Workday Looks To Expand Its AI Agent Partner Ecosystem With New Program

With the Workday Agent Partner Network, along with the new Agent Gateway introduced Tuesday, the cloud HR and finance application company is providing support and opportunities for “innovation” partners developing AI agents that work with the Workday platform.

HR and finance cloud application giant Workday is launching a new partner program that encompasses the company’s ecosystem of technology and channel partners who are building AI agents that connect with Workday’s Agent System of Record platform.

Workday, which is holding its Workday DevCon 2025 event in Las Vegas this week, also unveiled Agent Gateway, new agent-to-agent technology that customers will use to connect and manage AI agents from Workday and partners joining the new Workday Agent Partner Network.

“Our customers know that [AI] agents are going to be an important part of the future and we want to give them a responsible and trusted way to manage all that,” said Matt Brandt, Workday senior vice president of global partners, in an interview with CRN. “I think a lot of customers now don’t really know what’s happening and what’s going to happen in the agentic world.”

The Agent Partner Network initiative marks Workday’s latest expansion of its channel efforts. One year ago, the application company launched Built on Workday, a program to recruit and assist ISV and development partners who build applications and software add-ons and extensions that run on the Workday platform and sell them through the Workday Marketplace.

“Our number one job is to serve our customers. And what they need from us is…more innovation because there’s just a constant demand for capabilities from Workday, because our customers trust us and they want to put more work onto our platform,” Brandt said. “We want to harness all the partner innovation and deliver it faster to our customers alongside what we built, which is why we created Built on Workday in the first place.”

Workday, founded in 2005 and headquartered in Pleasanton, Calif., develops a cloud-based suite of applications for human resource management, finance, planning and spending management. Today the company describes itself as offering an “AI platform that manages people, money and agents.”

Workday largely focused on direct sales for much of its history with an emphasis on working with integration partners. But the vendor has been expanding its channel efforts in recent years, including with Built on Workday and now the Agent Partner Network.

Brandt said the number of Workday’s technology, service, and ISV and developer partners has grown by a factor of five in the last two years. (Workday currently has some 600 “innovation” software developer partners, according to Brandt.) Today there are 72 applications available on the Workday Marketplace and the channel chief expects that to reach more than 300 by the end of the year.

The Agent Partner Network “is a continuation of that desire to expand our ecosystem to include not only application vendors and integration partners, but now agents,” he said. “We are looking for application partners who can help us expand into new geographies, who can help us address more specific industry requirements, and that’s true of agent [developers] as well now.”

Agent Infrastructure

In February, Workday debuted the Workday Agent System of Record (ASOR) software for managing entire fleets of AI agents – both from Workday and third-party companies – in a single location. ASOR also provides agent governance and accountability capabilities to oversee autonomous agents that perform tasks involving sensitive data, such as HR and employee payroll information, and auditable financial processes.

(Workday has been developing its own AI agent products on the company’s Illuminate AI platform, which debuted in September 2024, and now offers 13 agents that work with data-intensive processes around payroll and financial audits.)

Workday sees the future workplace being made up of a combination of human employees and AI agents.

“The idea here is that as workforces change with new technologies, particularly around agentic AI, these will essentially be new workers, [which] will be coupled with human labor,” Brandt said. “And they’ll have tasks of their own and responsibilities and processes to run. And that requires, we believe, a place to manage them in the same way you would manage human employees. You’ll need to manage agents.”

“And so as, really, the global leader in managing human capital, with all the roles and assignments and onboarding and performance – all the things you have to do with people, we think the same construct exists for agents. As the workforce changes and there’s more agents to go along with people, we think they have to be managed by somebody, and we think that we’re best suited in the market to do that,” Brandt said.

Today’s announcements build on that ASOR technology. The new Agent Gateway is designed to provide an entry point for AI agents to engage with Workday and enable customers to connect and manage AI agents from Workday and partners in the Agent Partner Network within the Workday Agent System of Record. Agent Gateway uses shared protocols including MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent-to-Agent protocol) to allow agents to collaborate and exchange information.

Just as Workday has been recruiting ISVs and solution providers that develop software around the Workday platform, the company is seeing more development partners building AI agents for Workday. Brandt said new agents help expand adoption of the Workday platform into new geographies and new vertical industries, as well as expand the scope of Workday application skills and tasks.

One example: Paradox develops an interview scheduling agent that, working with ASOR, integrates with the Workday Recruiting Application. Other agent developers working with Workday include Amazon Web Services, Auditoria.AI, Compa, Deloitte, Glean, IBM, Kainos and Workboard, according to the company.

“AWS is powering the future of AI agent development through Amazon Bedrock’s

comprehensive foundation model ecosystem and enterprise-grade development framework," said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Agentic AI at AWS, in a statement.

"With Workday’s Agent System of Record, organizations will be much better positioned to ethically manage all these agents. We’re excited to collaborate with Workday to reshape the future of work through agentic AI. Together, we’ll empower organizations to unlock exponential value while maintaining our shared commitment to security and responsible AI,” Sivasubramanian said.

Agent Partner Network

Hence the need for the Workday Agent Partner Network. While the network is under the broader Workday partner program umbrella, Brandt said it recognizes that partners developing AI agents have unique technology and support needs. The new Agent Gateway is a key component and agent developers can offer their products on the Workday Marketplace.

Brandt acknowledged that AI agent pricing, licensing and go-to-market models are rapidly evolving and the Agent Partner Network will have to likewise evolve.

Brandt expects the companies joining the Agent Partner Network will be a combination of both existing partners – application developers expanding into AI agents – and new partners focused on agent technology.

“What’s really important for us is to bring in net-new partners who are agentic-first companies,” the channel chief said.

Brandt says it’s too soon to say just which tasks and processes will be performed by more traditional applications and which ones by autonomous AI agents. So Workday continues to push on both technology fronts with partners.

“We’re a year into this with Built on Workday, with app building, and we’re just starting now with agent building. Where it goes, I don’t know, but there’s just so much innovation potential here in both contexts,” he said.