Illuminate harnesses the power of the world’s largest HR and finance dataset to drive enterprise transformation with AI.

Workday, Inc., a leading provider of solutions to help organisations manage their people and money, announced Illuminate, the next generation of Workday AI. Built on the world’s largest and cleanest HR and finance dataset, Illuminate accelerates manual tasks, assists every employee and ultimately transforms entire business processes.

AI That Taps Into the Combined Power of HR and Finance Data and Context Illuminate models are fueled by the more than 800 billion business transactions processed by the Workday platform annually. But the data alone doesn’t tell the full story. Illuminate understands not only the data but also the context—the “why” or “how” behind every HR and financial process, such as how processes are connected, the people and roles involved, and the current task at hand – along with previous conversational AI interactions. With this powerful combination of data and context, Illuminate enables precise decision-making, anticipates employee needs, and delivers personalised experiences like never before.

“The business world is in the midst of a tectonic shift, excited about the immense potential of AI while also struggling to implement it in a way that drives meaningful results,” said Carl Eschenbach, CEO, Workday. “By placing tangible business value, responsible innovation, and user-centric design at the forefront, Workday Illuminate empowers businesses to harness AI’s full potential to drive unprecedented productivity and move forever forward.”

Illuminate: Transforming the Way People Work Illuminate works across the Workday platform, delivering powerful insights for precise decision making and streamlined actions. Illuminate will help organisations drive exponential productivity gains and significant cost savings in the following ways:

Accelerating common tasks with generative AI. Illuminate leverages generative AI to expedite content creation and summarisation for things like job descriptions, talent highlights, messages, knowledge articles, contracts, and more. Additionally, it offers insights and automation tools, including anomaly detection, auto-filling, prompting and document scanning to further streamline tasks.

Delivering real-time AI assistance in the flow of work. Illuminate reduces friction and helps employees prioritise critical work. The new Workday Assistant facilitates seamless, intuitive assistance across routine HR and finance tasks, providing real-time guidance through complex processes to allow employees to focus on more strategic work.

Transforming entire business processes with AI orchestration: Illuminate anticipates and streamlines common business processes to transform the way work gets done. It will provide every user with a “team” of business process experts, or agents, that can operate with and on behalf of the user. Illuminate will also conduct end-to-end business process orchestration, coordinating multiple agents and managing complex cross-platform processes.

Illuminate elevates people by enabling them to focus on the work that matters and do the things that are uniquely human – from spending more time with customers, constituents, or patients to pursuing more creative and meaningful work to building critical peer, team and stakeholder relationships.
Workday Ecosystem Extends the Power of Illuminate
Illuminate also lets customers use AI innovations from Workday’s partners, or developed through Workday AI Gateway, and orchestrates processes across all of them on the same platform. This allows customers to leverage their existing AI investments and extend the power of Illuminate, driving even greater value and innovation across their organisations.

“The rapid adoption of AI across enterprises has created a complex web of models, data pipelines and infrastructure,” said Bob Evans of Cloud Wars. “For businesses that want to effectively manage, scale, and govern their AI initiatives – ensuring they deliver real value while also mitigating risk – it’s absolutely essential to get all of those AI components working together to complete more complex cross-functional tasks. Workday Illuminate will provide that cross-platform AI orchestration that businesses will need to be successful in this age of AI.”