instance, you could communicate that Workday Learning serves up personalized content based on your role and work history, just like streaming services generate video recommendations based on your preferences and viewing patterns.

As reflected in the findings of the Deloitte State of Gen AI in the Enterprise report, AI is expected to increase the value of certain technology-centered and human-centered skills, while decreasing the value of others.¹³

• Technology-centered skills that respondents most expect to increase in value include: data analysis (70%), prompt engineering (60%), information research (59%), and software engineering/coding (57%).
• Human-centered skills that respondents most expect to increase in value include: critical thinking and problem-solving (62%), creativity (59%), flexibility/resilience (58%), and the ability to work in teams (54%).
• In response to AI adoption, the most common changes to talent strategy among the overall respondent pool involve redesigning work processes (48%) and upskilling or reskilling (47%).¹⁴

The bottom line is that using algorithmic analysis, modeling, forecasting, or reporting requires some education about what the technology can and can’t do. Workers don’t need to be data scientists, but they need to understand the technology’s capabilities, biases, and how to engage with it in a trustworthy way.

“AI is starting to augment how humans work, but it can’t do all the work for them. To be ready in the age of AI, workers need to be AI fluent to accelerate adoption. In the mid to longer term, jobs will have to be reimagined, work processes redesigned, and workers reskilled to harness the full promise of the technology.”
Nitin Mittal, Global AI Leader, Deloitte

Regardless of where your organization stands on the AI maturity curve, there are an abundance of resources available to help you take the next step. Workday offers a robust community forum where customers can learn from one another, along with helpful guides, such as How to Create Your Responsible AI Charter, and video courses such as Workday AI Masterclass, which demystifies AI by offering practical insights into how it works and how it can be strategically integrated within your own operations.

Deloitte, as a leading Workday alliance partner, also offers road-mapping sessions, industry-specific accelerators, and customized labs to help you determine where to start, and how to scale and get more value from your AI and Generative AI investments while mitigating risk.

Illuminate is the next generation of Workday AI that understands not only the data but also the context—the “why” or “how” behind every HR and financial process. Illuminate models are fueled by the more than 800 billion business transactions processed by the Workday platform annually. Spanning the entire Workday platform, these models deliver more-precise insights for decision-making, streamlined actions, exponential productivity gains, and significant cost savings by:

• Accelerating common tasks with generative AI. Illuminate leverages Generative AI to expedite content creation and summarization for things like job descriptions, talent highlights, messages, knowledge articles, contracts, and more. Additionally, it offers insights and automation tools, including anomaly detection, auto-filling, prompting, and document scanning to further streamline tasks.
• Delivering real-time AI assistance in the flow of work. Illuminate reduces friction and helps employees prioritize critical work. The new Workday Assistant facilitates seamless, intuitive assistance across routine HR and finance tasks, providing real-time guidance through complex processes to allow employees to focus on more strategic work.
• Transforming entire business processes with AI orchestration: Illuminate anticipates and streamlines common business processes to transform the way work gets done. It will provide every user with a "team" of business process experts, or agents, that can operate with and on behalf of the user. Illuminate will also conduct end-to-end business process orchestration, coordinating multiple agents and managing complex cross-platform processes.

1. 2025 Global Human Capital Trends: Turning tensions into triumphs,” Deloitte, 2025.
2. “Now decides next: Moving from potential to performance,” The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise: Quarter Three Report, Deloitte AI Institute, August 2024.
3. Ibid.
4. “Now decides next: Generating a new future,” The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise: Quarter Four Report, Deloitte AI Institute, January 2025.
5. “AI IQ: Insights on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise,” Workday, 2023.
6. Ibid.
7. “Closing the AI Trust Gap,” Workday, 2024.
8. “EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence,” European Parliament, August 6, 2023.
9. “AI IQ: Insights on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise,” Workday, 2023.
10. Ibid.
11. Jim Stratton, “Decoding the Data Dilemma: the Key to Success in the AI Revolution,” smartCIO, Workday, 2023.
12. Ibid.
13. “Now decides next: Getting real about Generative AI,” The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise: Quarter Two Report, Deloitte AI Institute, April 2024.
14. Ibid.