As a first-time attendee, staring at my shiny “first timer” button laid on the desk, Workday Rising delivered. With Sift being a new Workday partner, the experience across our team was fresh and exciting for everyone involved. We bounced from session to session, visited the expo halls, crossed the Waymo-filled streets amongst the 30,000 sprawled between Moscone West & South.
From left to right: Aaron Smith (VP of Marketing), Larry Angeli (CEO), and Ryan Bickham (VP of Product Engineering)
Like a sponge I absorbed as much as I could, whether it was at the welcome reception, spending more time at the booths to understand the partner ecosystem, attending sessions, or simply chatting with people about their experience being a Workday partner. I felt more value out of this trip than any conference in recent memory.
And between seeing Billy Idol shoot a video in front of the famous Workday Rockstar tour-bus, to the amazing performance of Duran-Duran at Oracle Park, I left impressed. So with a “Rebel Yell”, I’ll leave you with my top takeaways from Workday Rising 2025.
A local sealebrity, Lou Seal, came to check out what Workday had in store.
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The Workday Platform is open
Historically Workday’s platform has been more closed off, well that all seems to be changing now. Workday is understanding the need to make their platform and ecosystem more open to devs, partners, and customers in the face of a new enterprise environment. One of their bigger announcements was in relation to their developer platform called Workday Build, which is their new dev platform that allows organizations to create, extend, and scale AI-powered apps, agents, and orchestrations on Workday's core data and services.
The Workday Build platform
Its core components, Extend, Flowise, Orchestrate and Data Cloud make up this platform.
Workday Extend - Build applications that extend Workday’s core functionality
Workday Flowise Agent Builder - A low-code platform to build AI agents—from simple chatbots to complex automated workflows. (acquired by Workday in 2025)
Workday Orchestrate - An automation tool built into Workday that lets organizations design, execute, and monitor end-to-end workflows across Workday and external systems.
Workday Data Cloud [New] - Announced at Rising, Provides access to Workday data and connects it to external platforms for faster analytics and AI-powered insights.
The key new item here was the announcement of the Workday Data Cloud. This provides organizations with real-time, governed access to their core HR/finance data and enables seamless (with zero or minimal copying) connection to external data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, Salesforce). The goal Workday says is to significantly accelerate and enhance analytics, AI, and decision-making across operational, financial, and people domains.
These tools should make it possible to build, integrate, and innovate beyond Workday’s core applications, turning Workday from a historically closed SaaS system into a platform where organizations can develop and connect their own solutions.
Beyond all the developer infrastructure news was the huge announcement of Workday acquiring Sana, an AI-powered enterprise platform that centralizes company knowledge, automates workflows, and enables personalized learning experiences.
Sana will provide two main components for Workday:
Sana Agents: These are AI agents that users can create to automate repetitive tasks, find information across company data sources, and act proactively on the user's behalf.
Sana Learn: An AI-native learning platform that streamlines the creation and delivery of learning content, acting as a comprehensive learning management system.
Workday believes this could be a new “front door for work”. And a better, more modern interface for employees to interact within Workday. Enabling agents that can:
Find answers, information and files by instantly searching across a company's most critical data sources, including Workday, Google Drive, SharePoint, and Office365.
Act proactively by anticipating needs, summarizing insights, and assisting with projects.
Create presentations, documents, and dashboards, even full learning courses, based on company knowledge.
Automate repetitive tasks and routine work by executing workflows end-to-end.
Workday Build plus the Sana news all point towards open data and open development, offering exciting possibilities for Workday's future evolution.
The Agents are here and more are coming
Workday is going all in on AI. A total of 9 agents were launched in September and another 13 agents will be added by March 2026. This is on top of the 5 agents already here. That’s a 93% increase in agents between now and March 2026. An ambitious number, and it’s clear this is where Workday sees the future.
“If you take one thing from this conference, it’s Workday is all in on AI and we’re not here to just build features. Each of these are a product by themselves.” - Jerry Ting - Vice President, Head of Agentic AI & Evisort, Workday
Workday continually rattled off this scary stat across multiple sessions I went to, “only 5% of all AI projects deliver ROI”. This stat was provided by a 2025 MIT Report and when first hearing it, you could hear the proverbial balloon pop. Despite all the hype, it’s clear AI is entering the show me phase.
Senior Director of AI Strategy, Growth & Operations, Callie Kemmer, joined Jerry Ting for a session titled “Workday Illuminate™: Strategy and Vision.” During their presentation, Kemmer outlined four essential criteria that all agents must meet.
Amplify Talent Potential
Boost Productivity
Improve Strategic Decisions
Strengthen Compliance
People clearly need to see returns on these huge AI investments. Throughout the conference I was pleased that there were already examples of AI helping improve business outcomes by reducing time to hire, increasing recruiter capacity, reducing outside legal spend as just a few examples.
During Pfizer’s session, “Thriving in Disruption: How Pfizer Is Using Agentic AI to Power a Future-Ready Workforce”, they mentioned their strategy to unlock internal talent by using AI agents (Recruiting Agent, Talent Mobility Agent, Hiring Navigator) to support different HR personas: Recruiters, Managers, Employees, and Leaders.
These agents aim to enhance internal mobility by giving colleagues visibility into potential job matches. The agent proactively contacts a subset of candidates directly. Furthermore, the agent requests feedback if a colleague doesn't apply for a role, which then helps to train the AI to identify better candidates in the future.
“We’re actively engaging our colleagues with growth opportunities, we were not doing that before.” - Ann Farine DeVos - Senior Director, NA Candidate Experience, Global Onboarding and Tech Strategy, Pfizer
The early results were pretty staggering:
15% increase in # of internal jobs filled
10% reduction in time to fill
$3M+ savings/cost avoidance
Now that is justifiable AI spend being put to work backed with real ROI. It will be interesting to hear some of the success stories with the agents coming out in the next few months.
The fun
Of course it can't be a conference without some entertainment. The customer appreciation party embodied a mix of ‘80s nostalgia and glam with Duran Duran. The fact it was in the Giants baseball stadium was really memorable and my colleague Ryan and I even got to sit in the visitors dugout as we watched the cool drone show leading up to the concert.
Sore feet and lack of sleep be damned, it was all worth it in the end and I was glad I made the trip to Rising with my colleagues. Excited to see what the big announcement and themes will be next year in Vegas. Rising will take place October 12-15, 2026 at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
