Background:
Improving developer productivity with Generative AI is high on the list of priorities for organizations looking to leverage innovations in the fast-evolving technology. When advising customers, several management consulting firms discussed how software developers can complete coding tasks faster with Generative AI. As a result of these trends, many software vendors have been enhancing their offerings with Generative AI capabilities to fulfill these market expectations and customer demands to accelerate developer productivity further.
Workday Rising 2023, the company’s customer conference, was held from September 26th to September 29th in San Francisco. On the event’s second day, Workday released several new capabilities for Workday Extend, the company’s platform for building custom applications and solutions. The enhancements aim to improve the developer experience and help drive innovation for Workday customers. The capabilities include Workday AI Gateway, access to a new set of developer technologies provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), and a no-code/low-code toolset. This blog post will describe each of these capabilities, followed by a summary.
Workday AI Gateway:
One way to deliver AI benefits to developers is to securely abstract the consumption of AI services through an integration layer. The abstracted AI services need to address the most common business processes that customers require. Workday AI Gateway provides developers access to Workday’s AI and ML services, such as skills analysis, sentiment analysis, document intelligence, and ML forecasting. Document intelligence is especially promising for these services as it can eliminate the struggle of reading and categorizing incoming business documents. This integration service will enable developers to enhance applications with intelligence by leveraging AI capabilities natively embedded in the Workday platform.
Developer Technologies from AWS:
Several hyper scalers are rapidly innovating AI services that can connect easily with partner solutions. At their end, partners build security protocols, removing that responsibility from application developers while reducing the overall risk. Workday plans to support several AWS AI services like Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Rekognition directly within Workday Extend. Amazon Translate will help with multi-lingual communication for smaller international business customers, reducing the need for translators. This integration will give developers insights from unstructured data to build customized apps. Access to AWS AI services now delivers Workday developers a more comprehensive array of services, enabling them to meet changing business demands. Workday can exponentially grow the capabilities of Workday Platform users by adding access to other hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft.
A no-code/low-code toolset:
A perennial problem in software development is translating application specifications from business users to writing code and deploying tested applications by developers. Generative AI can help by allowing business users to use a visual interface in writing specifications that directly translate to a running application. Workday is enhancing the no-code/low-code capabilities of the App Builder, allowing developers to build applications with clicks. Another ability, the Developer Copilot, will translate natural language to app code, accelerating developer productivity.
Summary:
Enhancing developer productivity has been the holy grail of the software industry for years. Until recently, several 4GL development tools burst into the market, claiming to “drastically automate” the whole development process. However, most of them, if not all of them, fell far short of stated goals. With the advent of Generative AI capabilities, there is a lot of excitement in this space again for all the right reasons. Generative AI has the potential to meet these expectations, deliver productivity improvements across the entire development lifecycle, and open new opportunities.
The new Workday Extend capabilities aim to help customers adapt faster and deliver better results. While code generation from data capability is available now on Workday Extend, the rest of these capabilities will be released over the next six to twelve months. These Workday Extend announcements underscore Workday’s vision to empower developers and businesses through technological innovation and strategic partnerships. Workday’s latest offerings signify its intent to remain a significant player in the developers’ productivity space.
Workday has taken a giant leap in delivering on the developer productivity expectations with Generative AI. This is a good start in the right direction, but it must be noted that Generative AI is still in its infancy, and a lot more innovation should happen in quick intervals to keep the momentum.
Ram Viswanathan, Consultant and ex-IBM Fellow, contributed to this blog post.