Workday and Salesforce Unveil New AI Employee Service Agent

In a Wednesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, the CEOs of Salesforce and Workday, Marc Benioff and Carl Eschenbach, announced their companies’ new partnership to develop an artificial intelligence assistant. Workday and Salesforce Unveil New AI Employee Service Agent. This collaboration aims to enhance onboarding, human resources, and other business processes. Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff and Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach join ‘Mad Money’ host Jim Cramer to talk their AI partnership.

Both CEOs emphasized that the strength of their partnership lies in the integration of their extensive data sets. Benioff stated, “AI is all about data, and having access to extensive data enables us to deliver exceptional AI capabilities. This partnership exemplifies two companies coming together to ensure our customers have the data they need to realize the full potential of artificial intelligence.”

Partnership will deliver a personalized, AI-powered assistant for employee service use cases such as onboarding, health benefits, and career development within Salesforce and Workday

The two companies will establish a common data foundation that unifies HR and financial data from Workday with CRM data from Salesforce, enabling AI-powered use cases that boost productivity, lower costs, and improve the employee experience

Workday will be natively integrated inside of Slack with deeper automation, so employees can seamlessly collaborate around worker, job, candidate, and similar records using AI

Salesforce and Workday are both cloud-based software companies. Salesforce is renowned for its Slack application and software for sales, customer service, and marketing, while Workday specializes in human resources, recruiting, and workforce management.

Eschenbach highlighted that Salesforce and Workday possess three crucial data sets in the enterprise landscape—employee data, customer data, and financial data. He added that the new initiative benefits customers by integrating services across platforms, eliminating the need to switch between different systems.

“Through this partnership and our ability to share data, customers can seamlessly access our data sets whether they’re using Slack, Workday, or Salesforce,” Eschenbach said.

Workday and Salesforce Unveil New AI Employee Service Agent

The combination of Salesforce’s new Agentforce Platform and Einstein AI with the Workday platform and Workday AI will enable organizations to create and manage agents for a variety of employee service use cases. This AI agent will work with and elevate humans to drive employee and customer success across the business. Powered by a company’s Salesforce CRM data and Workday financial and HR data, the new AI employee service agents have a shared, trusted data foundation to communicate with employees in natural language, with human-like comprehension. As a result, taking action as part of onboarding, health benefit changes, career development, and other tasks will be easier than ever.

When complex cases arise, the AI employee service agent will seamlessly transfer to the right individual for remediation, maintaining all the previous history and context for a smooth hand-off. This unique approach of humans and AI seamlessly working together will result in greater productivity, efficiency, and better experiences for employees. This is only possible by having the data, AI models, and apps deeply integrated.

“The AI opportunity for every company lies in augmenting their employees and delivering incredible customer experiences. That’s why we’re so excited about our new Agentforce platform which enables humans and AI to drive customer success together, and this new partnership with Workday, to jointly build an employee service agent. Together we’ll help businesses create amazing experiences powered by generative and autonomous AI, so every employee can get answers, learn new skills, solve problems, and take action quickly and efficiently.”
Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce

AI employee service agent powered by Einstein 1 Platform and Workday AI: Salesforce and Workday will integrate Einstein’s agent platform with Workday AI, bringing the power of two generative AI solutions into one seamless employee experience accessible across Salesforce and Workday. The AI employee service agent uses LLMs to communicate in natural language, and leverages a powerful shared data foundation to deliver relevant, conversational responses to employee queries. Keeping the employee at the center, the agent will recommend and act across platforms on behalf of the employee — helping them be more productive and efficient. For complicated high-touch issues, requiring escalation to a human, the agent will seamlessly and quickly perform the escalation and hand-offs.
Shared data foundation built on Salesforce Data Cloud and Workday: Salesforce and Workday will have one shared data foundation connecting Workday financial and HR data with Salesforce CRM data. To make that possible, Workday will leverage the Salesforce Zero Copy Partner Network. This will allow customers to access and action financial, HR, and CRM data across Salesforce and Workday platforms without having to duplicate data or build custom integrations, all while ensuring secure data sharing so users only see authorized information.
Seamless integration between Workday and Slack: Workday will enhance its existing integration with Slack, providing an elevated conversational interface for users to access and collaborate around Workday financial and HR records, such as tasks, pay, job requisitions, employee details, and general ledgers, directly in Slack. Slack preserves the conversations about these records, which will allow information to be easily found, summarized, and acted upon in Workday at any time.

Benefits to Employees

Employees can now receive instant support through natural language conversations with their AI employee service agent, whether they are working in Salesforce, Slack, or Workday. This AI-driven assistant provides contextual help by understanding requests, accessing relevant information from integrated Workday-Salesforce data sources, and automating resolutions across platforms.

Seamless Onboarding: Streamlines the onboarding process by coordinating paperwork, provisioning resources, and accelerating new hire training.
Self-Service HR: Empowers employees to get answers to questions about PTO, benefits, and company policies, and enables them to perform self-service transactions like updating healthcare plans.
Continuous Development: Offers personalized learning paths tailored to an employee’s role, skills, and career interests, as tracked in Workday.

Sal Companieh, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Cushman & Wakefield, commented, “As a leading global commercial real estate services firm, we prioritize employee support and engagement, which directly impacts client service. The ability to streamline workflows across Workday and Salesforce and deliver more personalized AI-powered employee experiences will be transformative for us.”

Benefits to Employers

By integrating HR, financial, and operational data into advanced AI models, Salesforce and Workday enhance workforce capabilities beyond individual productivity, fostering overall workforce intelligence, optimization, and resilience:

Precision Workforce Planning: Aligns skills supply forecasts from Workday with demand signals from Salesforce, enabling accurate capacity planning.
Continuous Financial Planning: Utilizes unified employee and customer data for rolling forecasts, scenario modeling, and operational analyses.
Intelligent Sales Enablement: Assists sales teams with complex deals by analyzing historical data and offering targeted coaching recommendations.