How software giant Workday got 79% of its employees to embrace AI

Their study found that 43% of Workday’s employees—known as “Workmates”—said they lacked sufficient time to explore AI. More than a third of them also expressed uncertainty about how to use these new tools and worries about reliability and accuracy.

“Here we are wanting them so badly to explore, but they don’t feel that they have that time or that permission,” says Ashley Goldsmith, chief people officer at Workday. “What we’re working on is really changing the mindset.”

To encourage greater use across the organization, Workday held a splashy, all-hands meeting in April that prominently featured AI use case testimonials from across the workforce. Workday also set up a digital academy to promote AI upskilling and hosted a “prompt-a-thon” where employees could brainstorm problems they think can be solved with AI and develop prompts to best leverage large language models.

In another nudge this year, senior leadership for the first time mandated that all 19,300 employees establish personal goals for how they will use AI to improve their work and learn new skills. Their progress will be assessed by managers at the end of the year. 

Workday says these “Everyday AI” initiatives were built on internal analysis of the company’s workforce that uncovered that peer-to-peer guidance was more compelling than C-suite technologists evangelizing the benefits of AI. The company has also sought to reassure employees that experimentation is highly encouraged and that doing work faster with AI is always preferred over not using those tools.

“Everyday AI” was developed with the goal of boosting AI adoption across the company by 20% from the baseline set at the beginning of 2025. Workday says the increase was a better-than-anticipated 37% through May, with 79% of all workers now using AI. The tools used now range from the company’s own AI chatbot Workday Assistant to AI features from vendors including Zoom, Google, and Slack to generative AI-specific tools to support specific functions like customer support and coding assistant GitHub Copilot for developers.

Jim Stratton, who recently became Workday’s senior vice president of technology and architecture after serving as chief technology officer from 2018 until May this year, says his own approach to generative AI has evolved over the past few years.

Historically, the company would roll out fresh new features to all customers globally at the same time. But innovation is moving too quickly for AI—and some customers want to see early versions of AI-enabled tools before they are more broadly launched. That’s led to a staged rollout process for generative AI features, including at Workday, where early adopters get access to new tools first.

He’s focusing more on measuring the return on investments for generative AI, which can be easier to track for AI tools that assist customer support specialists or software developers using AI to generate code or bug fixes. But Stratton says ROI can be more difficult to quantify for other use cases, including when used to more accurately predict sales forecasts or when to help craft a pitch to a customer.

“Increasingly, in probably the last 18 months or so, there’s a real focus on measured ROI out of those investments,” Stratton says about AI and machine learning advancements. “Both in terms of what we do internally and also the products that we now go build.”

Workday says it has put extra emphasis on the company’s responsible AI principles, which include testing, risk assessments, and documentation, all work that’s especially critical for a software company whose tools are used to recruit and onboard talent, performance management, and onboarding. Some workplace tasks associated with this work, like decisions around compensation or promotions, should remain with workers. 

“There’s certain critical steps that for a very long time, I think humans will absolutely still be the decision makers,” says Stratton.

While that may be some comfort to human resource employees, fresh fears of AI’s impact on the workplace have increased in recent weeks, encapsulated by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s warning that AI could eliminate around 50% of all entry-level, white-collar jobs. Workday itself generated headlines along those lines when it announced in February that it would lay off 1,750 workers, or 8.5% of its staff, as the company prioritized investments like AI. 

With developer productivity improving by 20% or more, Stratton acknowledges the fears workers may have that companies will need fewer employees to do the same amount of work. “That could be true,” he says. “But the way we view it, particularly on the development side of things, we can get more done with the same number of people so we can just go faster in terms of delivering more product.”

Goldsmith says there could be cases in which the technology completely takes over the work a person does, but ultimately she espouses AI’s benefits to both the business and workers. This is the tough sell that all businesses are confronting: encouraging workers to use AI to complete more tasks, while assuaging concerns that doing so won’t put them out of a job.

“We can reinvest those dollars in our technology and do more to advance the support and work for our customers,” says Goldsmith. “That’s how we talk to our employees about it. It is about super charging them, not replacing them.”

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

Why Morgan Stanley built an AI tool to modernize legacy software. While many businesses are embracing AI coding tools from vendors like Anthropic and OpenAI, Morgan Stanley took a somewhat unique approach to assist the financial giant as it modernizes legacy software. The bank told the Wall Street Journal that it built an in-house tool known as DevGen.AI on OpenAI’s GPT models that can translate legacy code into plain English specs, which developers can use to rewrite the code. This approach has saved developers 280,000 hours this year, says Morgan Stanley, which also claims that AI-powered coding tools are better at writing new code than older programming languages or those customized for any given organization. “We found that building it ourselves gave us certain capabilities that we’re not really seeing in some of the commercial products,” Mike Pizzi, global head of technology and operations at Morgan Stanley, told the news outlet.

Meta mulls a multibillion-dollar investment in an AI startup. Facebook’s parent company is considering an investment in Scale AI that could exceed $10 billion in value, reports Bloomberg, in what would be Meta’s largest external AI investment. Scale AI, which provides data labeling services to customers including Microsoft and OpenAI, was last valued at about $14 billion in 2024 in a funding round that included Microsoft and Meta. If the Meta-Scale AI deal were to be inked, it would put the social media giant more in line with big tech rivals that have poured billions into AI startups, including Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI and Anthropic’s funding from the likes of Amazon and Google’s parent company Alphabet.

Alphabet says it will keep hiring engineers at least into 2026. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google-parent Alphabet, told Bloomberg that the tech giant’s engineering talent base will continue to grow even as its AI investments accelerate. “I just view this as making engineers dramatically more productive, getting a lot of the mundane aspects out of what they do,” says Pichai. He added that while AI excels in some tasks like coding, large language models continue to make some basic mistakes. Alphabet remains a strong AI bull: It recommitted to plans to spend $75 billion this year to add data center capacity. Alphabet’s engineering hiring forecast is more optimistic than what some others have said about the technology’s impact on the future job prospects for workers. Just last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI today is like an intern that can work for a couple hours but at some point, “it’ll be like an experienced software engineer that can work for a couple of days.”

ADOPTION CURVE

CEOs are more aware of responsible AI concerns than CIOs and CTOs. Consumers are far more likely to express concerns about the accuracy, privacy, explainability, and accountability of AI than any of the seven C-suite leadership roles surveyed by consulting giant EY. For consumers, the average percent of respondent concern across nine responsible AI principles was 53%, versus 38% for CEOs. CIOs were ranked fifth out of the seven C-suite roles (26%) and CTOs were last (23%).

EY explains that this is likely due to 50% of CEOs saying they have primary responsibility for AI at their organizations and that they tend to be more customer-facing than most other C-suite leaders, with the possible exception of the chief marketing officer. To get their C-suite peers to champion responsible AI, EY recommends that CEOs encourage other C-suite leaders to spend more time with customers and more closely study their feedback and surveys, go beyond regulatory regulations to address the risks of AI, and more loudly explain their organizations’ responsible AI principles to customers.

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

- New York State Technology Enterprise Corporation is seeking a CTO, based in Albany, NY. Posted salary range: $215K-$300K/year.

- Shake Shack is seeking a VP of digital and restaurant technology, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $245.6K-$328.9K/year.

- Chanel is seeking a senior group director, CIO office portfolio management and performance, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $175K-$210K/year.

- Alto Pharmacy is seeking a CTO, based in Texas. Posted salary range: $280K-$400K/year.

Hired:

- Genesys named Trevor Schulze as CIO, joining the call center software provider to oversee the global IT organization to further bolster the company’s AI and cloud strategies. Schulze joins Genesys from software provider Alteryx, where he was most recently SVP and chief digital and information officer. He also held CIO and senior leadership roles at RingCentral and Micron Technology.

- Neurocrine Biosciences announced Lewis Choi as CIO, to oversee the neurological-focused biopharmaceutical company’s technology initiatives. He joins Neurocrine after a 13-year career at Thermo Fisher Scientific, most recently as the VP of AI automation and data. Prior to that, he held IT roles at Life Technologies, which was acquired by Thermo Fisher, and SysGroup and ADP.

- Washington Post promoted Sam Han as chief AI officer, a new role after serving in various leadership positions at the news organization for nearly eight years. Han will lead the development of the Post's AI suite of products and he previously served as a VP at hotel operator Marriott. He also held leadership roles at Persistent Systems and Sears Holdings.

- Imprint named Will Larson as CTO, joining the provider of co-branded credit cards to oversee the engineering team and all technology development. Prior to Imprint, Larson was CTO at software provider Carta and served as CTO at mental healthcare app Calm. He also previously led the engineering teams at Stripe and Uber.

- LogicMonitor appointed Garth Fort as chief product officer, overseeing product strategy for the provider of IT infrastructure monitoring. Previously, Fort served as CPO and SVP of software provider Splunk, which was acquired by Cisco for $28 billion last year. Fort also previously held manager roles at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

- Thunder announced Paul Kersey as CTO, joining the Salesforce consultancy as it deepens capabilities in Mulesoft software, the AI platform Agentforce, and data cloud technologies. Previously, Kersey was VP of technology at IT service and consultancy NTT Data and as CTO at Apisero, which NTT acquired in 2022.

- Simplilearn announced that Jitendra Kumar will return to the company as CTO, where he will spearhead efforts to embed AI technologies into the company’s online learning courses. Kumar was previously CTO at the Blackstone-backed education company from 2013 through 2019. During the subsequent six years, Kumar was co-founder and CEO at two companies, HappyCredit and ReelOn.

- Napier AI named Noel King as CTO, where he will oversee the development of the company’s AI-enabled financial crime compliance software. Most recently, King was CTO at software firm Implement Technologies and IT services provider Shipyard Technology Ventures.

- MindBridge promoted Rachel Kirkham to CTO, after she was most recently SVP of AI and product at the financial risk software provider. Kirkham has been promoted several times by MindBridge since joining in 2020. Previously, she spent nine years at the UK National Audit Office, an independent public spending watchdog, including serving as head of data analytics research.