"General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) is useful for planning trips, but it has limits when applied to specialized tasks in HR and finance that demand 100% accuracy. Workday will provide 'superintelligence for work' based on 20 years of accumulated HR and finance data."
Josh Zwane, Workday's vice president of global solutions marketing, said this while unveiling Workday's new work AI platform "Sana" at a press briefing on the 14th at the Westin Seoul Parnas in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Workday, which provides HR and finance software for corporations, declared a transition into an AI company that day and said it would accelerate its push into the Korean market.
In his keynote address, Zwane said, "The reason AI has not been widely used in finance or HR is because errors are not tolerated in these fields," adding, "General-purpose AI reasons based on probabilities, so it can produce reasonable answers, but it does not guarantee a 100% correct answer." He said, "In finance or payroll, 95% accuracy is as good as wrong, so general-purpose AI is not enough."
As a solution, he proposed Workday's accurate and automated HR and finance solutions that combine probabilistic AI with deterministic safeguards—whose starts and ends are clear and are executed correctly every time.
Sana, the superintelligent AI agent Workday introduced this time, is a platform that integrates AI across a company's core systems and processes, where the AI agent performs HR and finance tasks within corporations' rules for security policies, audits and permissions. The company said this enables work in HR and finance without AI hallucinations or errors. It also features a conversational interface that lets users handle tasks in natural language without complex system searches or menu navigation.
Workday emphasized that using these task-specialized AI solutions can automate repetitive work to save expense and time. Zwane said, "We are focusing on applying AI to tasks like recruiting that are complex, slow and burdened with cumbersome procedures," adding, "If you automate tasks such as applicant screening, interview scheduling, candidate outreach and offer letter delivery using Sana's 'candidate experience agent,' you can dramatically cut the time spent on hiring." In fact, 7‑Eleven automated 95% of its hiring process using Workday's solutions.
Sana's "self-service agent," which handles administrative and managerial tasks on behalf of employees, has already been adopted by more than 400 clients, and Workday said employee productivity using it has improved by about 20%. Sana's "frontline worker agent," which finds replacement staff when frontline workers are absent, helps complete replacement hiring within hours instead of the weeks it used to take.
Heo Jeong-yeol, head of Workday Korea, cited Workday's experience operating HR and finance data on a single system over the past 20 years as its differentiator. He said, "Context management is extremely important in HR or finance," adding, "Workday's AI agents bundle and manage who has what permissions and what work they have done as a single package before carrying out tasks, so they know exactly in what context a particular request was made when they begin."
Workday, headquartered in the United States, currently has about 11,000 clients and 75 million users. In Korea, Samsung SDS, Coupang, Korean Air Lines, Celltrion, Hanwha Solutions, Toss, Musinsa and Yanolja use Workday's HR and finance platforms.