Name: Beyond the Hype: The Mid-Market Roadmap for AI Readiness and ERP ROI
Uploaded: 2026-03-18T18:16:08.634Z
Duration: 1 h 38 s
Description: Beyond the Hype: The Mid-Market Roadmap for AI Readiness and ERP ROI

Transcript for "Beyond the Hype: The Mid-Market Roadmap for AI Readiness and ERP ROI": Welcome to this webcast, beyond the hype, the mid market roadmap for AI readiness and ERP ROI. Brought to you by Workday. I am your host, Indy Bains. I lead industry and segment solution marketing here at Workday, and I'm excited to spend the next hour or so with you. And we're going to start by sharing the agenda and some housekeeping items with you first, just so that you appreciate the platform we're using here, which is the Gold Class platform. We will be taking your questions throughout the webinar, and we'll get to those in the last part of the event. But be thinking about your questions as we go through our discussion and add those in the q and a button on the right hand side of your screen. Now, a quick overview of the agenda. We will start by first getting an overview of what is Workday Go. We have a very exciting panel discussion lined up for you with guest speakers Katie Evans from IDC and Workday's VP and general manager of Workday Go and growth strategy, Darren Koch. And, we are going to first, though, start with an overview of what is Workday go with you first. So as we, as we get going here, let me first, share with you, on the next slide an honorary mention of our product statement. Now when you see this, this just means we'll be talking about our vision. We'll also share some product road map items today. But, ultimately, you should make your purchasing decision based on what's available today. If by chance you have any problems and you drop off this webcast, we will be sharing the recording with everyone. So you will get a link for the on demand webinar and all the valuable information that we'll be sharing with you today. So with that said, I'd like to welcome our panel discussion guests here today for you. We've lined up first, we've got IDC guest speaker Katie Evans, who is senior director for worldwide small and medium business markets and research. Katie is here to share the just released twenty twenty six survey results from over 2,700, SMB IT purchasing decision makers across the globe. She'll delve into why 96% of mid sized businesses are increasing their IT investments with many focusing on modernizing HR and finance systems simultaneously through AI enabled solutions. We are also pleased to have Darren Koch, vice president and general manager of Workday Go and growth strategy. We will be exploring the IDC research, with our two panelists and also, some Workday perspective on why AI is becoming an essential investment priority and how SMB organizations can bridge the IT gap. Alright. So before we get deep into the discussion around IDC research, IDC research, sorry, I'd like to get Darren to provide some perspective on Darren, what is I'm not sure if we just lost Cindy or not. Over to you, Darren. Sorry, we had I looked like we lost you for a second. It was just on my side. Thanks, everyone, for taking the time to join us today. I'm super excited to talk to you about Workday Go and hear, the research that Katie has pulled together. So what we're really trying to do with Workday Go is make Workday, the solution to the problem that many enterprises face or midsize businesses where they have to choose between cost, scale, and quality. And we believe with Go that we can break that impossible choice and deliver all of them at the same time by making Workday simple to buy, simple to activate, and simple to own. So we've packaged together the core SKUs covering the HCM business processes and brought them to you in a format that is consumable. We have preconfigured content. We have a robust partner ecosystem, and all of this really speeds up our time to value. And more importantly, what you'll hear throughout today's webinar is it provides an amazing operational enterprise grade foundation for your AI. Great. Thank you. With that said then, let's kick off our discussion here with both you and Katie. Katie, for a long time, sophisticated AI and unified ERP were considered luxuries reserved for the Fortune five hundred. What has changed in the technology landscape that finally makes these enterprise grade tools accessible, and essential for smaller, faster moving companies? Let's let's dig into your findings around AI investment priorities, and then we'll get some perspective from Darren as well. Awesome. Great. It's so great to be here. Thank you, Wendy. So thank you for teeing up my new survey results so nicely because I'm very excited about them. It's one of the most robust survey sample surveys at all of IDC. And, again, 2,700 IT decision makers across 23 countries and 12 industries that we surveyed, and they all have heavy influence on IT purchases at their at their companies. So we all know we all talk about AI, but I'm gonna put a really finite lens on it. And it's AI as related to the mid market and SMB specifically. So the survey results, we just got them back literally a week ago. And so what we found is that AI is the top digital technology investment priority for both small, and we define small businesses as one to five businesses as well, which is 100 to 900 employees. And that was, just a couple weeks ago from that survey data. And so SMBs really list several flavors of AI. We don't just ask about AI in general, but different flavors of AI as top forward looking investment priorities for them. And for explanation, I grouped this question into what are your top forward looking priorities, and it contains many more answer options besides AI, like low code and no code, RPA. But we found that 50% of SMBs say they plan to specifically invest in Gen AI in the next twelve months, which was the top answer, across the board, small, medium, and overall, from 11 different answer options. And 43% plan to invest in traditional AI in the next twelve months, and that was the the number two answer. So that's the data. To give a little deeper complex, context behind that, so what's so what's the reason typically for that mid marketer SMB? It's really that vendors and tech suppliers are now offering mid market friendly AI tech. So it's really packaged into other applications, simplified interfaces, costs that are, understandable, user friendly for nontechnical technically savvy users, quick to deploy without a massively long implementation cycle. So a lot of it is because the tech suppliers are making these AI, ready capabilities specifically and investing in specifically mid market, AI offerings. In fact, IDC predicts in, one of our most recent reports that, by 2027, driven by this widespread adoption of AI and agentic AI, that 70% of medium sized businesses will achieve a two time faster digital payback in by 2027. So year for AI in the mid market. All these figures that I've mentioned illustrate that SMBs are really finally more prepared to embrace it and have built up strategy. And, you know, I talked to SMBs all the time as well. And this is different from a few years ago, when mid market or smaller businesses were really taking a kind of a, I know AI is important, but I'm gonna wait and see and learn from others, maybe failures, lessons learned. I don't need to be a laggard, but I don't wanna be the first adopter be adopter because I don't have the extra, you know, resources, money for maybe a failed AI experiment or a little incubator that didn't really that wasn't successful. We just have a lean team and lean resources. But now the new 2026 figures show that there's enough metrics and data and real life case studies and stories out there of similar business sizes and similar ending from AI right now. So that's really the big change that we're seeing. Darren, anything you would like to add to that? Yeah. I think that, like Katie said, all of the the tech providers, it's no surprise. When you see the Gen AI adoption curves on the consumer side, the simplicity of the interface is driving wide scale mass adoption obviously brings up the question of how can you apply this to your business. And I think the beauty as a technologist of this moment is that we're taking something with an amazing foundational shift and bringing it into practical applications. What we see within our customer base is really a focus on ROI from their AI. Like Katie said, the idea of a project to see how it goes isn't a luxury that most of our customers can afford. But really, the challenge that they're facing is you can't take your finance and HR data and plug it into a consumer tool. The need for an enterprise platform to protect your data, to secure it, and then to run agents, which are really just digital workers, on something that is governed and secure that has the guardrails, and built in workflows. And so we we think of the world as the digital work, and that's, by nature, probabilistic work. The AI is making predictions and guesses and judgments on what to do, Now you really need a stable platform for that to run on top of to reduce risk, manage compliance, and deliver value. I think the research then went further into looking at specifically what were some of the trends around ERP investments. Katie, could we dig a little deeper, into those findings, on the next slide? Katie? Well, Darren, as Katie, is, unfreezing, perhaps you could, share some perspective first. Yeah. We're, for sure. You know, the core of what we're seeing is that investments, particularly on the finance side, are supported by the research. And at Workday, we're really not just the HR side. of the coin. We have a phenomenal financials product, and we really believe the power of the full platform of bringing those things together provides a lot of value. We have a customer, for example, called Metadata. They run they build software for clinical trials. And they're they're what we would call a midsize business, midsize enterprise, and they've gotten amazing value, over a million dollars in savings by applying AI workflows on top of the Workday platform. Some of it is what some people call traditional AI, things like OCR, invoice scanning, and some of it are more of the agentic capabilities like AI assistance. Ultimately, they're seeing real ROI both in dollar savings. They're seeing better performance on invoice payment times, completion rates. And so they're really seeing a pretty fantastic benefit, of this enterprise grade AI sitting on top of the Workday platform. And I think Katie's back. Yeah. Yes. I see her moving around. So, I didn't steal too much of your thunder, Katie. Why don't you tell us about the research? hope I I didn't realize I was paused. I apologize for that. But that slide right here really piggybacks nicely onto the AI data because another important metric from our survey data, and you can see on this slide here, is that 56% of SMBs overall, 53% of small, and 60% of medium list financial management and business operation tools like accounting, invoicing, ERP, HR as a top investment area for 2026. And, you know, anytime you get near 50 or above, that's a huge surge for SMBs, just to see that that 2,700 are making this a priority in the next twelve months. And then another telling metric that isn't on this slide, but I wanna point out because it was very dramatic this year, is that 93% of small and medium businesses plan to increase their technology budgets in the next twelve months, and less than 1% plan to decrease them. Only point six say they'll spend less. The rest will spend about the same. And much of that is gonna be going towards AI, and AI specifically that's embedded in a unified ERP system and a unified platform. And what we can glean from these figures and also, again, from my conversations with the mid market companies across the board, across the globe, as the SMBs are really acting like digital enterprises. And they are increasing their tech spend, prioritizing AI, the data shows it, and modernizing finance, HR, at the same time. And they're really turning to these advanced technologies to support their growth because they all grow. As we all know, they're gonna grow a lot more quickly than large enterprise organizations. So, they wanna be able to compete with their larger counterparts, and they're leaning into these technology resources to do that. You know, Katie, that 93% data point really stands out, to me. And, it it resonates because, as you know, most of Workday's customers are medium sized businesses, and we're talking to a lot of medium sized businesses right now, as they think about how they reimagine the back office, as we call it. So with that said, let's move to the next topic. And this is a a a topic which I think is very interesting as well. And, Katie, you know, when I think about this, in an era where, tech debt can be fatal, quite frankly, how does shifting to a partnership first model allow a lean team to manage, security, compliance, and innovation, without actually increasing their internal head count? Yeah. Yeah. So, again, I'll start with the metric, and then I'll expand. I'll kind of land and expand from there. But 40% of SMBs that we surveyed in 2026 do not employ one full time IT staffer. And so not only do they have lean lean teams in general, you know, many are wear many employees at smaller businesses or even mid sized businesses are wearing multiple hats and in charge of multiple different areas. And, I expected that percentage of IT, 40% not having IT employees to to change year over year, but it was actually 40% last year as well. And then 32% in a different survey stat, say that is a top challenge to achieving their internal business priorities. So that okay. What does that mean? Right? Let's unpack that. That lack of internal IT expertise means that mid market companies and small companies, are really seeking out partners with and tech solutions with embedded security, embedded compliance, embedded innovation. And they're really especially on the security standpoint, they're very conscious of it, especially as we can see that they're leaning into AI. We all know that AI is what I like to call a data guzzler. It's going to always need a constant stream of data to work. And so they're gonna be asking the tough questions of their tech suppliers to make sure it's secure and beyond the obvious. You know, how long is it being stored? Where is it coming from? How is it being used? And the big part of that is that with smaller revenues and leaner resources, and oftentimes, they're just the consumer trust and just building on the cusp of really taking off building consumer awareness, they can't afford to withstand a breach monetarily or just as a market position. But beyond security and compliance, to your other point on innovation, and and my the way I phrase it is tech adoption to do more with a lean staff. We're really seeing mid market companies and SMBs overall leaning on their partners and their vendors to fill in the IT gaps that they have internally. So they're asking for education and advice. What do we need right now? What do we maybe not need right now? Please be honest with me, but we may need it a couple years down the line. And they want partners who will and this is very important. It's like a matchmaking process, Who will listen to their needs, either pick up the phone, maybe even visit them and their headaches and their individual goals and challenges, and match those two technology solutions from the vendors that they support. And that's why partner education is so important. Mid market companies will often go with the tech supplier that their partner recommends, as they're not the tech experts. We've we've already unpacked that they don't have strong IT internal resources. In fact, trusted relationship with Source is a top decision factor for why SMBs chose their last tech supplier. So they develop this trusted relationship with their partners and will return to them as they grow. And we all know that they're growing more quickly than larger enterprises and as they need more robust offerings, over time. And so in short, with lean internal IT resources, they need vendors and partners who are going to take on the onus for them that will help with implementation and not make that super complicated, integration, security, and run advanced technology for them over time. And this is where really the long term partnership and that mid market packages that are really designed for them really resonate with this segment. Darren, what do you see from where you sit? Yeah. I I think we see and agree with with what Katie just walked through. Like, most of what the focus on the companies that I work with and have worked for, most of the focus is really on making sure that the basics are running perfectly. The security aspects and making sure that the platform is robust and secure, making sure that your core business processes are happening, making sure that data is accurate and coherent. If you have an IT team, as Katie said, of somewhere between zero and four, the idea of those folks spending their time making sure that the data plumbing, the integrations underneath your back office are all working isn't a luxury that you really have. You need an enterprise grade platform, but you need that without the complexity and cost, operational cost and technology cost that typically comes from large scale applications. And so that's that's what gets me really excited about what we're doing on the Workday Go product. Like Katie's Screenshare said, working with trusted partners, and we work we have a pretty extensive partner ecosystem for deployment, for ongoing support, really helping you get quick time to value, but then not leaving you there all alone, making sure that you have a trusted partner who's going to guide you through the maturation process on the people and money side of things and really help you navigate as the agentic world continues to explode. We have a huge number of agents under development. Again, digital think digital workers under development. We're actually gonna show some of those in in a little bit here. The ones I'm particularly excited about are what we call our deployment agent. So how do we speed up that time to value, make sure that your system is configured properly, making sure that the cost, and quality that you need to run your critical business operations are really there. We have similar agents across admin. So how do we help you administer and run Workday? But then really when you get into the business value, that's where I get super excited. When you think about things like, imagine everyone had in your company, your mid sized company had a personal career coach. And that's something that's usually limited to even the high performers at top companies. And so the ability to apply the technology to drive quality and scale into mid sized companies, I think, provides a lot of opportunity. I. think Darren, you and, Katie really help unlock some insights here that provide folks with that breakthrough understanding that legacy solutions often had this perception which required, a little IT army to manage these legacy solutions. And the breakthrough is with a modern born in the cloud SaaS platform with the service architecture, it is a different experience. And I think that's something that is often used to folks who have often thought that these enterprise solutions require a lot more IT maintenance. And I think, our ask is that, revisit that assumption and look at a modern platform and, take advantage of what's, what is available today that doesn't require as much IT, in house, maintenance. So let's, move to our next topic. And, this builds on, I think, what we just talked about. As we said earlier, the mid market, doesn't have the luxury, of also a two year implementation cycle. So when you talk about rapid value with customers, what is the expectation in terms of what they need to see and, how fast they should expect to see it? Katie, let's begin with you and unlock some of the insights from the research and then we'll come back to you, Darren, and get your perspective too. Right. So speed. Speed to ROI. Speed to see something. Right? It doesn't have to be everything all at once, but we're really I'm really seeing that mid market CFOs are under pressure to modernize for sure. Definitely, to find a flavor of AI that will work for their unique companies that is embedded and simple, again, like, for nontechnically savvy software to use, and that will deliver, key, fast and measurable. Measurable is a big one, but also speedy ROI. So they're really under budget scrutiny. They can't sign up for, you know, a a multiyear project that it's gonna take a few years to to realize, true gains. And they really need preconfigured solutions. It's all about getting live quickly and showing, yes. Here's some measurable improvement. We are saving x amount of hours that a human used to have to do. We are taking out these steps that an employee used to have to do. And so to elaborate a little bit more on that, from when I what I've seen covering SMBs for most is usually when these mid market companies are willing to rip the Band Aid off and finally shell out and invest in what is a significant purchase to them and finally get off their homegrown, maybe cobbled together solutions and invest in a a ERP solution that is advanced, they're at a trigger point where their old, maybe legacy, outdated, fragile technology that is easily breakable is no longer supported by the vendor is causing major issues and hampering their potential growth. And another key thing that I don't think is talked about enough for the mid market is that it's also frustrating their good employees and major majorly hurting efficiency and productivities, and they really want results quickly. So, you know, if you're using as an employee, you're using cobbled together tech that you have an MBA and wanna be doing more strategic things, you know, you're gonna lose some of your top talent. So investing in robust talent is really important and can help SMBs retain top talent, especially as recruiting, onboarding, training, interview, you know, takes up a lot of resources at these already stretched lean teams. And so we also see that, so they want those quick wins. That's really important. They wanna see the gains in productivity and efficiency relatively quickly because, again, they're at that trigger point where things are just not working smoothly anymore. We also see that they are interested in landing light and expanding on technologies or packages. So they want to work with vendors that can also support them as they grow and meet their needs and budgets now and in the future. So, the last thing they wanna do is implement a new ERP system or, financial system and have to rip and replace it three years down the line because they've outgrown the system or provider. That's a huge amount of time and resources that they don't have to spend researching, finding new, a new provider, training employees on a new system. So a lot of it is about we can meet your budget, your needs now, show you measurable results in a quick time frame, but also we will be there. Because I often see at the the mid market companies, they can double in revenue in a couple years, double in employee size in a couple years. So being with them on their growth trajectory and finding a technology provider that can do that is really important as well. Yeah. We see a lot of that across our customer set, as as customers are finding their way to the Workday family. We see that let's take an example. We have a customer called OneDigital, and they're a consulting company. They help midsize companies, companies of all sizes with employee benefits and financial services, etcetera. A core part of their strategy is to grow through acquisitions. And they're doing a dozen acquisitions a year of small consulting companies. They're bringing them all together. And having a platform that can support them today with that fast time to value that you mentioned, Katie Evans, bringing real measurable value is is super important today, but it also enables them to execute their core strategy of growing by onboarding lots of acquired employees. At the same time, they run call centers. And so with things like evergreen recruiting racks, building pipeline and maintaining it for customer service people, robust business processes, things like hired score to facilitate faster recruiting and higher quality, they're able to see that early value. They're also able to continuously drive the scale that they need to operate. So with Go, we've done a ton of work on the initial deployment side, making sure that you're starting with the right set of things, and like I said, working with our our partner ecosystem to drive that adoption journey. So just a quick logistic item for those on the webinar. If you have questions, you can please put those into the chat, into the the q and a section As we get through our last couple of topics here, we're gonna have some space for Q and A. Alright. Yeah. Lots of good questions, being stored up here. We'll come to those, in a little bit of time as we first proceed to the next topic. We know that, AI is really as good as the data it's built on. And, with that said, Katie, can you help explain the architectural link between a unified data core and trusted AI? And, specifically, why is having finance and HR in one place the only real way for mid market leaders to prevent AI hallucinations and gain insights that they can actually bank on. Right. Right. So we've all established or I've established, I know, and we've all been talking about AI as a priority for SMBs. But we need to take a step back because before you can lean into its benefits, it's essential to get the digital blocking and tackling down before focusing on the new and shiny AI and all it can do for you, specifically, as you said, when it comes to data. I see so many mid market companies that have maybe grown from small to to that midsize where they've just been trying to keep up with their pace of growth. That's where it comes back to that trigger point where we're willing to rip the Band Aid off because they were just doing things to stay running, and now it's at a pain point where they need to do something technology wise to be more efficient and productive. So I am seeing many mid market companies that have expanded, like Darren Koch talked about, that are maybe in a different, expanded into a different, country or multiple office locations or many, many more employees, and they started operating in silos. And, also, many times in archaic spreadsheets, email exchanges, multiple sources of data truth that contradicts each other that isn't real time. And so they really need need to get to a single source of unified data truth move to the cloud, real time data, and to get to a place where they have it all across business units, a a unified platform. In short, they really need to walk before they can run. And like I talked about, we're seeing I see a lot of HR accounting, finance using different data sources, making, you know, different, decisions based on different sets of data. And so when CFOs and CIOs, they really talk about AI, they're really talking about efficiency, closing faster, catching the errors automatically, getting real time views of cash and headcount. But SMBs must understand that if their data is inaccurate or fragmented across spreadsheets and disconnected systems, AI is actually gonna amplify that bad data. And that's why we're seeing this push towards integrated finance ERP platforms that really become this single source of of data truth across the company. Yeah. I think if you look at if you look at the major spend categories, people is very often the top one. And so being able to look at your investment in people, look at the way that that fits into the broader picture, and doing all of that on a unified platform with the enterprise guardrails and the business processes built in, we see as the perfect foundation for unlocking this digital work from the probabilistic agents that are doing work on top. We see it in a lot of our regulated spaces. So when you're talking to banks or insurance companies, governments, higher learning institutions, the number of customers that we see, like Heartland Bank as an example in Australia, where the unified platform allowed them to apply AI and continue to drive savings. We see it across some of the companies I mentioned earlier, like One Digital, where really bringing the the core processes of managing comp cycles, the integration into payroll. And the more of these things that are brought together in a single platform, the more power you have both on the security side as well as driving business value, which is what matters most in the segment. And, Darren, just being a former finance guy myself, I think there's nothing more important than trusting your data because pretty close is never good enough. It has to be exact every time. And to be exact, we are actually on track with our time here, so we're doing well, guys. As we move to our final topic before we get to our demo, and we will get some perspective around simplified IT and back office consolidation here. And just to sort of provide some context here, as as organizations look to scale, into 2026, many are struggling with this, sort of Frankenstack kind of a, issue and problem they see of disconnected tools. What is the long term risk of maintaining a fragmented back office? And and how does consolidating into one simplified IT footprint directly fuel the digital labor that is needed to, automate routine tasks. Let's start with you first, Katie. Right. So I'm I see this all the time in my in my data and in my conversations with mid market and SMBs. They really gravitate towards solutions that offer many capabilities under under one umbrella. And earlier, I mentioned that trusted relationship with Source was a top reason that SMBs said that they chose their last technology vendor supplier. But also another top reason out of, again, I think more than 10, including competitive pricing, lowest pricing, was offer as many solutions under one umbrella. So they're really concerned about integration headaches from multiple point providers, again, because they have little to no IT staff. Even just things like thinking beyond beyond just tech specifically, but dealing with multiple salespeople, dealing with multiple contracts, saving time on researching and training employees on several different systems and interfaces, that all takes time. That that that is a huge luxury at these at these lean operations and organizations. And as I had mentioned before, you know, as SMBs grow and add employees, they often operate in silos using different data sources. So it really makes this single platform and source of truth for, you know, many things like financial, accounting, HR, a top priority. And with these lean IT teams, they can't support the intricacies of a sprawling application and vendor landscape. And CIOs in these organizations, they they say that they they don't want another tool. They want fewer tools that will do more for them because of all those reasons. And they frankly need these platforms that can consolidate many different, many different tools kind of into one and take on more digital labor to run routine tasks so that small teams can really focus on exceptions, risk, and strategy and things that human minds, you know, that that is gonna be, that that they can take on the best, that is best for for a human and strategic thinking, long term planning, things like that are off of their plates, so that, you know, opening them up to more strategic thinking. So I'm hearing that a lot. Yeah. I I I agree with all of that. I'm curious, Katie Evans, how much you see the opening of, some of the the context and governance and control all playing into this. Like, the value that we see and what we hear from customers a lot is, you know, the modern models, have things called context windows, and that basically just tells the models all of the things that they should hold in their digital brains as they're making decisions and recommendations. And that context, when fragmented across many systems, either relies on internal IT resources to kind of plumb all these things together and make sure that they work And also opens up the risk of sharing sensitive data, whether it's financial data, what how much payment went to a competitor, you know, across a an IT spend stack. Obviously, most people don't want their salary shared in in chat responses. And so just the fragmentation across kind of limits the ability to provide governed context that I think is is critical as we look to driving real ROI and and real usage out of out of these solutions. I'm curious. Do you do you hear that in your conversations, and does that come through the research? Well, I right. So every time you add another player or another another card to the deck of cards, it opens up risks. Because like you talked about, the systems need to talk to each other, and there needs to be plumbing to connect them. And so that definitely opens up risks and exposure, and we're definitely seeing the security has been a top priority for SMBs before even AI became super hot. First, it was the move to the cloud. Oh my gosh. All my data isn't on servers I can see behind me. I'm kinda freaked out about that. Then it was the shift to remote work. People are accessing business critical networks, from Starbucks or from wherever, and now it's AI. So security is insanely important to SMBs. And you're right. Every time you add a new player to the game that, is a different point solution, it opens up risk of exposure, especially with, important data, if you're transferring it transferring it between different solutions and points of, providers. And it also just makes things I I also I often talk about, like, a a camper van. Right? So or, you know, you buy a Toyota Corolla, and then you're you're an SMB and you grow, so you add a trailer to the back. And then you add a camper van, and then you add what are those things called on top? And before you know it, you have you should have just you should have just bought a semi truck. Right? Because now it's fragile, and it can break. And instead of, you know, getting a robust solution, you have all these point solutions that can easily break if you try to make a change, expose yourself to risk. And I I really I really see that a lot in my conversations as well. And, also, it's just tough to manage when you have a very small or nonexistent IT staff. And a lot of the IT staff that does exist at SMBs, they're kind of jack of all trades. They aren't, super sophisticated in IT cybersecurity or, you know, super sophisticated in one specific area. They have to kind of, have a a blanket IT understanding. And so you really need a proven tech supplier that can secure your systems and help you when you have that lean IT staff. So Thank you, Katie. I I think this research across these five topics really helps paint that picture how in this AI era, it really is a new workday and the opportunity to transform the back office from the cost center mentality to more of a value center and the new generation of technology that's going to drive that. And on the topic of new generation of technology, we're actually going to get a little taste of what that looks like. And we're going to introduce, Katie Tibbitts, is a solution consultant at Workday, who specializes in working with medium sized businesses. And, she will be demoing, just briefly some some experience around the self-service agent and payroll agent. So Katie, without further ado, I'm going to let you take over for a few minutes. Great. Thank you. Well, let's start it with a day in the life of an employee. Now the self-service agent is going to shift the employee experience from a complex form filling task to a simple conversational one. The self-service agent will really transform how your employees are getting their work done, empowering your workforce with instant answers and effortless task completion. So whether that be an employee asking about a recent payslip if you have a question on why you received a certain payment, Or perhaps as an employee, you want to request some vacation time. The value here with self-service agent is instant resolution and deflection. Instead of needing to contact HR or your manager to submit that time off request or ask that question about your payslip or navigating through several menus to find what your PTO balance looks like. Rather, you can interact with that self-service agent to kick off that conversation to request some time off. Now from there, you'll only be presented with the time off types that you are truly eligible for. So empowering your employees to complete those different self-service transactions with the self-service agent while ensuring that you have the right guardrails in place. Now from there, you can select that time type that you would like to proceed with that absence request, automatically kicking off that absence business process. So what that means is you'll still have those proper approvals in place. The self-service agent is going to check what that balance looks like of available time off for your employee, validate that request against your own internal policies. So ensuring if there's a certain number of hours that you need to take those increments of when submitting an absence request. It's going to look at your own internal policy when kicking off that absence request for your employee. And then from there, you get to determine if you're ready to submit that request, again, using that natural conversation with the self-service agent, helping your employees to complete those different tasks while still following your own internal business process, ensuring that you have the right approval in place once you're ready to kick off that request. Switching hats. Imagine day in the life as a payroll administrator moving into the Workday payroll agent, which assists your team in multiple ways, whether that be identifying and proactively notifying your employees who are missing any payment elections internally or perhaps providing strategic insights to your payroll team across different pay periods, why different costs are changing over time, or what you see today, transforming minimum wage management from a manual scramble into a strategic advantage with the Workday payroll agent providing you with minimum wage monitoring and real time financial modeling. So perhaps as a payroll administrator, you're curious. Are there up any upcoming minimum wage updates that you need to be aware of? Now you can search across a specific location. So if there's a state in your organization that you want to know what is that impact going to look like from a minimum wage standpoint, you get to determine how do you want to view that information, how should that be presented back to you by the payroll agent. And instead of your team needing to manually track local jurisdiction changes as those are occurring, the payroll agent can proactively identify your team with any of those upcoming minimum wage increases and immediately surface what is that financial impact going to look like for you. So any historical related information, what is that upcoming minimum wage going to look like? And, again, allowing you to understand what is that overall impact going to look like on your business as a whole. What additional cost can you expect to incur? Now prior to joining Workday, I started my career as an HR practitioner at a manufacturing organization where we frequently hired production floor workers at or near the minimum wage. Without proactive minimum wage compliance, this can be a very manual process for HR teams as well as leaving room for human error. The payroll agent is going to solve for this challenge by identifying any of those upcoming minimum wage changes for you and alerting you of what that impact is going to look like on your business. So allowing your leadership to see what are those exact budget implications going to look like in advance of that minimum wage change, replacing those reactive fire drills with data driven labor cost forecasting and seamless pay equity alignment. Now you can even take that one step further. Once the payroll agent has surfaced for you, what that change is going to look like, what is that impact going to be on your organization. From there, you can ask the payroll agent for strategies, how to manage this upcoming change internally within your organization. So not just identifying the impact, but also providing you with that strategic action that you can take internally to help manage this upcoming minimum wage change, whether that be budget allocation or schedule optimization. Again, just taking that one step further with the payroll agent providing you with different strategies that you can utilize to help minimize that impact as you're proactively aware of and having those minimum wage changes identified for you. So with that, you've now seen just a couple of ways that these agents are saving you time and quickly see quickly surfacing different strategic insights for your organization. So with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Indy. Thank you, Katie. That was very much an appetizer. We know we have folks attending who probably have an interest in going into a deeper set of finance topics or HR topics. So we've made it as easy as we can to help you accomplish that. If you take a look at this QR code, it will take you to a questionnaire. And if you would like to learn more or schedule a demo with Workday, you can do that. And then Katie or others in Katie's team, they will be able to speak to you in detail and go into the topics that you want to have a a deeper conversation around. So that opportunity is there. And as we warm up for our q and a, I I do wanna just take a quick minute to just, reinforce the key takeaways that we've covered from the last five topics. First, solve the IT gap. Learning how to deploy enterprise grade AI and ERP capabilities even with limited in house IT expertise and tight budget. We talked about establish a single source of truth, hearing why unifying finance and HR data is really the only way to ensure AI reliability and eliminate the operational silos that commonly occur with with growing companies. The third takeaway was around prioritizing rapid value. Discover the road map, as we walk you through it to, to go live quickly, by leveraging preconfigured best practices to realize ROI, in weeks, months, and not years. And then the, fourth takeaway was around drive digital labor. Understand how agentic AI simplifies the back office, automate the routine tasks so your team can focus on strategy. So with that said, let's move into our q and a portion. This is the more interactive part of our conversation with the panel. And we do actually have one question here lined up. We'll start there as we start to go through the others. So here here's a question. So we only have a three person IT team. Okay? The the governance you mentioned sounds great, but we don't have a dedicated, compliance officer. How much of that platform governance is truly automated versus something my team has to still manually configure in Workday? That's a good question. I'll hand that over to you, Darren and Katie. Yeah. So I think the the core of this really comes down to a couple of things. The first is making sure that your security groups are set up right from the start. So when you do your deployment and when you engage with your partner, making sure that you're shifting left as the security people like to say and building in compliance. The second piece is really making sure that when you build your business processes, that the governance and approvals workflows are are orchestrated. Those are two capabilities that have existed in the Workday platform for a really long time. And as we think about the extension to AI and digital workers, the model you should have in your head is that they are workers. They have access to certain things that you give them access to. They fall into certain security groups. The payroll agent example that Katie gave is not going to be accessible to everyone. And the enterprise grade platform ensures that you don't need to be constantly monitoring that type of thing. I'm just looking at my monitor. So next one, I think maybe this one's for you, Katie. Data shows spend is up, but I'm seeing my manager's expenses, their own individual AI point solutions because they're tired of waiting on IT. How does the Sonar Frontdoor help us reign in that shadow AI without making us look like, the department of no? So either of you wanna step in on that one? I don't know. So you're talking about, a lot of different AI point solutions? Yes. I think that's what we're looking at here. Somebody's, facing that scenario of a lot of point AI solutions coming up, and they're thinking about how do we reign all of this in. Right. Right. I can I can go first, or, Darren, you can go first, whichever? I'm. happy to hop in. Look, I think the the core of what we're trying to do is to minimize that those instances, right, by providing a platform and framework and really building a lot of the tooling into the core applications that that people are using. So the first step is making sure. that you're you're seeing your your core processes. The other, it was mentioned in the question a little bit, is talking about Workday. And what's really exciting with the acquisition of Sauna is we're looking at changing and incorporating, more modern interfaces. You saw some of it in the demos, but changing the way that enterprise software is delivered, and that includes things like integrations into some of your private sensitive data like your own mailbox and getting the agents to work for you. Things like finding a receipt that was mailed to you and capabilities like that that bring true business value, which anyone who spent time filling out expense reports and searching for the right receipt can surely appreciate. Let's try to fit in another I here. If, it's. okay for me to wanted to One more, Indy, oh, from Katie. sorry. let's take a call because I think the the person asked this question. earlier, I wanted to get to this one. So Okay. this question was, you have touched an important topic that companies are concerned about uploading their data use Cloud AI. Could you please share your experience in building an in house AI agent for company confidential information? Yeah. I think the the last example like, few things, for anyone in a company are more confidential than their mailboxes. The communications that go back and forth, if you're a high level leader, you have things like m and a proposals in your mailbox. If you have calendar invites with who you're meeting with. Like, all of these things are great examples of confidential information. The payroll example, the things that are available in deployment when you're uploading large files that contain sensitive PII, like Social Security numbers. Like, all of these different examples are the things that we're building for to make it easy because the it doesn't take much, as Katie said earlier, it doesn't take much for that foundation of trust to be broken, and we need to build the tooling to make sure that that doesn't happen. Great. Yeah. And just to hop in on kind of I think both of the questions were kind of interconnected or similar. I always recommend veering away from an AI point solution. There's a lot of new what new vendors that have gotten in on the AI game since, you know, especially GenAI, and we all started using it at home to plan our vacations. And now, of course, it's it's huge in the business world. But AI has been around. I've been covering AI for, I don't know, fifteen years or so. And so going with a reputable large scale vendor that has been at the AI game for a while and has the resources to change with the ever evolving threats with the data, but also with the ever, you know, constant innovations. And thirdly, with maybe a platform that you're already going to have to use, whether it be HR or ERP, and embedding those AI capabilities to make those systems slicker, faster, easier to use, and more productive rather than, as we had talked about before, several different point solutions, bringing in more risk, bringing in more interfaces that you have to log in to, bringing in more systems that have to talk to one another, and also that might just not have the resources and bandwidth to keep up with this ever evolving that's what I always recommend. Well thank you to both of you for being wonderful panelists and I would also like to thank everyone for attending. As a reminder, here is the QR for more information. Stay tuned. We will be sending out a link for the replay and more assets for you to look at. We know this is an exciting opportunity for finance, HR, and the back office, and we're excited to help partner in helping you unlock the opportunities that new Workday offers. Thank you, everyone. I'm Indy Bains, signing out.