Background
DevCon 2023 was held from May 16th to May 19th at the San Jose Convention Center in California. According to organizers, attendance more than doubled, and many sessions were sold-out. However, Workday made all sessions available through live streaming and recordings. At the conference, Workday made new announcements that have set the stage for the future of work. Workday is known for its innovative contributions to enhancing enterprises’ HR and finance business processes, and this conference focused on users building innovations around core SaaS capabilities. The developer community in attendance collectively shared best practices on using a collection of features that fits under the Workday Cloud Platform umbrella. The conference showcased Workday’s strong support for its developers and the transformative technologies they work with.
AI and ML Revolutionizing the Workplace
Workday’s Co-CEO, Aneel Bhusri, and Co-President, Sayan Chakraborty, talked about AI and ML technologies enabling developers to become better change agents in their organizations. Workday announced the upcoming release of new ML APIs for developers to leverage Workday-curated Large Language Models (LLMs) for skills, invoices, receipts, and forecasting. With AI and ML becoming the go-to technology for improving productivity, Workday can abstract the complexity of this modern technology while delivering capabilities to enhance the efficiencies of enterprise HR and Finance processes. Using the ability to train models on user-specific data, Workday provides value to customers while maintaining guardrails of ethical and governance concerns. With the skills shortage, Workday can use AI and ML to improve productivity and business outcomes in the HR domain. The changing nature of finance requires more automation, and AI and ML can play a role in automating routine tasks related to the finance business process. Financial departments can use the technology for fraud detection, anomaly detection, and risk assessment, while HR departments can use the technology for candidate screening and personalized learning recommendations.
Dave Sohigian, Global CTO, spoke at the keynote and made some interesting points about how Workday developer tools play a role in enterprise innovation:
• CIOs look to platforms to solve many of their day-to-day business problems
• The Workday Cloud Platform builds on the Workday user experience that every employee is already familiar with. With the ability to combine security and continuous updates, the interoperability with the rest of Workday lowers the effort to solve unique problems the CIO faces.
• Workday builds new features and functions by partnering with developers, allowing faster innovation than generic developer platforms.
• By tying business value to applications, developers can move careers forward.
Growth through Strategic Partnerships
On day two of the keynote, Matt Grippo, Workday’s GM of Cloud Platform, and Scott Rosecrans, AWS’s VP of Applications Sales and Strategic Business Development, joined to discuss the state of the decade-long partnership. Workday has effectively used the AWS infrastructure to allow the consumption of Workday services globally, where regulations require data residency requirements. The joint capabilities now include native integration of AWS services in Workday Extend applications. This integration, piloted at the Hackathon event held during the last two days of the conference, enables developers to leverage AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, Amazon EventBridge, and Amazon AI Services within their Workday Extend apps.
Innovating with Workday
Workday’s SVP and Chief Technology Officer, Jim Stratton, with Shane Luke, VP of AI and Machine Learning, and Dave Sohigian, Global CTO, discussed several areas where Workday is committed to expanding developers’ capability to innovate on the Workday Cloud Platform. With Generative AI at the top of customers’ minds, genuine concerns about AI technology creating biased and discriminatory decisions exist. Workday executives stressed the importance of data quality over quantity in delivering trustworthy, transparent, and ethical AI capabilities for the developer community using customer-specific data. Platform interoperability is essential for developers to connect data and processes from internal and external applications. Combined with a familiar user interface, interoperability brings innovative tools into the hands of the developer to enable business transformation. Workday’s low/no-code capabilities enable both business users and professional developers to deliver functionality to users much faster than traditional application development, deployment, and delivery methods. Combined with Generative AI, Workday low/no-code capabilities could further enhance productivity. In my recorded conversation with Matt Grippo, GM of Workday Cloud Platform, Matt shared some research being done in this area.
Community: The Driving Force of Change
Carl Eschenbach moved from joining Workday as a board member in 2018 to becoming the Co-CEO in 2022. During his conversation with Jay Wieczorkowski, Sr. Director of Cloud Platform Product Management at Workday, Carl shared his background in hardware engineering and how he moved into software innovation after realizing its value in the technology ecosystem. Carl recognized the importance of a community and their role in helping Workday become a better steward in providing innovative developer tools. Carl underlined an economy built around Workday skills and encouraged attendees to earn credentials to showcase their value. The conference highlighted the importance of partners in developing and delivering customer solutions. Most sessions were about information sharing by developers on strengths and challenges in implementing solutions on the Workday Cloud Platform.
Summary
While DevCon 2023 was all about developers, many attendees came from the financial community and were primarily responsible for budgeting and forecasting in their respective organizations. They shared experiences of using Workday’s Adaptive Planning tool rather than spreadsheets. Attendees I spoke to shared that their SaaS provider did not provide such a capability and that Workday’s Adaptive Planning solution filled the gap.
Technology companies ranging from chip manufacturers to telecom industry vendors understand the value of developers to the success of their offerings. SaaS companies like Workday focus on allowing developers to innovate on top of the applications giving enterprises unique strengths against the competition. DevCon 2023 showed Workday’s and its developer community’s strides in enhancing HR and Finance applications. All executives in attendance stressed the value of developers in enterprise transformation and innovation while committing to contributing to the developer community. From strategic partnerships to harnessing the potential of AI and ML and bolstering its developer community, Workday demonstrated its position at the forefront of the future of work. Even in challenging budgetary environments, customers can expect to see the value of the Workday Cloud Platform with proper execution.