SE 32：work再発明の仕事は始まったばかり――WorkdayとOneDigitalのリーダーが語る（Workday Rising 2026 ライブ収録）

Yo, it's the future, don't hit the snooze, AI is here giving humans a boost. Team humans rolling, brains in the game, with Dan Turchin, y'all remember the name. People ain't in the midst, no stopping to blow, better work, better life, yeah, we're ready to go. Robots and humans are glad, you know. Okay, let's start the show. This is Dan Turchin from AI and the Future of Work. Welcome to a special edition of the podcast featuring conversations recorded live at Workday Rising 2026 in Las Vegas. As always, we are using Eleven Labs to digitize my voice for this compilation. The Real Me reviewed and approved the content and, of course, approved the digital twin. I joined the Workday executive team and customer community at Rising to discuss Workday's vision for AI and the future of work. We went beyond the headlines to understand how one of the world's leading HR tech companies is going through a refounding moment.

As co-founder Anil Boussri returns as CEO for a second stint at the helm, I sat down with three leaders who see that moment from different perspectives. a customer putting agents to work, the product leader deciding what gets built, and the executive shaping the vision behind it. Today, we bring you the highlights. In the coming weeks, we'll release each of these conversations in full. Let's begin with John Bruce, VP of People Innovation and Technology at One Digital, a company that helps employers with health benefits, retirement, insurance, and HR. John shares how his company is putting AI agents to work, including one that gives managers insights about their teams, and another called ACE that is a general coworker available to answer employee questions. He also explains why his team has to teach its agents to push back

and the human skill he hopes AI can't replace. I think, you know, we've taken an approach of going a lot deeper and wider at the same time. And as these new agents have been coming out, coming online, we've been very fortunate that we've been included in a lot of the early adopter programs. Most notably, and what I'm going to be talking about tomorrow is the talent sentiment agent. And that is, you know, a PECON native agent which takes the engagement data and can do sentiment analysis on it and surface insights for leaders and create this prompt question kind of thing where it's really giving the managers the insights that they need to be able to help them lead their teams more efficiently. I think some of the other agents they're doing, you know, really leaning into this, like, ambient agents where they're just always on, running in the background. They're not being prompted or triggered by anything. They're just looking. I think that's really exciting to see how that pans out

and really excited to see how it all shakes out. And we're really fortunate that we as an organization lean really heavily into AI and AI usage, and we're really, really excited to partner with Workday on a lot of this stuff. And I think, you know, one of the things that I'm really even more excited about is the whole MCP layer that they opened up, that they're exposing, so that, you know, there's going to be instances where we want people in Workday doing stuff, and then there's going to be instances where it just doesn't make sense, right? And I think, you know, there's a lot of situations where managers just need to be able to do something where they're working. And I always joke that, you know, 10 years ago, if you told me people would be approving time off inside of Skype, I would have thought you were crazy and, you know, then worked everywhere and the Teams integration came and that's what they're doing. And now this, as this iteration continues like a really meeting people where they are, I think it's, it's really exciting. And we're really excited to leverage some of our homegrown agents to connect to

an MCP layer to leverage some of those skills. Will there be a time when the predominant usage of Workday is not through the Workday UI? I think it depends on what you define by predominant, right? I think if we're talking about employee self-service and manager self-service, I'd say it's more probable than it is possible, right? I think, you know, as organizations, you know, I think about us as an organization where we call our agents coworkers. Like, that's kind of our approach to them. They go through, like, an intern apprentice coworker development phase. And I think about, you know, we have a general coworker called ACE, and that's, like, the one that everybody goes to to ask questions. And I think that 85% to 90% of an employee's usage of Workday would end up going through ACE at some point, right? And that's a good thing, right? Because it's reducing friction. It's making a better experience.

I think there's still going to be core things that we just have to do, right? I think about onboarding as an example. I think about you know maybe benefit events where you have like life event changes or some of that stuff where like some of the decision support gets baked in I think there areas where it may make sense to not take that out of work day because there's things you want to preserve. What's the humanness? Can you ever be outsourced to bots? That's a really good question. I don't think at least what I've seen so far that the, AI is at a place where it's capable of replacing just natural human curiosity, right? You know, even when we're developing agents, like, we have to tell it. Like, don't just accept the viewpoint I have. Push back. Pressure test, right? Because if I don't, like, if we're building a coworker for HR right now, for HR leadership to use,

and one of the pieces of feedback I got was, like, does this coworker think I'm a genius? because every idea says it's great. And so we have to, you know, force the AI to push back. And so that skill of asking follow-up questions, of hearing something and what someone's saying that says, you know, you're telling me you have an issue with A, but I really think your problem is three, right? And I don't, I really hope at least, because that's like the skill I've used to differentiate myself in the marketplace. I really hope we can't replace that with AI because then I'm in trouble. But I think that's the skill, right? That just, that wanting to understand, solve, solve, root out a problem. I just, I don't think we're at a place where AI can do that. Next, we hear from Max Wessel, SVP of Product at Workday, who leads the company's applications teams.

Max explains how his team decides what to build, from Anil's mantra to run Workday like the world's largest startup, to why taste and judgment matter when it's easy to generate code. He also shares the origin story behind the event's big product announcements. I lead our applications teams across Workday, so all of the applications that folks know and love. And what Anil has really set out as a mantra is we want to be the world's largest startup. We want clear accountability. We want clear direction. We don't want decision fatigue. We want to empower people to move fast and build new things. And a lot of what you saw in our keynote today at Rising was about just that. When we emancipate teams to focus on the most exciting use of the technology in front of us, they can create, whether it's turning a performance conversation into an actual coaching and development conversation through what we release with Sauna Coach, whether it's putting a team of analysts in your pocket by activating an agentic analytics system that's connected to your core.

All of that is the work of teams that are empowered to move fast independently inside of Workday. Some looking in from the outside would look at our roles as product people and say, let's be easy because AI does all the work. It writes the code and it specs the features and it even recommends what you should be doing more of. That's actually not the case. Talk about what's hard about your job and maybe even what's harder than it was in the past. there's a great book that was written i don't know 20 years ago um that was in the early days of the youtube moment and it was about what is creation look like for video in an era where anyone has the tools to build new content and it was that contrarian position the author a woman named Anita Elberci basically said, in an era where there is completely abundant long-tail content, what we're going to see is gravity to the things that are high quality.

And I actually think we lost sight for a while there, that part of the act of product management is around understanding the problem, having the taste in judgment, and the accountability to take a decision when it's very easy to generate code. It's very easy to create slop. And so more of the job is what product was always about, which is understanding what real problem are you solving in the world? How do you make something easy and delightful and intuitive for a human that interacts with it? And how do you focus on that very simple interaction, making it real? One of the things that I thought was most elegant about some of the new interfaces is that it felt like the right amount of UI, like the right amount of conversational AI balanced with the right amount of, I don't know if it's traditional, but classic forms and classic UI. How do you think about the way to build agentic workflows and conversational AI in at the right point in the workflow?

So the cool thing about that UI that you saw today it all generative UI And so we actually use the interaction with the agents in order to figure out what UI needs to be generated One of the examples from today we released a product called Workday Decision Intelligence. Workday Decision Intelligence is an agentic analytics tool. You could chat your way through data, but it's easier for humans to consume data in charts. And when somebody asks for a chart to be created and it comes out the way they want, in decision intelligence, you can save that as a playbook. And the next time you ask the question, when the agent goes through and does the analysis, understands the data relationships and comes back with an answer, it'll come back in that chart updated. And so we think a lot about how do we connect this incredible alien technology that is AI

with all of the tools that we need to translate it into the way we consume information. You said something profound, more profound than I think you realized, that I think will define kind of the next maybe decade of how humans interact with machines, the term generative UI. So you kind of tossed it out and then went on. But take a step back. What does that mean at work, Dave? How do you think about the role of generative UI? So generative UI is UI that is created on the fly by an agent. And there are a lot of emerging standards around generative UI. And we're still very early in the process of building out all of the frameworks, all of the tools to be able to give agents the ability to speak in the way we consume information. UI is wonderful. I don't want to chat to my e-commerce sites because the way they are laid out beautifully with pictures allows me to figure out exactly what I want to buy, the way that I

want to buy it. It is a experience designed for a human. Getting a code full data dump in a table is not the same, even though an agent might speak that language, we need that translation layer. And so when it comes to the work that Workday is doing right now, a lot of our focus is how do we build the generative UI components? How do we create the interaction system? How do we coach the agents to use those components to speak to humans? And what you get on the other side is things like forms and charts and workflow tools that feel like the types of systems we are all used to interacting with, but they're created flexibly on the fly by the agent. And so we have a whole team at Workday that focuses on creating those elements for our Asana agent to use as it interacts with users.

Finally, we turn to Garrett Kuzmeier, President of Product and Technology at Workday. Garrett shares Workday's vision for using AI to restore humanness to work, starting with why nobody comes home proud of answering 50 emails and how companies can decide what AI should do and what should stay human. He also describes the future he hopes for five years from now, when more people can spend their days doing work that inspires them. Talk to us about the why behind the what. You introduced a ton of innovation, but I think there was a theme beneath some of that innovation. Share with us kind of your philosophy around how you decide what to build. Yeah, and I think in Mac Pro, maybe the theme is that better and progress is possible is what we believe in. And we believe that there should be a better workday. We don't think that – that's the funny thing about AI, right? I think there is an assumption today that the workplace is basically perfect.

Every company is basically practically perfect, and now we just apply AI to it to make perfect. Just go faster, right? And that's a very theoretical and I think a very removed from reality perspective because the reality is for most companies, the workday and organizing the workday is hard. Most people spend a lot of time on what I call work about work, right? not the things that inspire them, not the things which why they wanted to go in that profession. You know, it's the nurse, you know, filling out and studying shift schedules and instead of, you know, attending to patients or it is, you know, maybe someone in journalism, you know, answering emails and coordination or a manager working on alignment or a software engineer, you know, trying to clarify requirements. versus then actually practicing their breath, right? You know, creating great podcasts, you know, writing a great piece of software. And what I fundamentally believe in, right, that A, for people it's important to have the purpose in life, right?

You know applying yourself to something and aspiring to achieve a certain degree of craft or mastery and being committed to that and have an environment in which you can do that And I think Workday plays a huge role in enabling that by on the one side right in all of the functions, the professionals that directly work in Workday, freeing them from all of that mundane work so they can actually do what they're meant to do and the things that they care about, right? Nobody's coming home in the evening and saying, I had a great Workday. I answered 50 emails. I had 20 meetings, right? this is what drains at least for most people the energy right and what's really great what makes a great work day is when you had an incredible customer meeting or we created this beautiful design or we made progress by solving that problem or you know I have the patient right it's those things that I think are meaningful when it comes to the work

experience we want to give this to everyone who is working with Workday as a professional, right, the HR, the finance, and the IT professionals, so they can do things they care about and where they add real value. And then secondly, because, you know, many people are being managed through Workday, right, who are not HR, finance professionals, that we focus on helping them to get the support so they can also advance in their functions. and reintroduced work intelligence, and this is not advertising. But like I said, companies are not perfect. Right now, actually, people are trying to understand how does work actually happen. How should I introduce AI in a coexistent way with the workforce that I have and giving them the tools so they understand what AI should do, what AI can augment, what should stay innately human, and how they reconfigure themselves around that. That is, I think, really purposeful.

I think that's really important. And, you know, we all at Workday, I think we care about it, right? One of the reasons why I came to Workday was because I really connected with that idea, you know, of building a great work experience for everyone, right, and a limit for everyone. Who wouldn't want to do that? So, pass forward. so Garrett's five year your fifth year rising what are you talking about on stage I think about the five years out my hope is that we are getting to a state where people actually you know can do the work that actually inspires and drives them and which makes them happy and still at the same point in time have this incredible, authentic work for supporting it so that everything else you know still runs and I would argue that the brilliant minds, you know, that the world has seen so far, right, I think we will see many more because I think everyone is paying right now a huge bandwidth tax,

meaning you're doing so much. It is so hard to focus and get good on anything, right? But imagine, we talked about the Terrence Powers and others, right, who have the, you know, the genius, obviously, but also the privilege of fully dedicating them to something like that. That we would have much more of that, right, Because much more of what right now defines, you know, our workday will change. And, you know, that's why our vision is that new workday, right? Because the end goal is that we want that, that everyone can have an incredible work experience and unfold their full human potential. As part of a prosperous economy, there you have division of labor, right? Between intelligent AI agents doing incredible work in all of the ways that humans can't do it. from reading the emails to coordinating and alignment, and then collaborating with humans where you need creativity, judgment, expertise.

These conversations from Workday Rising 2026 share one theme. The work of reinventing work is just getting started. John's team is teaching its agents to push back. Max's team is still early in building AI that builds AI, and Garrett is working toward a future where people spend more of their day on the work that inspires them. Not technology that takes the human out of work, technology that makes more room for the work only humans can do. In the coming weeks, we'll release each of these conversations in full. John Bruce of OneDigital, Max Wessel of Workday, and Garrett Kazmaier of Workday. Follow the podcast so you don't miss them. As each episode goes live, we'll add the link to it in the show notes of this episode. If you know someone rethinking how work gets done, share this episode with them or leave a comment with your perspective. Thanks for listening to this special edition of AI in the Future of Work,

featuring conversations recorded live at Workday Rising 2026 in Las Vegas. Until next time, keep building with purpose. Yo, it's the end of the show, time to power it down. AI for six, but humans wear the crown. Teen human in the house, got the vibe so clever. Damn, churchin' from people, rain makin' us better. We learned about AI for humans. We're ready to conquer the future, that's all for now. See you next time.