Workday Pumps New Agentic Capabilities into Extend Platform at DevCon

**Bob Evans** (0:00)
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. Earlier this week, Workday held its DevCon conference in Las Vegas. It was the biggest DevCon that Workday has ever had. They had 8,000 attendees. And of course, these days, the star of the show was new agentic capabilities that, and in this case, that Workday is pumping into its Workday Extend platform. So the one, you know, there was a number of things going on at this event. What was really interesting to me was a round table with a Workday product and technology executive and four builders of Workday technologies from various partners.
One of the things that came up there was their excitement about Developer Agent, which is one of the biggest announcements the company made during DevCon, that this Developer Agent being added to a number of new capabilities within the Extend platform. And I listened to this whole roundtable discussion, and a number of things jumped out. I just want to share some of the reactions with you because they give a sense of what's going on here among developers in the beginning here in the early stages of the AI revolution, what they're able to do, right? And as you see, companies like Workday go from being suppliers of packaged applications now to companies that offer applications plus the opportunity to extend them plus agents that are offered by Workday or its partners and its customers can build as well. And then you've also got the data capabilities that Workday is adding here to ensure that all those new things are being built, can take full advantage of the great data that customers have. It was just a very exciting time. And I want to share with you some of the commentary that came out in this roundtable. One person called it a real game changer, this Developer Agent, and she said, what used to take me days, I can now do in about one hour.
Another person said that, you know, with the Workday ensuring, requiring, that all the needs there, the guardrails around security, trust and governance are there, she said, I can build now without losing any sleep every night.
You can be very confident that everything's taken care of, this is organized, it's gonna be fully compliant with what's happening. Somebody else said, there are no barriers anymore, anything is possible. They said, ensuring that we get the access to the right tools, plus we have the access responsibly to the right sorts of data, then anything is possible. Another person echoed that saying, there's endless possibilities now for developers, and it doesn't take nearly as long as it used to, to deliver something of high value. And yet another person on the panel said, you know, we've heard all this talk about how AI is gonna wipe out developer jobs, software engineering jobs. I think there's a lot of misperse that actually hiring for software engineers here in the AI era is way up. So it was not just sort of a rousing show of, you know, this community of developers, right? You can understand at a developer-oriented event, they'd be very excited about what's possible here.
It isn't just, hey, we, as a profession, have sort of survived this uneven series of changes going on because of AI. But instead, we're not only surviving that, we're gonna have chances to do more than we ever have before, to do new things, better things, achieve more in a shorter period of time. And I really got this sense from all of these people that they're enjoying their work more than ever before because of some of these agentic tools like Developer Agent that Workday has released here. They see that now the work that the time, the effort, the energy, the brain muscle that they are putting into their work is gonna result in better output, more impact on the business, more capability because the technology through these agents is both taking care of a lot of what was before, sort of lower level, not very interesting, not real satisfying work, but it's also ensuring as the one roundtable participant said, everything around security, policies, trust, governance, all of that is taken into account and wired in. There's no way to go outside those lines. And so, hey, it's not bad to be able to sleep at night. So very, very interesting roundtable there at Workday DevCon, describing what's going on with Developer Agent, which is one of the key new products, the Workday, introduced at DevCon for its Extend platform. Thanks for being with us here at Cloud Wars Minute. I hope you have a fantastic day.