Workday® Assistant – Chatbot is Here!

Chatbots are all the rage, and Workday® Assistant is no exception, blending ease-of use with killer functionality. Most companies will find use cases that make this tool a “must-have”.

Workday® Assistant is a digital assistant chatbot designed to help you and your team conversationally complete tasks and retrieve information within Workday.

Some background: Jagan Jami reports in a recent post that a Chatbot is “essentially a software that is powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence and can carry human-like conversations.” He makes a compelling argument of integrating chatbots with ERP systems like Workday®. Advantages include better user experience, enhanced speed, messaging personalization, and task automation.

Jonathan Duarte provides some great insights on Chatbots’ use for Recruiting. The use cases are increasing – some of which include Applying by Text, Prescreening, and Task Automation. Duarte states, “2020 is going to be the year of widespread adoption of recruitment automation and chatbots.” Chatbots can be built using rules and/or Artificial Intelligence (AI). A Chatbot uses natural language processing and learns from user interactions and grows its capability over time. And with its growing popularity, it’s fantastic Workday® has embraced this technology. Messaging apps have overtaken social media apps recently in popularity. Younger users will no doubt embrace using a Chatbot in Workday®.

How to get this tool up and running, and use cases:

Workday® Assistant is a Chatbot that allows some common tasks to be accomplished with ease either directly through Workday® or through existing integrations with Slack or MS Teams. The overview of this functionality is here on Community. Workday® Assistant in a opt in feature and can be turned on for security groups desired by a client. Workday® Assistant is available now for English, delivered in the 2020R1 release. There is no additional fee and does require a subscription to the Innovation Services and a signed Innovation Services Agreement. The Workday Customer Success Manager can help. It can also integrate with other platforms such as Microsoft Teams® and Slack®.

Currently, there are 11 areas for use cases available to choose with Workday® Assistant:

• Worker Data

• Performance

• Time Off

• Pay

• Benefits

• Career

• Change Job

• Expenses

• Recruiting

• Time Tracking

• Custom Help Contact

ESS would be a prime area to incorporate the Chatbot. Use cases might include users checking Benefit details, seeing Expense reports or reviewing Payroll data. Change Job is another great use case as it can be confusing for managers and administrators. Incorporating Change Job Templates would also streamline this business process.

The setup for using Workday® Assistant is simple to accomplish. The Community documentation is brief and includes basic steps in Security Groups, Tenant Setup options, and Domain Security configuration. Some caveats include no Proxy use, In-flight changes, Business Process Policy Security, and possible delay in service activation.

On Community, clients can find a FAQ page where they can post questions and see answers to posted client questions. Also available is a How To page for addressing trouble issues. The main page also provides some guidance for introducing Workday® Assistant to users, such as with Announcements on a Home Page.

Workday® Assistant: What’s New & Roadmap

The Workday® Assistant What's New Post provides an overview and guidance for this feature.

Future features planned in the Roadmap include Additional Languages, Approvals, Learning, External Payslips and more.

Contact us for more information or support if you would like some help in standing up/testing this fantastic new feature set from Workday®. Contact us at : info@teamUpHR.com.