Enterprise-Scale AI Adoption Through Workday HCM: From Pilots to Transformation

Enterprises are accelerating the adoption of Workday HCM to standardize HR operations, strengthen compliance, and enable AI-driven workforce insights at scale. Workday’s native AI agents are gaining traction, with early pilots focused on recruiting, payroll accuracy, and employee self-service, where agentic automation delivers clear and measurable efficiency gains. Service providers are embedding AI across the Workday services life cycle, from data readiness and configuration to testing, release management, and continuous optimization. They are also driving enterprise-wide AI adoption, shifting pilots into scaled deployments that deliver sustained workforce transformation.

Both demand-side and supply-side trends are covered in our Workday HCM Services 2025 Market Insights™ and Workday HCM Services 2025 RadarView™, respectively. These reports present a comprehensive study of Workday HCM service providers and closely examine market leaders, innovators, disruptors, and challengers. They also provide a view into key market trends and developments impacting the Workday HCM services space.

Avasant evaluated 20 providers using three dimensions: practice maturity, partner ecosystem, and investments and innovation. Of these, we recognized 14 providers who brought the most value to the market over the past 12 months.

The RadarView recognizes platform providers in four categories:

• • Leaders: Accenture, Cognizant, Deloitte, and Strada
  • Innovators: HCLTech, IBM, KPMG, and PwC
  • Disruptors: Capgemini, Huron, and Kainos
  • Challengers: HR Path, Hexaware, and TopBloc

The following figure from the full report illustrates these categories:

“Enterprises piloting Workday AI agents in recruiting and payroll are realizing quick wins,” said Ruth Steinberg, partner at Avasant. “But long-term success depends on governance enablement, strong data foundation, and change management.”

The findings in the reports include the following:

• • Workday has nearly tripled its partner network since 2021, letting enterprises leverage partner-built integrations, industry templates, and automation to extend HCM capabilities beyond native Workday features.
  • Fifty-two percent of Workday services revenue comes from media, banking, manufacturing, government, and healthcare, driven by payroll modernization, compliance management, and large-scale workforce orchestration use cases.
  • Enterprises pilot Workday’s native agentic AI capability for recruiting, payroll verification, and employee self-service to validate ROI, reduce manual errors, and determine use cases for enterprise-wide rollouts.
  • Service providers are embedding AI into data readiness, automated testing, payroll validation, and managed services to streamline testing with Workday’s periodic release cycles and ensure ongoing environment optimization.

“Human–AI collaboration is becoming central to Workday AI adoption,” said Premal Shah, principal analyst at Avasant. “Enterprises are embedding checkpoints where people validate agent outputs, ensuring accuracy while building organizational trust.”

The Workday HCM Services 2025 RadarView™ also features profiles of the 14 service providers, including their solutions, offerings, and experience in assisting enterprises with Workday HCM adoption.

This Research Byte is a brief overview of Avasant’s Workday HCM Services 2025 Market Insights™ and Workday HCM Services 2025 RadarView™. (click for pricing)