This post was originally published on this site.
There’s been much talk recently of AI agents being treated as a form of ‘digital labor’ that supplements — or even partially replaces — the human workforce. But does this mean, by extension, that HR teams should now consider them as part of the workforce alongside employees and contingent workers, and that they will appear as a separate cohort in talent management and workforce planning tools? Or does that take anthropomorphism a step too far?
At Workday’s recent announcement of an Agent System of Record, the vendor certainly seemed to be arguing that HR teams now have to worry about managing AI agents alongside their traditional duties looking after the human workforce. As part of the announcement, David Somers, Chief Product Officer at Workday, wrote about how the vendor’s Skills Cloud, which maps the various skills required to perform roles in the workforce, had been helpful in defining what agents can do:
Think about Skills Cloud. We’ve deconstructed work into a canonical set of skills, which can then be bundled into roles. This mirrors how humans combine skills and roles to perform work, and the agent concept aligns perfectly with this human model.
I wondered what exactly this meant. Is Workday using Skills Cloud as a matrix for mapping which roles and skills should be handed over to AI agents and which should still be done by human workers? Does this mapping extend across to its workforce planning tools, enabling HR leaders to directly project the impact of AI agents on employee headcount? And how would this change the nature of the apps that run on Skills Cloud? Does this mean that managers wanting to assemble a team using the Talent Marketplace app would now be able to assign certain roles to AI agents based on their specific skills? Would employees start using the Career Hub to figure out which skills would put them on a career path that was less vulnerable to AI agents taking over their job? Or was I letting my imagination run away with me?
Agents and the workforce
I had a chance last week to dig into these and other questions with Aashna Kircher, Group General Manager for the Office of the CHRO at Workday. Let’s start by refuting the notion that agents are going to start appearing as a workforce metric in planning tools. It is possible to look at the skills mapped out in Skills Cloud when thinking about what agents might be able to contribute, but enterprises are going to be doing this at a strategic level rather than at an individual employee level. They’re not going to be carving up individual jobs, assigning some elements to agents while humans take on other aspects — not yet, at least. She explains:
With the launch of Agent System of Record a couple of weeks ago, we did announce a marketplace of where agents will be available. Mostly looking at that from an enterprise level, as opposed to a manager level… Where do we believe making agents available to assist with certain functions and capabilities in the workforce will be valuable? That’s what I believe HR will really play a large role in, in combination with IT and others.
I think the verdict is still out on how much of that will trickle down to a line manager level to make those determinations, versus keeping that at an enterprise level… What we’re not doing today — it’s not to say we wouldn’t explore in the future — is using Skills Cloud as a direct line to go from, ‘Here’s what the agent is going to do,’ to [telling an] employee, ‘Here’s what you now should do as a consequence.’
So far, so good. But the advent of agents is clearly going to reshape many of the jobs that humans currently do. To that extent, they do become a factor that needs to be taken into account when planning how to grow or shrink the workforce — just as introducing any new automation technology impacts the future shape of the workforce. Skills Cloud can contribute to this high-level planning process, as she explains:
AI is going to do nothing if not disrupt the way that roles are done today. I believe that a huge part of the function of HR and CHRO moving forward will be to proactively guide their workforces in terms of the skills that they need to develop…
Skills Cloud already helps organizations today anticipate and adapt to changes in how work is done. I expect that will continue moving forward. We already help identify, for customers, where skills are emerging and declining within their organization and the market, and help identify fits for employees in finding new roles, finding opportunities, finding gigs within organizations. It already does those things today, and I expect that that will continue.
AI will also play an important role in supporting people as their careers evolve in this new landscape. Even while some AI agents may start taking over your job, others are on hand to help you skill up for your next role. She goes on:
AI is actually pretty good today at coaching and career growth. From a market perspective, that’s one of the things that we’re seeing the technology be very good at — helping people, whether it’s a practicing scenario back and forth with with AI, or specifics on coaching through management or skill development. I actually think AI can play a very profound role in elevating people’s careers and helping to support them on that new career path.
HR and IT collaboration
With the increased impact that AI agents are going to have, CHROs will want to stay in close touch with plans to introduce them and expand their reach. There was some talk during the launch event for the Agent System of Record which seemed to imply HR teams will take direct responsibility for managing the agent lifecycle. It’s more likely in most organizations that this responsibility will remain with IT teams, but it will require close liaison with the HR function. Kircher comments:
The CIO and the CHRO are going to have to both partner in where are the best places and functions, from a re-org, redesign and workforce planning perspective, to have these capabilities complement. But also, where in the business is there readiness and change management and support of employees in going through that process? That will also have to be joint, hand-in-hand between IT and HR.
This is a continuation and expansion of the relationship that has always existed between the two functions. In many organizations, the HR system already serves as the system of record that determines user access rights, based on roles and identities stored in the system. The realization that this function would need to extend to encompass agents as they take on aspects of some of those roles was a big factor in prompting Workday to develop the Agent System of Record. She explains:
Access and identity being an area of joint responsibility, that is the reason that Workday really ventured into the Agent System of Record, because really, right now, Workday is that source of access and identity management for employees, and we do believe that the same capabilities are going to be extended to agents in terms of that governance on identity management.
Most customers are still at a very early stage of rolling out agents. Some have seen good results from introducing agents to support recruitment, where their ability to automate routine tasks can increase capacity and reduce time-to-hire. New agents that support functions such as payroll and financial auditing show promise, but getting governance right is crucial for this type of application. As these and other capabilities continue to roll out, HR’s main focus remains the stewardship of workforce, in collaboration with other functions across the business. She comments:
The role of HR in helping to define that organizational design and what roles of the future look like is only going to grow. Obviously it’s going to have to be in partnership with IT and the CFO and other parts of the business, because so much of this now is workforce planning and evolution. But that role is going to be critical.
Much of how we are engaging with customers is in helping them to think about how they look at their organizational structures, jobs, roles, functions. Those are all critical data pieces and elements that already live in Workday, whether that’s thinking about how they continue to evolve their job architectures, to defining the skills and tracking the skills that are relevant for roles, to managing and looking at the skills of their existing workforces, and where there’s opportunity to upskill, reskill, or realign those capabilities to business need. That’s continuation of a path that Workday has already been on with [Talent] Marketplace and Career Hub and our intelligent job architecture. This just accelerates that.
My take
Some useful clarity from Workday on the current state of play with agents and their impact on the workforce. The reality that comes through is that there are no easy answers to managing this transition, and that clear communication to employees and close collaboration between key leaders in HR, IT and elsewhere will be paramount. Tools like Skills Cloud and the Agent System of Record can help enterprises get a handle on how the landscape is evolving, but in the end the important decisions are still going to come down to human judgement, gut feel and empathy, because no one — least of all an AI agent — can predict the outcomes with any certainty.