In 2026, organisations in Asia face mounting pressure to automate routine processes. At the same time growing awareness of the limitations and risks that come with the use of AI is giving rise to calls for better oversight, understanding how roles and skills will evolve, and make workforce and financial decisions based on reliable data.
To capture these opportunities, Workday has unveiled a suite of AI innovations designed to help organisations automate routine work, plan their workforces, and connect HR and finance decision-making through governed enterprise data.
Autonomous operations
The new Autopilot capabilities let AI agents work continuously in the background, anticipate tasks that need attention, and act within an organisation’s existing policies, permissions, and approval processes. Sana, Workday’s AI layer, orchestrates them.
The Talent Acquisition Agent can monitor open roles, identify qualified candidates, support interview scheduling and prepare candidate outreach for recruiter approval. Enhanced Payroll, Accounting and Deployment Agents are designed to identify payroll issues before processing, continuously test financial information for audit readiness, and recommend relevant Workday capabilities based on a customer’s configuration.
It is anticipated that AI will be embedded at the operational layer facilitating the execution of repeatable work while preserving human approval for consequential decisions.
Preparing workforces for AI
Work Intelligence breaks jobs into individual tasks and links them to the skills required to perform them. Built on Workday Skills Cloud—used by more than 3,450 customers and containing an ontology of more than 75,000 skills—it helps organisations identify where AI can automate or augment work and where human expertise remains essential.
The capability can help leaders assess emerging skills gaps, compare internal development with external hiring and create personalised learning pathways. It also lets organisations monitor how AI changes tasks and roles over time, supporting workforce planning and reskilling strategies.
Connecting HR and finance
Workday has expanded Decision Intelligence across its portfolio, giving HR and finance teams a unified AI-powered experience based on live, governed Workday data. Teams can ask questions in natural language, analyse scenarios, compare options and take action through existing permissions and approvals.
For HR leaders, it supports decisions on hiring, skills gaps, organisational design, retention and associated costs. For finance teams, it helps investigate revenue and margin changes, analyse forecast variances and evaluate financial scenarios.
