Future of Work - A Workday Podcast

Why isn’t 98.5% accuracy good enough for enterprise AI? Because when the task is payroll, finance, or compliance, an answer has to be right every time and follow the rules of the business.

In this episode of the Future of Work podcast, host Stephanie Felix talks with Josh Zywien of Workday and Erik Pounds of NVIDIA about what it takes for enterprises to trust AI agents at scale, and why the future of enterprise AI is open, specialized, and trusted.

Hear from the architects behind the rollouts of Rising’s biggest product announcements, the analysts breaking down what they mean for the industry, and leaders exploring this marked shift from reactive administration to intelligent orchestration.

Workplace psychologist Liz Pavese, Ph.D. and economist Aaron Terrazas break down the structural mechanics shaping today’s global workforce. Unpacking the "Loyalty Illusion" inside a low-hire, low-fire, low-move economy, this discussion pairs Workday’s proprietary global workforce data with psychological frameworks and market forces to explore the shifting worker dynamics brought on by AI adoption.

The walled garden model built double-digit-billion-dollar software companies, but it won't survive the shift from human users to AI agents. Rogerio Almeida and Tod Sacerdoti explain why traditional walled gardens fall short in an agentic world and how open standards like MCP redefine the future of enterprise ERP platforms.

Workday Chief Responsible AI Officer Kelly Trindel and SAS VP of AI Ethics, Governance, and Social Impact Reggie Townsend explore how the choices organizations make about AI today will shape how people work tomorrow. From preserving human judgment and developing future leaders to translating organizational values into practice, they discuss why responsible AI governance requires looking beyond what technology can do—or regulation allows—to what kind of workplace we want AI to help create.

AI usage is up across the enterprise—but according to Workday's Global Research, 82% of employees say their AI tools still feel disconnected from their actual, day-to-day work, creating the very friction AI was supposed to remove. 

In this episode of Future of Work, Nancy Weitl, VP of HCM Products at Workday, is joined by Stacey Harris, HR Industry Analyst and Chief Research Officer at Sapient Insights, to unpack why "busy with AI" isn't the same as productive, why most companies are tracking the wrong AI metrics entirely, and what it actually takes to close the value gap.

Most companies leave HR out of AI strategy until the big decisions are made, and then wonder why their tech investments yield minimal enterprise returns. Atlassian’s Avani Prabhakar joins Workday’s Ashley Goldsmith to explain why traditional HR models are becoming obsolete, and how human-first leadership is the only way to unlock AI value.

Most enterprise AI strategies chase the newest frontier model. Author and analyst Jon Reed says that's backwards. In this episode, Reed sits down with Workday's Jon Lexa to deconstruct why 90% of AI's real value comes from the system you build around the model, not the model itself, and what it takes to ground that system in real-time organizational truth.

In this episode, Workday leaders Dean Arnold and Jay Wieczorkowski reveal how a new era of agentic AI allows anyone to build custom, production-ready enterprise workflows using simple, natural-language prompts. Discover how open standards finally eliminate the trade-off between lightning-fast AI innovation and ironclad enterprise trust.