Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, yesterday announced an expanded partnership with Workday, Inc., a leading provider of solutions to help organizations manage their people and money. Together, AWS and Workday will build generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, jointly innovate new customer experiences, and invest in joint go-to-market initiatives to accelerate customer cloud transformation, helping customers increase productivity, grow and retain talent, and streamline business processes.
“This expanded partnership combines the power of Workday AI and Amazon Web Services to deliver AI features to our customers faster and more efficiently,” said Shane Luke, vice president of Product and Engineering and head of AI and ML at Workday. “With Workday AI, we’re focused on delivering value for our customers through the use of enterprise data in their Workday applications. By leveraging AWS, we can focus more directly on that goal, while using the tools and services they provide for a range of model management and operations.”
Developing generative AI tools
With AI embedded at the core of its platform, Workday leverages AWS technologies such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker JumpStart to develop generative AI capabilities that help customers manage their workforce and financial assets. For example, Workday is using AWS generative AI capabilities to help customers create job descriptions in minutes versus hours, analyze and correct contracts for more accurate revenue reporting, and create personalized employee talent highlights.
Workday is also teaming up with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to experiment with new applications of generative AI capabilities and to identify new use cases. As a result, Workday is deepening its use of Amazon SageMaker to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) by implementing model guardrails and responsible AI policies and evaluating generative AI use cases for production.
Increasing native integrations for developers to build custom applications
Workday is also expanding its native integrations with Amazon Web Services to enable Workday developers and customers to apply AWS technologies to build custom applications. Customers can now use their Workday data along with AWS technologies, including AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon S3, Amazon Textract, and Amazon Translate, in Workday Extend to build customized apps for finance and HR processes more securely and at scale. This deeper integration is designed to help customers improve the developer experience, build customized apps that can reduce operational costs, and respond to unplanned spikes in demand and resource disruptions.
Expanding joint go-to-market collaboration
As part of the expanded partnership, Workday and AWS will invest in joint sales and go-to-market initiatives. These initiatives will help accelerate new Workday customer acquisition and raise awareness around the availability of Workday on the AWS Marketplace, in addition to helping Workday customers that run on AWS launch preconfigured Workday solutions. Running Workday on AWS will give Workday customers near-zero downtime maintenance windows and help them comply with regional data residency laws and regulatory requirements.
“Since 2008, AWS and Workday have worked together to help thousands of customers across every industry accelerate cloud migrations and drive faster, more intelligent financial and workforce decisions,” said Kathrin Renz, vice president of AWS Industries. “With AWS as a preferred cloud services provider, Workday can quickly develop new ways to help organizations around the globe become more responsive and data-focused. We look forward to deepening our partnership across joint customer workstreams and new innovations and developing generative AI capabilities to help companies around the world move faster and with greater certainty.”