Name: Next Generation ERP Is Redefining Finance and Procurement with AI
Uploaded: 2025-11-12T19:16:07.432Z
Duration: 30 min 16 s
Description: Next Generation ERP Is Redefining Finance and Procurement with AI

Transcript for "Next Generation ERP Is Redefining Finance and Procurement with AI": welcome to this looking forward webinar on how next generation ERP is redefining finance and procurement with AI. A couple of housekeeping items before we begin. We do have a q and a functionality. Feel free to drop in questions over the course of the webinar, and we're gonna do our best to get to all of them. If we run out of time or for any other reason, we're not able to answer them live, we're gonna go ahead and follow-up with you afterwards. So as we get started, I'd like to remind you that this presentation, of course, is gonna contain forward looking statements and is subject to the following safe harbor. My name is Daniel Fortenko. I'm a senior product marketing manager here at Workday. And joining me today are Megan Ellis, a counterpart of mine on the product marketing team, and Drew Siminerio, a senior principal solution consultant. I'm gonna have them introduce themselves as they hop on stage in a little bit. We are incredibly proud to be recognized by Gartner, which named us a leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud ERP finance. This recognition is something that really validates our AI approach in our next generation ERP, and it's fun and it's validating really that we're fundamentally changing how finance operates, and we're driving ROI for our customers. Today, we'll talk about the opportunity with NextGen ERP, then showcase AI innovation for finance and procurement, and we're gonna wrap things up with some information on how to get started on adopting the AI features that we cover over the next forty five minutes or so. Let's go ahead and dive in. I just wanna set the stage really quickly of the fact that we're living in a moment right now where AI is reshaping our world faster than we ever imagined. I think that comes to no surprise to anybody who is dialed in right now. But AI is not just a buzzword. It's a strategy that organizations are actively trying to figure out. A record 58% of S and P 500 companies mentioned AI on second quarter earnings calls. That's according to Goldman Sachs. And AI is redefining industries, skill sets, and even career paths entirely right now. The finance and procurement leaders that we work with are right now navigating three big persistent challenges. The first is general macroeconomic uncertainty. The second is an explosion of data, and the third is talent shortage. So the question becomes, where are we seeing those leaders that we're talking to and those organizations that we're interacting with leverage AI to address those challenges? So according to research, finance leaders are using AI to drive efficiency, to mitigate risk, and to expand insight. 79% of finance leaders that were surveyed said that they plan to leverage AI in the next twenty four months to upscale talent and drive efficiency across their teams. 68% of finance leaders said that they expect AI to play a key role in improving risk management and strengthening controls. And 46% said that they lack full visibility into their company's financial performance due to data challenges, which is a significant bottleneck where AI can help. And that's done by surfacing key insights in real time. But the road to AI adoption often hits a very familiar wall. The reality is that for many organizations, their existing legacy ERP systems are actually limiting factors in their ability to truly adopt and scale AI. They're dealing with extensive customizations, complex integrations, manual workarounds, and often painful impending system upgrades, just to name a few of the complexities. Of course, you could see them running across your screen, in in full here. In short, the systems that were once created to help you run the business have now become the very things that are holding you back and blocking the effective implementation of AI. And that's why when we step into this new era of AI, it's critical that your ERP is built for what's next. That might mean that your system needs to have the flexibility to support change, to scale seamlessly as the business grows, to provide sound data governance, to ensure trust and transparency, and many of these other characteristics that you see on the screen here. So in summary, meeting the needs of this AI era requires an ERP that is AI ready and intelligent, flexible and adaptive, and open and connected. And Workday's next generation ERP provides the perfect foundation for the AI era. It's designed for insight, turning every transaction into intelligence and empowering both AI agents and people to excel. It's built for change, adapting to shifting needs with speed, so you're always ready for whatever comes next. And it's connected, seamlessly bringing Workday into your industry ecosystem. For the purposes of the webinar today, we're gonna focus on that first pillar primarily. So let's drill into how Workday is uniquely built to deliver on those promises of next gen ERP. It all starts with our AI ready data foundation, where data and context, think, like numbers and transaction detail, stay connected within a single system of record to fuel powerful AI learning. Then our adaptable architecture allows you to adjust processes quickly and securely, keeping pace with regulatory and operational changes while documenting any change as it occurs, all with clicks and not code. And then if we put agents on top of that, the Workday agents in particular execute complex processes autonomously so teams can focus on the work that they've never had the time or the resources to do previously. And finally, our experiences bring it all in one, enabling the entire workforce to work side by side through intuitive, unified interfaces. In total, these capabilities make Workday a system that is truly built for AI. So before we jump in and actually highlight today's innovation, I just wanna take a moment and actually answer a very common question I hear. And that is, what is an AI agent? So unlike traditional forms of AI, agents don't just automate. Agents, they understand, they act, they think, they learn, they excel at handling tasks that require speed, scale, consistency, and they proactively work towards goals rather than waiting for instructions. Our agents are intended to work with people, not replace them. They provide recommendations. They execute routine processes and surface insights while ensuring that humans stay fully in control. So I recognize that in areas like accounting, procurement, trusting AI to fully execute processes can feel genuinely like a really big leap. And it's gonna take time for for teams to fully trust something to run autonomously, and that is okay. What we're gonna show you today are two of these agents in action. But before we do, it's worth grounding ourselves in why this matters and what outcomes these innovations are driving. So ultimately, all of the innovation that we are are building at Workday is in service of three critical outcomes for our customers. First is efficiency, where we are looking to amplify your team's strategic output, not your your team's workload. Second is compliance, where we are building ways to assure unparalleled financial integrity and compliant procurement. And finally, insight, where we are focused on turning your data into a strategic asset to protect and grow your organization and drive value beyond just cost savings, but also as a strategic partner. So let's start by looking at how we are helping our customers build more efficient processes across two core areas. The first is opportunity cash, and then we'll also speak to record a report. So starting with revenue contract agent. We're continuing to innovate across the opportunity cash process to help our customers grow revenue, to simplify complexity, and to avoid revenue leakage. You may have heard, last year, we acquired Evisort, and we've since launched two AI agents, the Workday contract intelligence agent and the Workday contract negotiation agent, both powered by Evisort AI. Now, we're leveraging that same AI technology as the foundation for revenue contract agent. The revenue contract agent transforms static contracts into dynamic strategic assets. It automatically extracts and analyzes critical contract data. It automates downstream activity by recommending billing schedules, rev rec, and creating accounting entries. And in the future, this agent will also be able to move to use multiple documents to enrich contracts, make rev rec recommendations, and automatically update accounting when amendments happen. This tackles what we believe are some of the most painstaking parts of contract management. In fact, we are expecting to improve time to billing readiness by 35%, thanks to expediting contract setup and to reduce errors by 60%, which means that's a lot of time back for you and many, many, many fewer errors. So let's see what revenue contract agent looks like in action. I'm gonna bring Drew up on stage with me. Hey, Drew. Can you hear me? Hi, Daniel. Can you hear me as well? I can hear you. Great. Hi, everyone. Drew Siminerio. I'm a I'm a financial solution consultant, here with Workday as Daniel mentioned. Really, happy to be here today. Let's go ahead and get started. What we're going to do is we'll start out in our revenue hub where we can see our contracts and our billing all brought together alongside our revenue recognition as well as that document intelligence. For those of you that know that manual tedious airframe process of entering contracts into a solution, you'll appreciate the heavy lifting that Workday is doing for you. It's going to extract all the information from the document, create the contract, and allowing us to review these side by side. Now, also on the right hand side within AskWorkday, we can see that it might be eligible for a volume based discount. But before I go ahead and review that discount, maybe I want to go ahead and validate the affected date of the contract. It's going to traverse the document, further validating the information in Workday is correct. Now we can go ahead and review that discount. It's going to traverse all of the associated documents, maybe even the associated MSA, where that discount is stored and it's ultimately indicating that we might be eligible for a 20% discount. I can go ahead and review the associated MSA to review that contractual language here as well before going ahead and accepting that discount. Now, whenever we go ahead and accept it, it's gonna automatically apply that discount into the associated billing schedules, in real time. And so here, we can see how the revenue contract agent's not just saving us time on manual entry, but it's getting key insights for for every document to help us drive more accurate and strategic decisions. With that, I'll turn it back over to you, Daniel. Awesome. Thank you very much, Drew. That was the revenue contract agent. I'd like to move us along the opportunity to cash process now to collections. We recently introduced GenAI collections letters. This helps collection specialists pull the right details and craft personalized letters in minutes. Ohio State is an early adopter of this feature. They used to spend five minutes per letter, which doesn't really sound that bad until you're writing 650 of them a month. So with GenAI, that's down to just one minute each, which results in forty hours saved every month. And, of course, it's resulted in the ability to do more follow ups, better collections, and to have a stronger DDSO. So that's Gen AI collections letters. Now moving on to another really exciting, AI innovation, which is our AI powered reconciliation. We often hear from finance leaders that account reconciliation is a major headache. It's manual. It's time consuming. It's full of risk. And our AI powered enhancements are gonna fundamentally change that. So our vision is real time, accurate, and autonomous account reconciliation. Because it's embedded in your ERP, it maintains end to end data lineage, which leads to faster and more accurate reconciliations and greater audit confidence. In fact, we think we believe that AI can take on much of the heavy, of the heavy lifting, reducing the time your team spends on this manual work by up to 70%. I'm gonna bring Drew back on stage and hand it over to him to show us what this looks like in action. Drew, over to you. Great. Thanks, Daniel. So what we'll do is we'll start in our close and consolidation hub, which is really that landing page for all your month end closed process and activities. Across the top here, we can see our our account reconciliations progress. Right? We can also see those auto prepared ones. Ultimately, ones that Workday has generated, effectively creating them as they prepare. On our account reconciliations tab, we get a more consolidated vantage point across all of our legal entities and accounts identified and surfacing up different risk profiles and statuses. But let's take a closer look at this first, reconciliation for accounts payable. Now as we as we, navigate into the the reconciliation, we can see that the ledger and supporting balances tie out perfectly here. We can see how that's also supported by an AI driven account summary, really eliminating the need to have to enter and create some of that supporting documentation manually. We can see how it's also attaching additional support like an AP aging report. But before I go ahead and submit it, I wanna leverage the AI, Ask Workday to surface up maybe some, agent items over thirty days. We can navigate to that. But more importantly, we can proactively send notifications to our settlement team to get in front of maybe a potential late payment, for next period. Now, once I'm comfortable with the additional support and proactive notifications, I can improve that, and we can see that, that status updated here in real time. So with that, I'll turn it back over to Daniel. Awesome. Thanks, Drew. So we've released the first phase of the of the vision for AI powered recon, and customers are seeing the benefits. Shelter insurance, for example, highlighted that because there's no need to move data to another platform, everything is inside Workday. Reconciliation becomes real time. So those were some of the innovations paving the way to new levels of efficiency. Now let's highlight a few that are leading the way forward in compliance, helping to mitigate risk, and achieve unparalleled financial confidence. So we see a huge opportunity for a agentic AI to provide testing and capabilities that can strengthen controls, data integrity, and confidence across financials. Using agentic AI, we are building the financial test suite to elevate the financial assurance you have today and a financial audit agent, which will automate audit evidence collection. And these agents will work together to help you validate compliance of your business processes and transactions with your company's policies and regulatory requirements. They will proactively detect errors and fraud to prevent overspend, losses, or reputational damage. They'll achieve data accuracy and completeness with likes of trend analysis to help you accelerate the close and bring greater confidence in the accuracy of financial results. And finally, the audit agent will expedite audit preparation and response by automating audit evidence collection in support of an auditors PBC requests. Let's go ahead and bring financial audit agent to life, and I'll bring Drew back on stage to walk us through that one. Drew, over to you. Perfect. Thanks, Daniel. So as Daniel mentioned, we'll take a look at how the solution really elevates your existing control structure, prove data integrity, and that overall confidence. So from the overview dashboard, we can see a clear view of your overall operations, as well as the ones that require your attention, And we can see right away the four items that have been flagged within procure to pay as priority items. One of those being a potential duplicate invoice leading the, potential duplicate payment. We can see that this the agent automatically took action on that, putting it on hold, as well as recommended communication that we might want to send to the supplier to further validate that invoice as well. But the agent isn't just solving problems for us, it's going to help prevent them in the future as well. So it's going to recommend additional tests to help us prevent this from happening again. So here in the test marketplace, we can see the tests that have been developed by Workday and KPMG amongst other partners. And we're in this case, we're gonna select that high risk supplier verification test that's going to continuously monitor our master data going forward, ensuring both accuracy and completeness. Now, the agent isn't just running these proactive tests. As Daniel mentioned, it's going to act as our financial audit agent here as well, really driving a lot of automation around the completion of PPC requests. So, it's going as a new, request comes in from our auditors, maybe in relation to AP cutoff, where we wanna surface up, specific selections for an invoice, the associated payments, maybe the contracts and whatnot. As part of that the sample selections, enter that in in in, native language and let the agent go to work. It's gonna extract all the the respective documents from the solution, putting it into a more of a review format for us, for each of those respective samples. It's also going to, automatically, populate the company, the period, maybe a preparer and a reviewer as part of this request as well. Now, once this is, I feel comfortable with this, Workday is gonna automatically assemble the complete request package for for delivery back to the auditors. So you can see how the agent goes well beyond just air spotting. It's actually recommending preventative controls here to incorporate into our control structure, as well as help simplifying that manual audit request process. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Megan to to tell us what's new around procurement. Thanks, Drew. Hi, everybody. I'm Megan Ellis. I'm so happy to be here with you guys. And, yeah, we're gonna take a look at thinking about compliance as it relates to purchasing behavior within an organization. And one of the key ways that this can be done is by using AI to lead users toward compliant purchasing behavior through guided buying, and intelligent intake and procurement is key to this. Intelligent intake functions as the single predictive and personalized front door for the entire procurement process. By leveraging AI, it instantly guides nonprofessional, requesters to the appropriate purchasing channel, ensuring that employees can find the correct and easiest path to purchase. This is generally available today, and our early customers have told us that it is working for them. They are seeing that this is a solution that drives increased compliance, and it's resulting in clear time and cost savings. Intelligent intake makes procurement really simple, intuitive, and efficient even for casual requesters in your organization. It makes it easy for them to find the right path for purchasing. And speaking of increased compliance, one of the major ways that we're helping our customers manage risk across their entire source to pay life cycle is by integrating Evisort fully into the flow of work for procurement. So at Workday, we know the power of Evisort's contract intelligence because our own procurement team was a customer prior to their acquisition. With Evisort contract intelligence, they were able to achieve tremendous results, as you can see here, including huge time savings per contract and a 77% ROI. This is one of the major reasons that we knew that Evisort would be the right choice for powering our contracting solution and why we're so excited for our CLM integration, which is in EA now. This integration embeds Evisort's advanced capabilities throughout the source to pay flow of work, and it is key to driving compliance and bringing spend under management. And with that, I'm gonna hand it to Drew to show us what this looks like. Great. Thanks, Megan. So let's meet Brian. Now, Brian's a a casual requester. And by that, we mean that he knows what he needs, but not exactly sure the path to get there. So using an intelligent intake, he's able to enter this in natural language. In this case, he's looking for cybersecurity services. He enters that and lets intelligent intake go to work. It's going to suggest a correct compliant path based off of the organization's predefined rules, in this case, going to a sourcing project. But if the sourcing project wasn't required, maybe around an MSA, Intelligent Intake would direct Brian to Workday CLM to create that document. But with this request, Brian's guided to strategic sourcing where he's able to fill in the information in this form and submit. Now, introducing Teresa, whenever she logs in, she can see that request, for cybersecurity services up in the top of her queue here, and she's able to quickly identify that she needed to issue a competitive bid using an RFP. Now, for the sake of the demo, we're going to run through this quickly, and she publishes this event, maybe invites some suppliers and ends up awarding it to Synergy IT Partners. Now, upon that, she can create that contract with bringing us to that Workday CLM ticketing screen. So, she's able to upload that document that she received from Synergy IT directly and issue that create that ticket. We can see all the information coming forward from strategic sourcing, keeping all this information in line, as well as the associated status. We can go ahead and insert this into review. Now, this is Workday CLM, powered by Eversort AI and that contract negotiation agent in action. The agent immediately is gonna get to work automatically redlining, clauses and terms compared to our playbook and inserting that that necessary language to avoid any downstream issues with the supplier. The agent's also going to identify maybe, clauses that might be missing from this contract, so like this confidentiality clause that we can surgically insert as well. Now with the authoring complete, we can send this to to review, to in for signatures to finalize that. But at any point here, we can quickly navigate back into the contract within Strategic Sourcing, and see the completed contract status and any other contracts that are also underway with this supplier as well. In addition to that, we can also navigate to the executed contract within procurement where we can raise POs and issue invoices against this. So now back to Brian as that requester. He has a full vantage point to see all of his the comprehensive list of all of his requests. We can see that request related to cert that that cybersecurity services, has been fully executed and complete. So with that, I'll turn it back over to Megan. Thank you, Drew. So we have taken a look at how we are helping to protect your business with unparalleled financial integrity. And now we're gonna transition a little bit and just look at how you are able to turn your data into a strategic asset. Let's take a look at how we're doing this with financial reporting. So one of the ways that we are leveraging AI to help customers get faster and better insights into their data is through conversational reporting, which gives every user in your organization from analysts to business leaders. It gives them instant answers from their reports, and Drew is gonna show us what that looks like. Great. Thanks, Megan. So here, we're looking at a a simple supplier contract activity report, and we can see the Workday icon in the top right, and we can ask conversational questions, maybe something like, which supplier contracts are out of compliance with the contractual terms, and by how much, and we're going to get this answer right away in a more usable table format. We can also expand this to the additional detail to check the logic. Right? But we can also ask additional follow-up questions, maybe, which contracts have higher than expected burn rates. And we can see how it's going to take it a step further. Not only provide that information, but auto calculate the spend that will exceed the contract terms, so I can prioritize the follow ups. I can also expand this out as we can see to use full team full screen to drill down and dig into the numbers a little bit further. So in short, we can see how I can surface up actionable insights, quickly, allowing me to make the best strategic decisions for the organization. So with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Megan. Thank you, Drew. Well, we hope that you're as excited as we are about the innovations that we've shared today. We do see your your questions coming in. We're doing our best to get those answered. And as Daniel, mentioned, we will follow-up after the webinar if we haven't gotten to you. What really excites us about these innovations is that we are seeing the tangible outcomes that our customers are achieving, with all of these. They are really leveraging these advancements to gain greater efficiency, compliance, and deeper insights. And these tangible results, are come from having an ERP that is really built for the AI era. It really confirms that Workday's next generation ERP is the only foundation flexible enough to be AI ready, open, and connected, built to amplify productivity and strengthen controls across your entire organization. If you are a Workday financial management or spend management customer, we would love to help you start your journey with these new capabilities. Please scan the QR codes that you see on the screen here to connect with our team and explore how you can begin to adopt the features that we've showcased today. The recording and presentation will be shared after this. Thank you all so much for joining us. We hope that you have an incredible workday. Thank you.