Salesforce and Workday formed a strategic partnership that revolves around a unified data foundation that connects Workday financial and HR data with Salesforce CRM data to streamline workflows.
With the move, Workday and Salesforce are combining forces to deliver an AI-powered assistant for employee use cases that include onboarding, health benefits and career development.
The upshot here is that the Salesforce and Workday partnership adds seamless integrations across the platforms to extend into workflows. ServiceNow has become an increasing threat to HR and CRM use cases championed by Workday and Salesforce.
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Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang said the integration of business processes and data is critical to CxOs. "The shared data foundation between ;Workday and Salesforce will enable these partners to deliver AI capabilities that could completely transform the employee experience," said Wang. Wang added:
"Organizations are having a tough time bringing all their datasets from multiple systems into one place. Workday and Salesforce are often in the same organization and represent a large bucket of data that will be needed for AI. Executives want to ask how many FTE's do they have in an area and whether or not they should add more people in sales lead generation or marketing. To do that, the data and the process have to come togeether in one place."
Here are the moving parts of the Salesforce and Workday partnership:
- The partnership combines Salesforce's Agentforce Platform with Einstein AI with Workday AI and the platform.
- The AI agent will be powered by the unified data foundation and natural language. The AI employee service agent will run on Einstein 1 Platform and Workday AI.
- According to the companies, the AI employee service agent will use LLMs built on the common data platform, which is built on Salesforce Data Cloud.
- Salesforce and Workday said the combination will enable employees to take action and automate tasks.
- Workday will be natively integrated inside Slack.
- The partnership is aimed at boosting productivity for joint customers.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the partnership with Workday "to jointly build an employee service agent" will enable employees to "get answers, learn new skills, solve problems and take action quickly and efficiently."
Carl Eschenbach, CEO of Workday, added that the partnership will boost employee experiences with genAI. For employers, the common Salesforce and Workday data layer will improve workforce planning, financial planning and sales enablement.
