Name: Run Payroll with More Confidence: Get to Know Payroll Agent.
Uploaded: 2026-08-04T18:00:45.181Z
Duration: 30 min 12 s
Description: Run Payroll with More Confidence: Get to Know Payroll Agent.

Transcript for "Run Payroll with More Confidence: Get to Know Payroll Agent.": Alright. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our latest installment of our looking forward with Workday webinar series. Today, we'll be covering how you can run your payroll with confidence by embracing a Genetec AI with payroll agent. During this session, we may share a few forward looking statements that are subject to change. Please note that these are covered under our product statement agreement. Before we get started, let's cover a few housekeeping items. This webinar is being recorded and will be emailed to you within twenty four hours. If you have any questions, you can select the q and a button on the right hand side, and we'll try to leave some time at the end to help answer any questions that come in. But we'll also have people monitoring and providing responses during the entire call. We have uploaded some amazing resources for you to view, so please check them out. We also have an upcoming webinar, that's also in the resources tab for you to for to help you, through your agent adoption journey. And lastly, you'll be prompted with a survey after the webinar concludes. We appreciate your feedback. If you're experiencing any audio issues, please check if your browser has muted the webinar. You can click enable audio or use the control at the bottom of the screen to unmute. Google Chrome offers the best webinar experience. So I'll just quickly introduce our speakers for today. My name is Tayah Burns, and I'm a product marketing manager for Global Payroll at Workday. And I'm joined by my fellow workmate and payroll expert, Sherry Aubrow, principal outbound product manager. For today's session, we'll show how payroll agent brings conversational AI directly into payroll workflows to surface potential issues, explain complex changes, and guide teams to the next best action. By the end of this session, you will understand three things, how agentic AI is designed to deliver meaningful work with governance and controls, where payroll agent adds value across the payroll cycle, and what a day to day interaction with payroll agent can look like through live use cases. Payroll teams must balance accuracy, timeliness, compliance, employee experience, and the work is often fragmented across inputs, exceptions, configuration, time and absence, payment elections, and payroll results. Manual review is necessary but can be time consuming and difficult to scale, not to mention relentless global compliance complexity burnout. AI is most valuable when it can help with the real work in the moments that matter, not simply generate an answer, but bring relevant context forward and help a person move toward a resolution. And we know traditional payroll is evolving. Workday research shows a staggering 92% of business leaders recognize the strategic impact that our payroll operations have on a company's trajectory. And of those, 80% all have already taken action by implementing automation, machine learning, or artificial intelligence somewhere within their payroll processing. So this tells us we're not just waiting around for the future of payroll. We're actively living in it, and the technology itself is rapidly evolving. But here's the catch. We're seeing a value gap. We've got the tech, but the results haven't quite followed. So the question is no longer are you using AI. It's is how you're using AI actually delivering value. So we'll uncover how Workday is continuously innovating to close that gap through payroll agent. But before we get to that, let's understand context of what makes an agent possible and demystify a little bit about what agentic AI actually is. So you have AI, the broad umbrella, which is software mimicking human logic to solve a problem. Then you have machine learning. This is kind of like the workhorse. It can scan millions of rows of data to spot anomalies, like a pay variance, without needing a manual rule to find it. And it's like a muscle, so it gets stronger through pattern recognition. Then you have deep learning. This is the context. So this is really the brain layer that can handle the messy, unstructured things, like how a new local tax ordinance interacts with a complex union contract. It understands the relationships between the rules, ensuring the math actually reflects the policy. And then you have generated AI. That's the communication layer. It translates payroll logic into plain language, whether that's summarizing a 50 page legislative update or drafting drafting a personalized response to an employee's pay question. The breakthrough happens when all of these technologies converge. So traditional AI can help answer questions or generate content, but an AI agent is purpose built to help accomplish a specific job. It can understand context, reason over authorized business data, identify what needs attention, and guide a user through the next step in the workflow. This is the shift from AI as a tool to AI as a teammate. Now digging a bit deeper into AI agents, we have three types. So you have non agentic AI, which is the basic chat AI. It can tell you what a policy says, but it cannot act on it. It identifies a problem but still leaves the actual work on your desk. Then you have agentic AI. So this is the teammate. It doesn't just find a discrepancy. It creates the solution. It pulls the data, drafts the correction, and prepares the audit trail for your final review. So it moves from knowing to doing while keeping you in the loop of approval. And then you have autonomous AI. So this is really the future of zero touch operations. It's a network of agents working twenty four seven to resolve 90% of routine issues before you even log in. So by silencing the noise, it clears the path for you to focus entirely on high value strategy and the complex exceptions that actually require your domain expertise. Sana is the intelligence and singular agentic experience across all of Workday, changing how work gets done across HR, finance, and IT. Simply describe what you need, and Sana orchestrates the expert agents behind the scenes like payroll agent to make it happen, whether that's helping payroll teams find issues, understand changes, or guide payroll work forward, always grounded in Workday data, your role, your permissions, and your company's governance. Payroll agent is designed to make payroll professionals more effective, not remove their judgment. It brings information forward, explains what it finds, and helps guide investigation and action while your teams remain accountable for decisions and approvals. But let's address the elephant in the room. We know that in payroll, almost right is always wrong, and payroll has to be completed with absolute precision. Most AI is probabilistic, so it's essentially a guessing machine. And so while that's great for patterns, it does have limits when it comes to sensitive people and money decisions. So for AI to handle mission critical payroll work, it needs more than just a great model. It needs context. It needs to understand your specific rules, who has the power to make decisions, and the guardrails that ensure compliance. And that context is what makes Workday unique. By design, Workday is deterministic. We drive processes like payroll with absolute precision because they have to be executed exactly the same way every single time. We're moving you from a system that guesses to a system that knows. Sana powered agents predict, flag, and explain issues before they impact pay yet always operating inside governance, data privacy, and compliance guardrails you can rely on. With Sana payroll agent, we're reimagining the payroll workflow. By eliminating manual processes and checklists to an agent orchestrated experience, your teams are freed from low value task to higher value strategic work. Sonnet agents work natively within your payroll workflows to empower you to automate repetitive tasks and inquiries and proactively complete tasks while keeping you in the center of it all with human oversight and approval. And with that foundation, I'm gonna pass it over to Sherry to show us some helpful agent use cases that strengthen your payroll workflow. Sherry, take it away. Alright. Thank you, Tayah. Hey. Before I get started in jumping into the payroll agent, a couple things I wanna call out just because I'm asked these questions, what seems like all the time. Yes. We require a uniform master services agreement, otherwise known as a UMSA, to be signed in order to use the payroll agent as well as flex credits. So just wanna call that out there, make sure people are aware before we jump into to this. That usually becomes a couple of the biggest hot topic questions that are asked. So just calling it out straight up front. Let's go ahead now and get into the agent skills and capabilities. We have a couple of skills today and capabilities that we wanna share with you, and I'll do a demo in just a minute. We're gonna talk a little bit about some of the missing data that is, from a payroll practitioner perspective that we're always looking for to try to solve those answers. And then we're gonna look at minimum wage. How can minimum wage help? How can the agent help with minimum wage? And then lastly, payroll data insights. So we're gonna use natural language with payroll data insights, but we're gonna use natural language to go through some other things as we go through the demo. But I wanted to call out the items that you're going to see in the demo so you understand what it is we are going to be sharing with everybody today. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and say, let's demo. Now I am a payroll practitioner, so I have to tell you that, I'm on the conservative side as it relates to doing these demos live. So I went ahead and did a rerecord a recording. So what you're gonna see is a recording, and I'll be back with you in just a minute. Alright. We are back. Alright. We are back. Thank you. I love the fact that my video got the all the thumbs up. I appreciate that. Lots of questions that have come in. Tried to answer quite a few of them as they came in, but, yeah. Hopefully, we'll have more time at the end here to to get into some more of that. Now, we know that adopting new workflows as it relates to payroll agents can be challenging. So we also want to keep you in that natural flow of work. And here's our recommendation to how you might adopt a payroll agent with confidence. First, you want to start with questions that you get most often that make the most sense to you. These are usually the strongest entry points to use the payroll agent. Next, you want to confirm. Right? You want to validate that you have the right roles, permissions, data, and governance policies and practices in place for all the different use cases. Then you want to take action. Start with one high impact workflow, such as PDI that we just showed. Look at variance. Introduce the payroll agent in the flow of work using real payroll life scenarios. Establish a clear path, for reviewing those insights and resolving the issues. Lastly, you wanna make sure that you measure. Right? Measure the saved time. Measure by investigating variances, exceptions, and employee questions. Monitor the reduction, right, from the number of manual checks, the late cycle rework and escalations. Gather feedback from all the folks that are using the payroll agent. Right? Access, improvements in payroll, accuracy, operational visibility, as well as stakeholder confidence. I get asked this question quite a bit, and it's Sherry. Are you a 100% confident that everything you tell me in the payroll agent is gonna be right? Well, I can tell you with what I do. Yes. But, right, that's like asking me how confident am I with a 16 year old driving. Right? So you kinda gotta you have to feel confident with it. It's not how does Sherry feel confident with it. You all gotta feel confident with it. Okay? So just wanna call that out. Alright. And lastly, I'll leave you with this. Right? Payroll is too important to depend on all the manual work that we have to do alone. The agent can help you move your team from reacting to payroll issues to getting ahead of them. It's going to bring you greater clarity to what's changed, and it's going to bring you more consistency into how work gets resolved, and it's going to give you more confidence with every payroll that you run. Now it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take time to build that confidence. So people will not feel confident upfront, but like I said, continue to build that confidence as you move forward. Okay? That's the only way it's gonna get better. I wanna leave you with this. This is a quote from Barb at Panera, and she stated that the Workday payroll agent reduces manual process, drives compliant, and easily assist with data insights. And you saw in the demo, but using that natural language, I could simply just type in what it was I wanted to ask. And Barb is right. It absolutely makes things easier. Now before I wrap up today, I just wanna take a quick moment, to remind you all that at Workday, partnership and success go hand in hand. We know that unlocking the full potential to your technology requires more than just great software. It requires a roadmap. And that's exactly why we offer Workday Success Plans or WSP. Think of WSP as that true success multiplier on your Workday investment. These subscription based plans give you trusted advisor to help you navigate these key stages, because we all know we all have just bonbons sitting there and our feet up on the table, and we all have time to look at everything. WSP helps us take care of that. AI is a huge part of what we do, And so let WSP help you. In addition to that, a huge part of helping our teams is investing in their training and certification offerings. So through a mix of our instructor led training and on demand courses and certifications, we have a vast library of resources that can drive incredible efficiency within your organizations and help deliver some of that top talent that you may need. And, of course, our services ecosystem, doesn't stop there. Whether you need predictable and fast, deployment services, specialized partner services, twenty four seven global support, or just wanna collaborate with your peers on Workday community. We have the resources you need to move your business forever forward. Now or out of Workday, please reach out to us. We're here to help help build what's next in your space. The expertise, support, and education included in WSP, I'm used to calling it Workday success plans, can also help you to unlock the potential of Workday AI, including some of those AI features, Workday agents, and and more. In a nutshell, WSP can help you identify the AI features and Workday agents that will impact the maximum that will help you impact maximum goals. You'll have the ability to ask the experts. You'll have access to accelerator webinars, feature accelerators, and more. Learn how to use AI to best manage change, reduce risk, and plan for growth on a continuous basis. That's key. Using WSP components, such as optimization packages and collaboration crews. Lastly, we had a lot of questions come in. So make sure you join us tomorrow on community for an extended q and a during the payroll networking group. Reserve your seat now. You can use that QR code on the screen. That'll get you to the place where you can register to go in and join us tomorrow. We will absolutely have that conversation, with everyone tomorrow. I know that Tayah and I have been busy trying to answer some of those questions. So Tayah? Yeah. We got a flood of questions. So thank you everyone for putting your questions in there. It's been super engaging. I think we have enough time for maybe a few, hopefully, and then whichever ones we can't get to, we'll make sure to answer them after the webinar. So let's jump in here. We've got a really good question here. Does payroll agent require payroll being run-in Workday payroll module? It's a great question. Right now, the answer is yes. It is looking at Workday delivered payrolls. Doesn't mean that the agent can't work if you have some of our partner, for our global payrolls, but right now, it is designed for our Workday delivered payroll. So that would be US, Canada, The UK, Australia, France, and soon to be New Zealand. Alrighty. So it's great that it presents the minimum wage changes coming. How do you act upon implementing those changes using using the agent? That's great. And we're working with our compensation team to actually get to that. For right now, at least in payroll, it's what we have to do is we have to notify compensation. And so if that Puerto Rico one or that Virgin Islands one that we saw in the demo would have been in my May payroll that I was completing or, that I had in progress. I would have wanted to reach out to my comp team and say, hey. This change is made, and you guys need to make sure that we're good to go. Just so that everybody stays in the loop. Ideally, wouldn't it be great if it went directly over to compensation, and we're gonna continue to work with them to make that happen. Awesome. Thanks, Sherry. Can the agent also show employees with missing tax elections as well? I love it when these questions come in. So you saw some of our agent initial skills and capabilities. We're continuing to add breadth and depth to those skills. So, yes, you're gonna see that start to come, in future releases as well. Right now, it doesn't. I'll be completely transparent. It doesn't. But stay tuned for more information on that. You'll see that coming. Okay. Another good question. Do you need to have payroll anomalies in order for payroll agent to detect to detect discrepancies? That's a good question. Well, Payroll Anomalies was delivered back in oh, gosh. Dating me now. Back in 2024. And you don't necessarily have to have it. I think payroll anomalies is a great way to call out some of those things that are different than what it has, what it was used to seeing. But the answer is no. You don't have to have payroll anomalies to utilize the payroll agent. Awesome. Alright. I think I have time for maybe one more. Alright. Sorry. Let me see. Can you use the payroll agent to identify missing data before you start your payroll processing? Are all the notifications just in Workday, or does it email as well? Well, that's a great question. So you kind of saw let me back up. The first part of that question, Tayah, was can you repeat? Yes. Can you use the payroll agent to identify missing data before you start your payroll processing? Before you start. At this point, that's where we want to get to. It's going to if you ask it, the payroll agent can right now using our payroll data insights. It would be able to do that. So, for example, if you wanted to ask, I don't know, has the time record been loaded? It might not be able to give you that answer right now, but in the future, that would be something that it would ask or that you might be able to get. And then the second part of that question, Tayah, was Are all the notifications just in Workday, or does it email it as well? Right now, the payroll agent is able to, send information through Slack, and through other vehicles, but the notifications right now are simply the notifications that are in Workday. So if you go back to that example in the demo where the notifications were sent to the people who didn't have payment election set up, the notifications were sent to those three people that it picked up. It was sent to their notifications inbox within Workday. So, but it can be configured to do different things in different ways. But, again, that's up to you to be able to to do that. The other thing I wanted to call out, and I forgot to mention it in the demo, is that, yes, you have to configure these skills to work in Workday. Now the configuration literally doesn't take very long to do, and you don't have to add all the different skills that I shared today. If you only wanted to add minimum wage, you could enable minimum wage and not enable payroll data insights or the configuration and or, missing data pieces. So it's really up to you to decide which pieces of the agent that you wanna use, which makes it a little easier in terms of trying to understand usage and how you might use it differently than other customers. Awesome. Thank you, Sherry. Well, thank you all for your time today. Please take a moment to check out the resources that we've provided, and also join us tomorrow for our networking group. And then, please, if you can, try to join the upcoming webinar around flex credits I mean, I'm sorry, around the USMA. Alrighty. So have a great day. Thank you for joining, everyone. Take care, y'all. Have a great work day. Bye bye.