Workday wants to be an enterprise agentic management hub

Let’s face it, every one of the major enterprise SaaS platforms is making a big play for agentic AI. Even as we struggle to define the notion and find examples of the aspirational vision of software moving intelligently through complex workflows, these companies are working hard to be the place you go to create and manage agents.

One of those companies is Workday. It introduced the Agent System of Record (ASOR) in February as a way to manage agents as they proliferate in the enterprise. That was a key piece, being able to understand the agents you have, but this week at the Workday Developer Conference in Las Vegas, the company announced another element, the Workday Agent Gateway. 

Matt Grippo, SVP of Core Software at Workday, sees the two pieces working together, enabling companies to connect agents from outside the Workday ecosystem into the ASOR, so all agents can be managed in one place, regardless of origin.

As he sees it, the ASOR is where you manage agents, whoever has created them, and the gateway is where you handle agent communications. “ASOR is your management console front end, while you can think of the Agent Gateway as the back end,” Grippo told FastForward. It provides a way for developers to programmatically interact with Workday agents and other Workday tooling.

Enabling agentic communication

The Agent Gateway provides a communications layer via the two burgeoning communications protocols: Agent2Agent from Google and MCP from Anthropic. These protocols are an essential ingredient for agents to be able to communicate with each other.

“We're focused on being A2A- and MCP- compliant, and using those as standards inside the gateway. Looking ahead, we also see the gateway enabling agent-to-agent communication, beyond just agents talking to Workday agents, but also agents talking to each other,” Grippo said.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, says the beauty of the Agent Gateway is that it lets you build agents for internal and external use cases. “The Workday Agent Gateway is really where all the standards and protocols come together so that partners (ISVs, SIs) can access Workday and each other,” Wang said. 

Putting it all together

Both pieces are essential elements for enterprises as they begin deploying agents more widely. If the current vision takes hold, and agents begin spreading across enterprises from various vendors, being able to understand the range of agents that are available for humans and other agents to interact with is going to be essential, which is exactly what ASOR does.

Similarly, as these agents operate within an organization they will need a way to pass information to one another and understand how their roles fit together, just as human employees do inside a large organization, and that is the gateway's role.

As an example, Paradox, a partner company that makes interview scheduling tools, has developed an interview scheduling agent. Workday users can access the agent in the ASOR, and coordinate scheduling, send reminders and answer candidate questions, among other things. According to the company, “With Agent Gateway, the Paradox interview scheduling agent will deeply integrate with Workday agents in the ASOR, further accelerating hiring, boosting recruiter efficiency and improving the candidate experience."

If you're thinking that you can get that already from conventional API integrations, Workday says that the communications protocols in Agent Gateway enable agent-to-agent interactions, delivering an experience that traditional APIs alone cannot provide.

Aspiration versus reality

While the company has outlined this overall vision, it's important to understand that the Agent Gateway doesn’t exist yet, and won’t be available, even for early adopters, until the end of this year.

It’s not a complete infrastructure package by any means, but it’s a good start. While A2A and MCP are being increasingly accepted as agent interoperability “standards,” we are so early that it’s possible that other options will emerge over time. But by building on top of these foundational pieces, Workday is working towards helping its customers develop a more complete agentic system.

It’s still early days for truly autonomous agents in the enterprise, but with ASOR and the Agent Gateway, Workday is moving beyond managing finance and HR data to becoming a system of record for the agents themselves. If agents truly are the next platform shift, every SaaS vendor wants to be the one providing the agentic management layer.

Featured image courtesy of Workday