I attended PwC’s Workday Tomorrow 2025 event, held in Frankfurt from March 25–27, as a speaker. The atmosphere crackled with knowledge-sharing and plans as the 50 attending HRIT leaders and professionals discussed how to leverage AI in terms of people processes.
IDC’s extensive interviews with HR leaders at the event revealed they are indeed keen to leverage AI for:
- Recruitment: CV prioritization, interview scheduling, candidate communication
- Performance Management: Summarization, feedback gathering, goal setting
- HR Assistants: HR help desk, transactional assistance
- Job Descriptions and Skills Management: Inference, automated skills surveys
As a Workday customer, you can gradually switch on the AI capabilities embedded in the functional areas to which you have subscribed. IDC, however, recommends that customers launch their AI journey with less complex use cases (e.g., “GenAI job description”) that can be switched on and tested for fit with your HRIT teams.
Each Workday client can turn on/off the AI functionality in their own tenants by way of configuration, including data contributions on a field level. Workday’s AI architecture allows customers to always retain control over their data within Workday.
To help customers adopt AI capabilities, Workday offers fact sheets for all available AI use cases in Workday Community. The vendor also offers a broad AI Masterclass to help organizations get started in adopting AI. The Masterclass aims to help HR and IT professionals deepen their understanding of AI technologies, including how to deploy and govern AI responsibly, and covers a range of concrete case studies.
The HR function is a business partner — but also a cost center. Some of the HR participants in Frankfurt discussed how HR can better establish its business value contribution to obtain resources and funding to work with AI. This requires HR to establish business cases with concrete financial ROI metrics to justify the investment. AI solutions that save significant time for employees and managers, for example, can have substantial benefits.
Comprehensive planning is required to execute such wide-ranging, transformational AI use cases. These are complex projects that demand organization, implementation, and funding. Successful project outcomes also require specialist skills to address legal topics, data security, change management, Workday configuration, and deep industry knowledge.
Workday Tomorrow 2025 offered attendees the opportunity to gain a better understanding of how consulting firms like PwC can support Workday customers to prepare, plan, and execute AI use cases within ongoing transformational programs.
How the AI Wave Will Impact the HR Function
Even if HR itself does nothing with AI, will HR be impacted by the AI deployed in the core business of organizations? (Hint: It will!)
A March 2025 IDC survey of 419 CEOs revealed that more than half (55%) believe AI will lead to fundamental business model changes in their organization in 3-5 years (IDC’s CEO Survey 2025; N = 419).
The survey showed that CEOs see a number of skills gaps impeding AI success in their organizations. Interestingly, the most important skills gap identified was teaching AI to regular business employees.
CEOs Identify Their Organization’s AI Skills Gaps
CEOs have turned or will turn to HR to help remedy this skills gap: IDC believes we will see extensive reskilling and upskilling efforts to create an AI-ready workforce. HR will also be tasked with recruiting, retaining, and developing scarce AI-related tech skills in security, AI governance, data management, development, and other areas.
Change management and communications skills will be much needed as organizations undergo difficult, tech-driven changes. Employees have a lot at stake: Some skills will lose value as AI agents take over certain tasks, and some job roles will change and result in new tasks. In Frankfurt, PwC expert Armin von Rohrscheidt talked about how – at least in a German context – involving workers’ councils early, fully, and transparently is the recommended approach.
Interesting HR Perspectives that Came to Light
- How does an organization train its workforce to become “AI-ready”?
- How can an organization prepare regular business users to work with conversational user interfaces, prompts, and agentic workflows?
- Are new training methods needed?
IDC believes that traditional linear elearning approaches will not suffice to bring about such skills. Instead, collaborative, social, experimental, and hybrid approaches are called for (a mix of real-time interactions and individual learning). Furthermore, learner progress and proficiency levels must be monitored as opposed to simple pass/no-pass quizzes.
Another discussion concerned how AI will impact the career progression of junior employees. Organizations are in the process of implementing agentic workflows so that basic administrative processes, or even longer-running processes, can be automated, with humans supervising the process as opposed to just being in the loop.
These basic processes have typically been performed by junior employees to help them “get their hands dirty” and “learn the ropes” of the organization. But if these entry-level processes will be performed by AI agents, how will junior employees gain an understanding of the basic workings of an organization?
This has been a theme for IDC’s Future of Work team. One hypothesis is that AI will not only automate basic tasks but will also assume a mentor’s role, enabling junior employees to explore simulated, experimental workflows and use this as a path to insights into core business processes.
Reflecting on Workday’s Expanded Partnership with PwC
Workday’s partnership with a major partner like PwC goes far beyond the traditional applications vendor + global systems integrator setup. As a key partner, PwC has a large number of certified consultants in the various Workday solutions and cloud tools, co-sells the solutions with Workday, and markets services capabilities at Workday events.
Today, however, PwC sells its own branded solutions, certified by Workday and built natively on the Workday Extend platform. Furthermore, these PwC solutions are sold on the Workday Marketplace. PwC co-markets and co-brands events with Workday, and Workday involves PwC in its multiyear product road maps.
This implies that PwC’s customer relationships in the Workday ecosystem have become truly multifaceted, spanning strategic consulting, project services, managed services, as well as subscriptions to a range of software-based products.
Selling software products requires relatively long-term and in-depth collaboration between Workday and a partner like PwC. If PwC creates a new product — for example, Sickness and Recovery Management — it is important that Workday is not planning to add such capabilities to its own HCM solution (within the next 24 months at least). There is no perpetual guarantee of free play, of course, but a certain time window must be guaranteed.
Final Thoughts
AI is not just another wave of technology to manage and roll out. It has massive transformational potential. It will permeate the business world whether we like it or not.
Any AI initiative will receive serious scrutiny from employees, senior stakeholders, unions, and regulators. However, if HR and IT concentrate on the best practices outlined at the Frankfurt conference — especially related to internal communications and change management — now is the time to get started.
Think outside of the box. AI is not a traditional tool rollout. Knowledge must be shared internally and among peers in other organizations. Network and iterate often. The future of the HR function is — without a doubt — linked to AI and automation.