Name: Migrating to The Universal MSA to Accelerate Customers’ AI Journey
Uploaded: 2025-08-26T18:31:21.401Z
Duration: 28 min 8 s
Description: Migrating to The Universal MSA to Accelerate Customers’ AI Journey

Transcript for "Migrating to The Universal MSA to Accelerate Customers’ AI Journey": Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Daniel Bork, assistant general counsel at Workday, and I'd like to welcome all of you to our webinar on quickly migrating to the universal main subscription agreement or UMSA, which will enable you to accelerate your AI journey with Workday. Today's speakers will guide you through the UMSA benefits, our new AI features, how to enable those AI features, how to migrate to the UMSA, and we'll end with a few FAQs about the UMSA. Before we start, we'd like to refer you to our product statements. Workday's unreleased features are subject to change. Future features may not be delivered as planned and as a result, your purchase decisions must be based on currently available services. A few housekeeping items before we begin. This webinar is being recorded and will be emailed to you within twenty four hours. If you have questions, you can select the Q and A command on the right hand side of your screen to ask questions throughout this presentation. For relevant resources shared during this webinar, you can also select the docs command, also on the right hand side of your screen, to download these resources. After the webinar, you'll be prompted to answer a short survey. We thank you in advance for your feedback. By way of agenda during this session, we'll start by covering off the benefits that the UMSA provides to our customers. We'll then do a demo on Workday's AI features and agents, which will be followed by another demo on how to enable these AI features. We'll then explain how you can quickly move to the UMSA, and we'll conclude with common FAQs about the UMSA. Joining me on this session today are my colleagues, Bridget Hoffman, legal counsel in our global legal services team, and our resident UMSA specialist. Bridget will discuss how to migrate to the UMSA and cover off MSA FAQs. Chris Schott, principal solution consultant, who will present our new AI features and companions. And finally, Vivek Srivastava, director AI product management, who will walk you through the AI features enablement process. We can go to the next slide. Now let's start with the UMSA benefits. By way of background, we received considerable feedback from our customers demanding a Workday solution with more AI features. The UMSA is Workday's next stage in solution innovation. And we're we're also reinforcing Workday's existing commitments to data control and security. All Workday customers will eventually move to the UMSA, so our new accelerated process is a great opportunity for you to do this migration early. The UMSA keeps much of our legacy MSA, Ts and Cs, but we're complementing it with operational detail on how Workday intends to deliver our solution and products going forward. The UMSA helps customers stay in control of what AI features they use and how data is used to supercharge those features. More importantly, we're removing existing contract hurdles between our customers and our most innovative AI features in order to optimize your Workday user experience. I'd like to highlight three key benefits of the UMSA for you. Firstly, we're improving your access to the Workday AI features. We have a simplified UMSA user interface, which provides much easier access and visibility to all of our AI and machine learning features. This will elevate your user experience and provide meaningful insights to help you make decisions. Secondly, we're providing customers greater control over these AI features through, firstly, the new user interface I just mentioned, but as well as notification mechanisms and reports. The UNSA will allow customers to easily view what data they may be contributing for the delivery of AI features, and it will allow them to more easily control these data contribution. Additionally, our customers will be provided with early notification in Workday regarding these new features as well as new data collection and new legal terms. This will give customer time to evaluate the impact that these new improvements may have on how they use the Workday solution. Lastly, with the UMSA, customers will only need to review the UMSA and the related product terms in order to give them access to all that Workday has to offer. We've evacuated most legacy product addendums from our contracting process to reduce the administrative burden that comes with managing multiple legal documents. The UMSA is a streamlined contracting structure that eliminates the needs to sign multiple documents to access Workday's solutions and enhanced features. To recap, with the UMSA, your AI features will be immediately available to you. You'll have an improved UI for managing AI features and data contribution, and you'll receive in tenant notifications about new AI features or changes to these features. Now let's turn to Chris Schott to give us a demo on Workday's AI features and agents. Thanks a lot, Daniel. Let's go ahead and keep our slides moving here, and we'll get into some demonstration. Now I'm coming to you live from Workday's global headquarters. Very excited to be here in California. Now here we're looking at the Workday platform. And with our AI embedded platform, we're enabling strategic partnership with our customers by connecting HCM, finance, and planning all in one modern platform. But why does that even matter? Well, with a thousand customers of ours already leveraging AI and 70 plus million users generating nearly 600,000,000,000 transactions annually, our platform approach ensures that AI isn't a bolt on, but rather that it's built in, bringing immediate value while maintaining human centric control and transparency. Now our teams have been hard at work over the last several years, and with Illuminate, there are significant product capabilities already available. Just last year, we saw 50 plus new features get added for our customers to take advantage of. With more than 85 capabilities across the platform today and 4,100 customers contributing data to our models, you can clearly see that AI is embedded in the natural flow of work with the Workday platform. And it's not just AI for AI's sake. There's no sizzle here without real value and outcome. These features are available today, and we're highlighting on the left side of the screen some of the capabilities that have the highest adoption across our customer community to date. For example, pecan content summarization has the strongest adoption by SKU with nearly 85% of our pecan customers leveraging that generative AI capability. But enough of the data, let's go ahead and jump on in to the product and see a couple examples of how we're bringing this to life for your key stakeholders so that your organization can take advantage of these investments that you've made with Workday. Our first example of a few capabilities within the system will begin in HCM core before we head over to financials and then look at a platform example of an agent that we're delivering and announcing it rising. The job architecture is a critical component of every customer's global source of truth when it comes to their workforce, their human capital. But updating that data can often take an army, maybe of consultants, but most certainly, it takes effort, time, and consideration. With this first capability, you're seeing an example of how we're leveraging generative AI and embedding that across our platform in many different use cases to help save our customers time, leveraging relevant information, context from your environment, and the models that we deliver. Well, now your team members can save time, effort, and over time, money. By streamlining this process, getting clear, concise job descriptions for your job catalog or your job requisitions that your talent acquisition team might be leveraging so that you can find that best fit candidate, truncate time to fill, and fill those seats. Generative AI use cases are available across the platform. Take a look at your subscription and dig in on ways you can deliver some of that efficiency to your key stakeholders and those doing the work in your Workday environment. Another example of some capabilities that we'll see is how Illuminate is powering up search. Think of those first time managers. Think of the people that might be using Workday for the first time. With our new enterprise wide search capabilities, we're powering up the prescriptive relevant answers that somebody can get here. All you need to do is enable that UMSA and then turn on simplified search, and your team members can leverage more relevant search results. But it doesn't stop there with usability. As this person is clicking through these tasks, finding the right actions, when not only are we making that easier, but when it comes time for the decision to be made, we're making it even better for your key stakeholders by embedding agents within the flow of work. And let's just say this manager has never gotten to promote somebody before. We'll enter the Workday self-service agent. This is an early adopter today and going commercially available towards the end of the year. This enables you to embed relevant information, whether source documentation or relevant data in Workday help so that you can lead the doers to the right information at the point of decision. No longer are you having to ask your employees to pick up the phone and call an HR business partner because now we've got relevant documentation, policy, and help embedded at the point of engagement. We're delivering the data to make it easy for people to know what they've found and eliminating those calls, questions, and extra asks for your services teams. Another few capabilities that we've embedded within HR core to power up the experience for your end users, improved prompt recommendation, and improved source documentation when it comes to adopting this toolset. Think of all the ways your key stakeholders, those power users, can start to leverage Workday now that they've got the Workday self-service agent by their side. Now jumping over to core financials, let's take a look at the journal insights capability. This is a game changer for customers because it enables you to deliver anomaly detection directly to your financial analysts. Now with our journal insights, we're delivering this information in an easy, explainable way, driving anomaly detection and proactively saving your team's time. Now this innovative solution with journal insights leverages advanced machine learning algorithms, and it continuously analyzes journal entries, automatically identifying potentially erroneous transactions that might deviate from patterns that the system has recognized with your organization's unique data landscape. And, of course, that explainability continues on, drilling through into the details. Now we're able to take action with insights right there by our side, improving the decision making and speeding up the audit process, helping you close your books faster. Now the last capability that we're gonna take a look at here is a platform agent. This is going to be available for our customers and more will be out at rising coming up. This is the BP Optimize agent. This will be monitoring in the background all of your different workflows based on the footprint of your subscription with Workday. This would then enable an analyst or a member of the team to interrogate those datasets in natural language, but instead of having to constantly monitor these things on your own or leverage custom reporting, well, now you'll have a turnkey dashboard that monitors these things in the background on your behalf and proactively notifies you when there might be relevant actions to take. As you're seeing with the assistant side panel, AskWorkday is always available now by clicking the sparkle in the upper right hand corner. For customers that have agents turned on, your users will be able to leverage AskWorkday to engage with this helpful information, to make decisions faster, reduce risk, and eliminate uncertainty before we analyze the great work that your teams and your workforce is doing within the tenant. At the end of the day, why does any of this matter to our customers? Well, because you'll be able to unlock even more value for your teams, reduce extra questions that come in, and ensure that your team members are using the most of these digital assets you're investing in with Workday as your partner. I'd love to welcome Vivek to the stage to walk through the enablement for turning on UMSA. Thank you so much, Chris. And, you know, welcome everyone. So, you saw a great demo from Chris around some of our existing AI capabilities and, some of our new agentic, pieces that are coming through. So what I'll talk about is how we can enable some of these capabilities and specifically around, data contribution under the UMSA. So some of you probably are customers who have signed the innovation service agreement or as known as ISA. Under the ISA, the way the feature adoption process works is you go and run this specific task called the innovation service opt in. You select the particular innovation service. What you're seeing here is a screenshot for the HCM machine learning GA innovation service. Really, the innovation service is nothing but a way to click on and look at the service description, which is a legal document explaining the various features that get turned on by the specific innovation service. And then you would click okay. And then in the next step, you would typically go and then run the maintain data contribution task, and then select the specific data category, and look at what data is being used to to deliver the feature. What we found and, you know, the innovation service is not a new process. It's been there for a few years now. What we found is primarily that the service or the concept is a little bit more complicated. A lot of our customers gave us feedback that they were not very clear on how the data was gonna be used for what particular feature. So what we've done is under the UMSA, as Daniel mentioned, we've kind of simplified the entire process. So now what you have is a single task, which was called as data contribution for AI features. You will see a list of all the product lines listed there. Now the good thing is you'll only see those product lines for which you are entitled to, based on the SKU you have purchased. So for example, some of the product lines, you will see if you have the financials management SKU will be financial management or spend management, and you will not see things, if you've not purchased Beacon like the Beacon product line. Right? So this simplifies when you look at what AI features you are eligible and entitled for at the product line level. And if you do not want to contribute data, you just have to go check the box in the column. It says disable data contribution. And for all AI features under that product line, data contribution will be disabled. Now if you want to, allow data contribution for some AI features but not allow for certain, then you have the option of next step in the task called the data contribution for ML features. Again, we break down everything in a more feature by feature manner. We, also call out what data is gonna be used for those features. So you have full visibility, full transparency in terms of how the data is being used to to train models, and deliver the feature. Note that, only those features are shown in that screen for which we really need your data to train models. There are a significant amount of AI features where data is not used to train models at all, where we just use off the shelf models. So those features will not be listed on that UI. Right? Because that UI is more for data contribution. But you can still see a list of all those features in your AI fact sheets on community. So in the interest of full transparency of which AI features are available, we share all of this information either in your tenant, where there is an action needed, or in community, in the AI fact sheets, which calls out all the AI features that are available across all skews. Now one of the things that we have also added, which was missing from the innovation service, and, you know, this is again a good reason to migrate to the UMSA, is some sort of a notification mechanism where you will get emails as these AI features are launched in your tenant. Note that all AI features follow the GA pattern of Workday, which is, you know, releasing in, March and in September, the dual dual major releases that we have. So notifications are not new as a concept. We're just leveraging the existing notification framework to, send notifications to you as a named service contact or anybody you configure your tenant to receive notifications when these AI features are made available in your tenant. These notifications are sent thirty days prior to the AI feature being available in your tenant, both in preview as well as in prod. So you have, you know, sufficient time to decide whether you want to adopt this feature or not, whether you want to contribute data or not, and you have full control on the data. You have full control on opting in or opting out on the data. Last but not the least, there are a couple of additional reports that we have surfaced as part of the UMSA. So keeping things simpler, keeping things easy, you now have access to if you're on the UMSA, you have access to an intelligent features report. This lists all the AI features, whether they are contributing data for training models or not, that you are entitled for based on your SKU. So, you know, a lot of times we've gotten feedback from our customers that I don't know which AI features I'm eligible for and which are available in the tenant for me to turn on. So this report is your one stop shop to go run it. You know, it's just like running any any work based standard report. You can just filter it based on all the SKUs that are available or just on the ones that you have. So that way you have full control again on what features you should be, enabling. Last but not the least, this is something that, you know, our customers who are in innovation service really like, which is a data details report. So we continue with providing that, but we do it more at the AI feature level rather at the innovation service level. So you can now run an AI features data details report in your tenant, and this will again give you a complete list of all the data being used for training models, down to the field level. So you can, you know, even export this as an Excel. You can work with your governance, counsel, prior to using any AI features as we all appreciate and understand that data is absolutely, you know, the key thing that a lot of customers have questions around. So that's kind of the, you know, the the the new ways of enabling data contribution under the UMSA. And some of the reports that you'll be, entitled to, as part of migrating to the UMSA. With that, I will now invite Brigitte on board to walk us through on how to move to the UMSA. Thank you so much, Vivek. In this next session, let's walk through the process for moving to our USA. Our goal is to make this transition as simple and seamless as possible for all of our customers. There's actually two primary pathways that we go about this. So first, the most common method is at a subscription renewal or another sales event. So this is basically when a customer's contract is up for renewal, and the new order form will automatically be generated under our new UMSA. By just simply signing that renewal, the customer will be migrated. It's a very straightforward process integrated into the natural business cycle. A key point I wanna emphasize here is that moving to the new UMSA will not impact feature availability. This means that customers will not lose access to any products or features that they currently have. There may be some minor changes to the steps for enabling new features, but the features themselves will remain available. The second method is for customers who want to move to the MSA ahead of their renewal cycle. We call this an early renewal. Customers can choose to sign a specific document, what we call our early UMSA migration amendment, at any time. This is a really great option for those who wanna take advantage of our new terms even sooner. However, it's important to be aware that this option may not be permissible for certain customers, specifically those purchasing through a Workday reseller or an established contract vehicle like NASPO, for example. We'll need to verify eligibility first before going forward with that. If a customer wants to initiate an early migration, the process is simple. Just have them open a customer success ticket, and our team will provide an amendment for signature. Moving along, we designed our UMSA to be a more modern and transparent agreement that supports our commitment to innovation, specifically around AI. So now that we've talked about the how, let's talk about the why. What are some of the common questions around moving to the MSA? This slide breaks down these common questions into three areas. First, we have our AI and product terms. The MSA provides a new framework for how we deliver these AI capabilities. We're committed to using AI in a responsible and ethical way here at Workday, and this agreement ensures that we're fully transparent with our customers about how their data contributes to our product innovation. The new product terms give us the agility to continue innovating, but, also, this is a critical point of reassurance for our customers. They do not take away from our existing product warranties. Secondly, the UMSA standardizes our universal exhibits. As a part of the move, customers will adopt our universal security and universal data processing exhibits if they haven't already. This is a significant benefit for our customers. As we keep these exhibits continuously updated with the latest global regulatory requirements, it helps to ensure they remain compliant. Furthermore, adopting these exhibits is a prerequisite for accessing the enhanced features that are delivered under the new AI model. It's an essential step for customers to move to the universal security and data processing exhibits, AKA our UDPE and USC. If you haven't already, this transition is beneficial for our customers. Now I'll hand it off to Daniel to discuss our last commonly asked question. Thank you, Bridget. So, lastly, let's discuss question about the dynamic terms that now accompany the UMSA. We've chosen, this approach because these are, modern contracting terms. The universal MSA offers a contemporary contracting approach that aligns with current SaaS industry standards, and it promotes transparency. The dynamic terms allow Workday to continuously innovate and enhance our services while maintaining the strong contractual protections our customers expect of us. This means a more agile, less bureaucratic, and clear agreement for you. Thank you for attending our webinar today. We hope this session was informative and valuable. Special thanks to all our presenters for their insights. As I mentioned at the beginning, a recording will be emailed, and resources will be emailed to you shortly. I would ask you to please complete the brief survey after the webinar ends. Thank you again for your time today.