Name: Innovate Keynote - Trusted Intelligence for Work across HR, Finance and IT
Uploaded: 2026-08-18T03:47:20.106Z
Duration: 17 min 8 s
Description: Innovate Keynote - Trusted Intelligence for Work across HR, Finance and IT

Transcript for "Innovate Keynote - Trusted Intelligence for Work across HR, Finance and IT": Harland Bank is a digital bank offering niche products across Australia and New Zealand, such as reverse mortgages, rural and livestock lending, and motor financing, as well as traditional banking services. Harland aims to deliver speed and simplicity for our customers through modern technology, which allows them to view and transact on their accounts or apply for a loan online without needing to visit a branch or speak to our customer service team. When we embarked on this journey, we were using an outdated financial system that hadn't kept pace with technology and lacked a lot of the features that modern systems have. Recent acquisitions had also left us with disparate systems, and we relied heavily on manual processes and people to deliver financial data to the business. We wanted to consolidate onto a single platform that would support scalable and sustainable growth by automating repetitive tasks, delivering better data and analytics, and enabling self-service for our stakeholders. Implementing Workday aligns well with this approach as employees engage with a single platform across both finance and HR with an easy to use interface to meet their needs. Having all of our people and financial data in one platform and available in real time has been huge. Our stakeholders can self serve through dashboards and drill down to source transactions without relying on finance to produce the data for them. We're currently using Prism Analytics and accounting center to ingest and transform data from our operational systems to post to our general ledger. Previously, this relied on a manual process to upload the files. Now the files are updated daily without manual intervention, which the auditors love, and the data is available for stakeholders at the start of each day. Like most organizations, Heartland is keen to leverage AI to transform the way we work to deliver better value for our customers and stakeholders. At the same time, we need to ensure we operate within a strong governance framework to safeguard our business. Workday Illuminate is not only critical for our business to ensure we keep pace with technology, but also allows us to operate with a more trusted environment. Throughout the process, the Workday team has gone out of their way to ensure we are well informed and supported with our use of the platform, keeping us up to date with new features, and guiding us on how to get the most out of our investment. Partnership is a great word to describe our relationship with Workday. Hi, everybody. My name is John Lombard. I'm the president of Workday in Asia Pacific. It's great to have you all with us today. I'm here to talk about trusted intelligence for work. I wanna thank you all for taking the time to be with us. You know, the pace of change in our industry has never been And part and part of our role as leaders is really to cut through that noise. Whether you're in finance, in HR, in IT, you know, we're all feeling that pressure. On the one hand, we've got our boards wanting to know what we are doing to transform our business and adopt that new technology in a safe way. But then on the other hand, of course, our people are just getting on with it. They're using the technology whether we like it or not every day in our businesses. And so, the role that we have as leaders is to really cut through that noise, and that's what we wanna do here at Workday is is help you get clarity on how you use this technology. So here's the thing about most of the AI that you've tried. It knows a little bit about everything, but it doesn't really understand the detail of your business, your people, your numbers. And if you think about our two most important assets in any business, our people and our money, that's absolutely vital. So running a payroll system that's 95% accurate, 95% right is actually 100% wrong. So it's really important that we think about governance, accuracy, security and ultimately when we build our platforms at Workday, we start with the foundation of trust. And that's the trust that AI can miss. So when it comes to the context of how your business runs, so think about the org structures, the process controls, the approvals, it's really important that that is all part of any AI agent, any AI deployment. And it's these guardrails, it's the importance of these guardrails that are a key element to Workday's approach and deployment of our technologies and really important for you to understand that in the context of thinking about using this technology in your workplace. So AI agents are only as good as context, data, process and controls. And if we go through each one of those context is really all about how your business runs, really understanding that business flow and business process. Data is really making sure that the data is from a trusted source, whether that's people data, money, it's really important that we can trust the source of that data. Process is really ensuring that the agent is working inside existing workflows and not off to the side. And controls, of course, is all about auditability and traceability and making sure that there's a full audit trail of all of those activities. And that's the difference between AI that guesses and AI you can trust. So this is a huge inflection point with this explosion of the use of AI across our organizations. It really is giving us a lot of opportunity. But if we're really honest, there's a fair bit of pain in there as well. So if we think about where we are at the moment, there's a real opportunity to completely reinvent our Workday. So it's not just about faster tasks when we're deploying this technology. It's really having AI agents that are frictionless, that can help us predict and operate our business in a really seamless way. It's really the ability for us to deploy that trusted intelligence in our workplace. And making sure that when we do that, it's on a trusted platform of data. So that when we're operating our business, we know that when we anything that we do will be 100% accurate. And the way you and your people will experience this is through Sana. So Sana is the trusted intelligent backbone. Now it puts AI agents to work across your whole organization. Think of it two ways. First, for your people, Sana agents answer questions or take action grounded in data that you can trust. And second, for your IT team. It's their platform to build, orchestrate, and govern every agent, whether Workday built it, your team built it, or it came from someone else. So here are the fundamentals of what Sana can do. So it finds. That means that your people get instant answers based on reliable information from your company's data sources. It acts. Sana takes action across your applications with as much oversight as you wish. You know, that can mean running whole intelligent workflows on its own and bringing anomalies to the attention of the right people. It builds. You get ready to use documents and dashboards updated from live data, and it connects. All of this isn't just limited to your Workday tools. Sana connects other software too like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack and Microsoft. So a single request can run right across your stack. One experience to govern and to work across hundreds of different applications. It's a bit of a bold statement, but honestly, it's why I think and we think that it's the last software your people will ever have to learn. And you might think that's a big claim. So rather than just me telling you, let's actually show you. Next, Isabel is gonna give us a demonstration of what Sana can actually do. I know you'll have lots of questions as we go through, so please feel free to use that q and a panel. We'll be able to respond to those questions in real time. Isabel, over to you. Thanks, John. Hi, everyone. I'm Isabel, Workday's principal solution consultant for AI strategy. But to show you Sana in action today, I will be stepping into the shoes of a VP of sales. We'll start simple. Let's find out how much PTO I have left. Nice. Good to know that I still have some location to take in the second half of the year. Next, I want to revisit that sales call I just had with Acme yesterday and have Sana update Salesforce with the latest deal amount based on that call. Because Sana has access to all my meetings, it's going to let me review and double check before it makes the update. Awesome. Now for something I really hate to do, which is expenses, I'm going to ask Sana to file an expense report for me based on receipts it can find in all my inbox items. Looks like it's noticed that everything is within the policy except my new book. That's too bad. Let's send the rest of them off. And now you can see that Sana is not only creating the expense report, but also offering to turn this into a recurring workflow for me. So now my expenses are never overdue, and Jasmine and our finance team doesn't have to chase me anymore. This looks so good. But we should probably add a notch on the set too, Jasmine, as well. Perfect. Now I can save and publish this workflow, and it will just run automatically every two weeks. While I'm here, I can also browse other published workflows from others in the Sana team. Looks like Jasmine set up one for preboarding, and it seems really comprehensive. And when I head over to my inbox, which is where Sana is notifying me of anything it's been working on and where it might need my input, I can actually see this workflow is already in action because Sana is notifying me that a new direct report of mine is starting soon, Sophie, our new sales director. Let's see how Sana is going to help me with that. So he's already gone and prepared all the key systems Sophie will need access to based on her roles and seniority. This list looks good, but we should add Loom in case she wants to do some use case recordings. We know all these are in high demand right now. All the software are covered. Next, what about hardware? All also very good. Sana has already figured out. Sophie needs maybe a laptop and prepared an email for me to send and check her preferences, highlighting what others in the sales team typically use. Notice what's happening here. Sana knows Sophie's role, level, team, and start date because it's already reading directly from Workday. It knows what access her peers have, what hardware they are using, who her skip level is. No one configured this. That is the Workday graph doing the heavy lifting. Let's send the email over to her now. My last step is scheduling one to ones so she feels welcomed in her first week. Sana has identified key people for her to meet in other teams, check their calendars so I can just go ahead and approve all these invites, and we are done. Think about the hundreds of clicks and all the hours we've saved for me, Jasmine, Sophie, and IT, all because Sana has access to Workday, Outlook, and ServiceNow. We aren't just saving time. We are enhancing the employee and new joiner experience too. This is where the real power of Sana is unleashed on enterprise package. Thanks for your time, everyone, and back to you, John. Wow. Thanks, Isabelle. Thanks for that demonstration of Sana in action, and I really want to encourage all of you to reach out to the product specialists if you want to learn more about Sana in action inside your organizations. But I did want to introduce you to some fascinating work that we've just done. So we've just commissioned some research across the Asia Pacific region. It's called the copy and paste economy. It was from a thousand different respondents across this region. These are people that sit in different functions within a variety of organisations. And it's really worth considering the responses to that research, and I'd like to share some of that with you now. People are happy. At least nine in 10 rate their day to day work positively, and even more than that in some regions. And the vast majority like using AI. I guess that's no surprise, saying it makes work faster and better. So this isn't really a story about the disengaged AI skeptical employees. Your people are on board, which makes the next insight all the more interesting and fascinating from my perspective. Now many employees are losing time acting as the glue between disparate systems. So copy pasting information from one system to another, reconciling numbers that just don't match, chasing approvals across tools that don't talk to each other. Across the regions, eight in 10 employees report that they spend significant time and effort at work reconciling, moving and coordinating between systems and teams. People are like human APIs and I suspect it's happening in your business right now whether you can see it or not. So if AI is so useful why is it this copy paste waste is actually happening? Because fewer than a third of organizations have actually embedded AI within their core systems. You know, as I've said earlier, many employees report that AI tools only work at the periphery, and that's the whole problem. Bolt on AI can make individual tasks faster, but it can't support the work that flows between your various systems. That's why your people are still acting as the glue that brings these systems together. The opportunity isn't actually about adding more AI tools. It's getting AI into the core into the core of our business. So when you achieve that, I think magic happens. Across our region, the organizations that embed AI into their core systems are nearly twice as likely to see that AI save them time. You know, this is not a marginal gain at all. They're really saving 25% more than those whose AI is on the edge or, you know, on the periphery. And that's the difference between AI as a kind of novelty and AI that's really something that moves their business. So we put all of this together in our latest research. So as I said, it's the copy paste economy. There's a report tailored to your region, so you're getting insights that reflect where you actually operate, not not some global average. So it's a kind of thing that's really handy to have as part of any boardroom conversation. So you'll find the link to the report for your region under the docs tab. Please grab it. It's really a great read. So closing that gap between AI and core systems is actually what the rest of the day is all about. So we have an agenda tab, so please, select the track that you wanna be part of on that tab. If you've got any questions, just use that q and a panel. We'll make sure we respond to those in real time, so don't worry if you're not sure. And I'll be back at the end of the day to bring it all together. Thank you.