Workday Unveils Next Generation of Transformative Illuminate Agents

Workday, Inc., the Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform for managing people, money, and agents, has announced a new wave of Illuminate Agents designed to significantly speed up the hiring processes, improve frontline worker experiences, streamline complex financial processes, and empower employees to find information quickly and easily.

Unveiled at Workday Elevate Singapore, the new Illuminate Agents leverage Workday’s foundation of responsible AI and are purpose-built to supercharge employee productivity—creating a future where agentic AI fundamentally transforms how work gets done.

“The key to unlocking real business value with AI is to actively reshape the very core of how businesses operate,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, President, Product and Technology, at Workday. “Workday is helping our 11,000+ customers in that transformation by leveraging our deep HR and finance expertise to deliver agents that provide measurable business value and empower them to thrive in the future of work.”

“Data is a powerful catalyst for growth when it can be transformed into actionable intelligence,” said Shane Luke, Vice President at Workday Illuminate. “Our agents leverage the world’s most powerful HR and finance dataset to turn insights into impact—boosting productivity, enhancing compliance, and accelerating decision-making at every level.”

Meet Workday’s New Illuminate Agents

New Illuminate Agents announced by Workday include:

• Contingent Sourcing Agent: Accelerates temporary hiring by identifying talent open to contingent roles, streamlining screening, and enhancing applicant quality.
• Contract Intelligence Agent: Enhances legal and business decision-making by rapidly reviewing contracts to identify risks, track key dates and fees, and provide ongoing analysis.
• Contract Negotiation Agent: Expedites negotiations by drafting applicable contract language, detecting risks, and recommending revisions.
• Document Driven Accounting Agent: Sets a new benchmark for accounting productivity by extracting data from documents to automate billing, invoicing, and accounting entries.
• Frontline Agent: Saves frontline workers and managers time by enabling text-based absence reporting, quickly identifying qualified replacements, and helping to ensure compliance and accurate shift pay.
• Self-Service Agent: Powers employee and manager self-service by providing instant answers to inquiries, assisting with complex tasks, and executing everyday actions on employees’ behalf.
• Supplier Contracts Agent: Proactively reviews supplier contracts to identify obligations and opportunities, aligning procurement processes with contract terms.

“Workday’s cutting-edge contract AI and automated workflow technology has already delivered tangible benefits, saving us thousands of hours and millions of dollars across multiple critical corporate initiatives,” said Shelle Elzer, Legal Operations Manager at NetApp. “We’re genuinely excited to see Workday expand on this agent innovation and are confident these advancements will empower our teams with even greater efficiencies that ultimately free them to focus on more meaningful work.”

“Workday continues to effectively target critical business outcomes in productivity, compliance, and insights with agentic AI. This is one more significant step in establishing AI agents as practical and impactful tools for business transformation,” said Mickey North Rizza, Group Vice President, IDC Enterprise Software. “Customers need measurable business value and clear time-to-payback and Workday’s innovations with agentic AI will resonate strongly with organisations looking to truly transform the future of work and fully take advantage of the power of AI.”

Workday Illuminate: AI to Transform How People Work

These new Illuminate Agents join Workday’s growing portfolio of agentic AI solutions, including the previously-announced Business Process Optimise Agent, Financial Audit Agent, Payroll Agent, Recruiting Agent, and Talent Mobility Agent. Customers will be able to easily deploy and manage these agents through the Workday Agent System of Record. This central command centre will enable IT and business leaders to maximise the impact of their agents and ensure they support their employees to drive measurable outcomes.

Illuminate is the next generation of Workday AI. Built on the world’s largest and cleanest HR and financial dataset—fuelled by more than 1 trillion transactions a year—Illuminate Agents understand the business context around the data to transform business operations by elevating humans, accelerating finance, and managing an organisation’s entire fleet of AI agents. From skills, to performance, goals, cost and ROI metrics, organisational models, and individual identities, Illuminate has deep contextual understanding of how work gets done.

Availability

Contract Intelligence Agent and Contract Negotiation Agent are now generally available. Self-Service Agent will be generally available by the end of 2025. Contingent Sourcing Agent, Document Driven Accounting Agent, Frontline Agent, and Supplier Contracts Agent will be available to early adopters by the end of 2025, with general availability planned for early 2026.