Workday Rising: Continued Innovations in Finance for 2024 Highlight AI Benefits of a Unified Platform

At Workday, innovation is about pushing the boundaries. It's in our DNA and underscores our commitment to delivering world-class capabilities for managing your people and money, enabling business leaders to address real-world business challenges.

Workday continues to set the pace for innovation across all core finance and procurement processes, bringing continuous advancements in data management, data acquisition, and data blending as well as AI, advanced analytics, forecasting, and machine learning (ML). We've been making enormous strides over the past year, and I'm thrilled to introduce several new and enhanced product offerings unveiled today at Workday Rising. These new capabilities empower customers to improve agility, streamline business processes, and drive better business outcomes.

Our human-centered approach to AI means that our technology will bolster employees' abilities-not replace them.

Business leaders are realizing the potential value of AI, with 71% of CFOs planning to increase spending on AI by 10% year over year, according to a recent Gartner® survey. With AI built into its core, the Workday platform is uniquely positioned to lead organizations forward.

Workday's human-centered approach to AI means the technology will bolster employees' abilities-not replace them. And new enhancements in financial management, financial planning, and spend management deliver true value for customers. Let's take a look at the top innovations.

Financial Management

Organizations that adopt generative AI are expected to unlock an estimated $10.3 trillion in additional economic value, according to Accenture. What's more, businesses that prioritize value creation from the beginning of their transformation are twice as likely to achieve desired benefits and successful outcomes.

In financial management, we're continuing our focus on hyper-automating processes by delivering the following new innovations.

Empower customers to seamlessly draft collections letters. Users will be able to easily adjust the tone, add invoice details, and execute the email-all within Workday. Also, we're adding AI that proactively makes recommendations to match unreconciled bank transactions.

More capabilities for accounts payable (AP). These new capabilities will allow users to auto-respond to supplier inquiries by engaging the Auditoria AP help desk and enable AP staff to prioritize work and focus on exceptions with a new supplier hub.

Financial Planning

We continue to arm customers with AI-assisted and AI-augmented insights and processes to help organizations prepare for tomorrow. Recently, we reached a significant milestone of more than 1,000 customers who are actively using the AI capabilities within Workday Adaptive Planning.

The new Workday Assistant within Workday brings together generative AI capabilities in a conversational user interface to quickly surface data, uncover contextually relevant insights, and provide recommended actions based on those insights.

Workday is also delivering intelligent variance analysis, a new experience with AI-generated commentary and guidance. It includes a new variance analysis hub that brings together key analysis and insights personalized and generated by AI in one place, significantly reducing time and improving decision-making.

In addition, we've continued to enhance the capabilities of predictive forecaster, which uses ML to accelerate the process of creating demand forecasts based on historical and third-party datasets-all within an intuitive user interface.

Recently, we reached a significant milestone of more than 1,000 customers who are actively using embedded AI capabilities within Workday Adaptive Planning.

Spend Management

One of the most exciting new technology innovations, Expenses Agent, will dramatically increase the efficiency of the expense reconciliation and approval processes. We're rolling out a range of features such as:

• Automated hotel itemization, which will automatically itemize hotel and non-hotel charges across nights using credit card data

• Slack and Microsoft Teams instant notifications will be sent to submitters when an expense report has been sent back with comments or approved

• Automated expense creation and compilation, slated for next year, will match receipts and group them into related trips

We're also leveraging Workday Assistant in Workday Procurement with a guided buying experience that proactively recommends the optional path for initiating the procurement process, greatly simplifying the user journey.

We're thrilled to introduce new features and functionality, but the work doesn't stop here. We're driving innovation to ensure our customers are best positioned to keep moving forever forward.

Gain more insights on the latest trends and news for finance leaders and professionals. Learn more.