"General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) is useful for planning trips, but it has limits when applied to specialized tasks like HR and finance that demand 100% accuracy. Workday will provide 'superintelligence for work' based on HR and finance data accumulated over 20 years."
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 enterprise HR and finance software, declared a transition to an AI company that day and said it will accelerate its push into the Korean market.
In his keynote that day, Zwane said, "The reason AI hasn't been widely used in finance or HR is that mistakes are not allowed in these fields," adding, "General-purpose AI reasons based on probabilities, so it gives reasonable answers but does not guarantee 100% correct answers." 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 solution that combines a probabilistic AI with deterministic safeguards that have clear beginnings and ends 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' security policies, audits, and authorization rules. Through this, HR and finance tasks can be performed without AI hallucinations or errors, the company said. It also features a conversational interface that lets users handle tasks in natural language without complex system searches or menu navigation.
Workday emphasized that by using these task-specific AI solutions, corporations can automate repetitive tasks to reduce expense and time. Zwane said, "We are focused on applying AI to tasks like hiring that involve complex, slow, and cumbersome procedures," adding, "By using Sana's 'candidate experience agent' to automate screening, interview scheduling, candidate outreach, and offer letters, we can dramatically reduce the time spent on hiring." In practice, 7‑Eleven automated 95% of its hiring process using Workday's solution.
Workday said more than 400 customers have already adopted Sana's "self-service agent," which handles administrative and management tasks on behalf of employees, boosting employee productivity by about 20%. Sana's "frontline worker agent," which finds replacement staff when a frontline worker is absent, helps complete hiring for replacements within hours instead of the weeks it used to take.
Heo Jeong-yeol, head of Workday Korea, cited as Workday's differentiator its two decades of operating HR and finance data in a single system. He said, "Context management is extremely important in HR and finance," adding, "Workday's AI agent bundles who holds what permissions and what tasks have been performed into a single package and then executes work, so it starts with a precise understanding of the context in which a specific request was made."
Workday, headquartered in the United States, currently has more than 11,000 customers 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 platform.