This year at Workday Rising, the energy was impossible to miss. With more than 30,000 attendees from 76 countries, including over 1,300 higher education participants, the event felt vibrant—and a little overwhelmed. Workday made bold announcements with three acquisitions in recent months, a major product announcement with Workday Data Cloud, and a pathway to monetize its AI and Data Cloud products. These announcements reshape how Workday is positioned in the market to manage data, increase automation, and bring AI to high-value use cases.
The central storyline was all about Workday’s Illuminate AI agents across HR, finance, and industry. These aren’t just generative AI features; they’re designed to improve critical business processes. For example, the Performance Agent helps to streamline reviews, the Financial Close Agent simplifies one of the most complex workflows in finance, and the Academic Requirements and Student Administration Agents built specifically for higher education are targeted at high priority problems in higher ed.
These announcements landed alongside a wave of acquisitions, partnerships, and platform updates. Workday is now working directly with Microsoft to connect Copilot Studio, Entra ID, and Purview to the Workday Agent System of Record. On the data side, partnerships with Snowflake, Databricks, and Salesforce will allow zero-copy access to core HR and finance data via the new Workday Data Cloud, and a zero-copy data lake that will eventually include the Workday Student data. The acquisition of Sana provides Workday with a new chat-based interface to invoke Workday and third-party agents to carry out complex tasks. Further, with Workday Build and the recently acquired Flowise Agent Builder giving customers the ability to create their own AI agents, you start to see how the pieces fit together into an open, extensible ecosystem.
For higher education specifically, the focus was on compliance, automation, and student support. New agents are being built to help institutions improve the transfer credit evaluation process, build complex curriculum rules directly from the catalog, and help students build better schedules and understand the complexities of the degree plans and institutional policies. Furthermore, Workday announced an agent targeted at providing additional reminders to faculty to submit their grades, and the ability for faculty to respond by asking the Agent to go ahead and submit their final grades to Workday, assuming they are ready. Other announcements were made that address NCAA and state-level reporting, tuition remission, and international student needs like SEVIS reporting. Compliance may not be the flashiest feature, but it is one of the most critical, and institutions in the room knew it.
The reaction we heard across institutions was one of cautious optimism, with excitement about automation and relief at seeing Workday finally expose its data externally. They see agents as potentially practical tools for compliance and efficiency, not just experiments.
In higher education, the potential to reduce administrative burden stood out. Automating student lifecycle tasks, generating academic requirements, and ensuring compliance with FERPA and other regulations resonated with leaders who are often stretched thin.
There were also strong examples of success. The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) was highlighted as an institution that has embraced every AI release from Workday, serving as proof that these tools can be adopted at scale. At the same time, analysts and leaders on stage raised thoughtful questions about explainability, governance, and how institutions should think about managing risk while embracing AI.
Workday also announced it new method to monetize agentic AI, Data Cloud, and—more interestingly—API access to Workday. These products will all be paid for via Flex Credits, which can be bought in bundles of credits. The cost of a credit and number of credits per agent invocation or API call were not revealed. These changes will come in early 2026, and executives claimed that customers would be granted free credits to be able to begin using agents (and pay for roughly their current API usage.) This will be a very important period for customers to pay close attention to new contract terms.
For us, the biggest takeaway from Rising 2025 is that Workday is positioning AI agents not as bolt-ons, but as the very core of how work will get done. It’s a shift from experimentation to execution. For institutions, the opportunity is clear: automate the tasks that weigh down staff, stay compliant in an increasingly complex environment, and deliver better experiences for students and employees. How much they’ll pay for this is not fully clear at this time.
Perhaps the most important signal is Workday’s shift toward openness. From Workday’s Microsoft and Snowflake partnerships to low-code agent builders and direct data access, this is no longer the walled garden of years past. It is a critical shift for Workday to compete directly against the free data management capabilities of its competitors.
As one keynote speaker put it, this is a moment where we all have permission to rethink everything we do. Coming out of Rising, that feels less like a hopeful statement and more like a call to action.
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