Last week, Salesforce and Workday took their partnership to the next level.
In doing so, the businesses pledged to deliver a personalized AI assistant for employee service use cases.
To lay the foundations for that AI assistant, the tech giants will establish a common data foundation that centralizes CRM, HR, and financial data.
Workday will leverage the Salesforce Zero Copy Partner Network to make that possible.
According to Rebecca Wetteman, CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir, this data convergence is the most critical part of the announcement. She told CX Today:
This is about bringing customer, employee, and financial data together to leverage AI, integrating the Workday and Salesforce platforms so that Salesforce Service Agent bots can respond to employee questions about HR and finance.
Those bots will leverage large language models (LLMs) to communicate in natural language and perform tasks for employees across Salesforce and Workday.
Think of career development tasks such as coordinating paperwork or provisioning resources. Now, consider employee questions for HR around paid time off (PTO), benefits, or healthcare plans. These are the types of jobs and queries the bot will automate.
When it comes to trickier questions or tasks, the assistant will perform “seamless” escalations and hand-offs to colleagues, according to Salesforce.
However, the AI assistant may still support employees in performing more complex tasks by proactively serving up relevant knowledge and data from that shared data foundation.
Employees will be able to engage with the AI assistant via Slack, with Workday set to become natively integrated inside the collaborations platform.
For those who utilize the existing Slack-Workday integration, the user experience won’t alter all that much. Ultimately, users will just interact with an intelligent bot more often than a human HR or finance person.
Nevertheless, that native integration supports Workday Benioff's vision for the collaborations platform as a business's HQ to deliver customer and employee success from anywhere.
Meanwhile, Workday also gets a unique benefit from the partnership, as it backdoors its way to the forefront of enterprise AI innovation. As Wetteman stated:
