The conversation around AI in the enterprise is changing.
Not long ago, most discussions focused on models, copilots, and experimentation. Today, organizations are asking more practical questions, such as:
- How do agents operate across business processes?
- How do they interact with enterprise systems?
- How do organizations maintain security, governance, and trust as agents begin taking action?
These topics were at the center of a recent event in London that brought together leaders from Workday, Workato, and organizations exploring the future of AI within their HR and Finance operations. As a partner of both platforms, our team at Dispatch Integration was encouraged by what we heard in the discussion.
The most interesting takeaway was not that Workday and Workato are pursuing the same strategy. It is that they are approaching the future from different directions while arriving at many of the same conclusions.
The Roles of Workday and Workato Are Becoming Clearer
For years, Workday has served as a trusted system of record. It houses the people, financial, and operational data that organizations rely on to run the business. It provides structure, governance, security, and business process controls around some of the most important functions inside an enterprise.
Workato plays a different role. It acts as a trusted system of action, connecting applications, orchestrating workflows, and enabling processes that extend beyond the boundaries of any single platform. It helps organizations move information, coordinate activities, and automate work across increasingly complex technology ecosystems.
The rise of AI agents does not change those roles, and in many ways, it reinforces them.
As agents become capable of initiating actions, making recommendations, and participating in business processes, organizations need both trusted systems of record and trusted systems of action.
One provides context. The other enables execution.
The Real Business Challenge Is Not Which AI Model You Use
The market often focuses on the intelligence of individual AI models. For most enterprises, however, the larger challenge is determining what happens after a model produces an answer to perform real work to execute tasks. Questions that were explored in London event for Workato and Workday included:
- Can an agent update a worker record?
- Can it provision access to systems?
- Can it initiate a payroll change?
- Can it coordinate actions across HR, IT, finance, and other business functions?
These are not model questions. They are business process questions.
What stood out from the Workday and Workato roadmaps is how closely aligned they are on this reality. Both appear to be converging around three core principles:
- Agents can’t have raw, unmanaged API access. They need identity, permissions, and observability.
- The hard problem isn’t the model. It’s governing what the model is allowed to do, and having visibility into the quality and performance of the agents.
- An agent that acts across systems is only useful if every action is both impactful and trusted.
These principles may sound straightforward, but they represent a significant shift in how organizations think about AI. The conversation is moving from intelligence to management.
Where Should AI Agent Governance Live?
One question that surfaced repeatedly is where agent governance should reside — in Workday or in an orchestration layer like Workato.
From our perspective at Dispatch, the answer depends largely on how your business operates.
For some organizations, Workday serves as the center of gravity. People, payroll, finance, and operational processes are deeply concentrated within the Workday ecosystem. In those environments, governing agents close to the system of record may be the right approach.
Other organizations operate across dozens or hundreds of interconnected platforms. Workday remains critical, but it is one part of a much larger technology landscape that includes CRM platforms, collaboration tools, identity systems, finance applications, data platforms, and industry-specific software.
In those environments, governance often needs to extend beyond a single application. In reality, enterprises fall somewhere between these two extremes.
They are not a simple solar system revolving around one application. They are constellations made up of multiple systems, teams, and business processes. Within those constellations, certain domains may choose to govern agents close to Workday while others leverage a broader orchestration layer.
That is not a conflict. It is a reflection of how modern enterprises actually operate.
Building an Agent Ready Workday Ecosystem
The excitement surrounding AI agents is understandable. The opportunity to automate repetitive work, accelerate decision-making, and improve business outcomes is significant.
But the organizations that realize those benefits will not get there through agents alone. They will get there through well-orchestrated business processes, connected systems, and governance models that create trust. This is why orchestration remains so important.
An onboarding process does not begin and end in an HR system. It touches identity management, payroll, IT provisioning, communications platforms, and downstream business applications.
The same is true for countless finance, operations, and employee lifecycle processes.
Agents can accelerate these workflows, but only when the underlying systems are connected and governed appropriately. That is where the combination of Workday and Workato becomes particularly compelling. Together, they create a foundation for organizations that want to move beyond experimentation and begin putting AI to work in meaningful ways.
The enterprises that gain the greatest advantage will not necessarily deploy the most agents. They will be the ones who learn to govern, orchestrate, and continuously improve interactions among agents, people, and business processes.
While the journey, in many ways, still feels like it is just beginning, the direction is becoming much clearer.
For more direction on how to re-engineer your business processes with agentic AI, try DAVE, our conversational assessment tool that helps you assess, understand, and prioritize the most effective ways automation and AI agents can transform your business.
