Workday is stepping up to stop AI agent sprawl

The enterprise technology landscape is shifting beneath our feet. As AI capabilities mature, organizations are beginning to deploy autonomous agents across critical business functions—a trend that will accelerate dramatically over the next 24 months. This evolution represents the next major inflection point in enterprise technology adoption, with governance implications that echo previous waves of shadow IT and virtualization sprawl but with significantly higher stakes.

Agents operating with decision-making authority across recruiting, finance, and operations introduce unprecedented control issues that organizations must address before widespread deployment. Workday is addressing this challenge with its new Agent System of Record, a centralized governance platform designed to manage the entire lifecycle of AI agents across the enterprise.

AI agents are coming—and they’re bringing governance nightmares with them

The promise of agentic AI is compelling: greater efficiency, faster decision-making, and a level of automation enterprises have never seen before. However, these benefits come with significant risks if AI agents are deployed without proper controls:

• Decision fragmentation: Autonomous agents make thousands of independent decisions daily across departments with zero coordination. This creates massive strategic blind spots as executives lose visibility into how these digital workers interpret and implement business rules.
• Security vulnerabilities: Every agent deployment increases an organization’s attack surface. These aren’t passive applications but active decision-makers with authorized system access. Traditional identity management is completely inadequate for continuously verifying and monitoring agent behaviors.
• Compliance chaos: Agents operate across regulatory boundaries, making judgment calls that create accountability vacuums. When regulators demand explanations for agent decisions, who will answer? Traditional compliance frameworks are useless when autonomous systems make thousands of micro-decisions using opaque reasoning.
• Financial black holes: Agent deployments create massive hidden costs without coherent tracking or optimization. Without specialized management tools, organizations blindly fund digital workers with zero ROI visibility.

As these semi-autonomous systems make increasingly consequential decisions, organizations without proper governance frameworks risk creating shadow digital workforces that operate beyond appropriate oversight—undermining executive control, regulatory compliance, and shareholder confidence.

Workday’s is bringing order to AI agent chaos with its Agent System of Record

Workday’s newly announced Agent System of Record represents the first comprehensive attempt to bring enterprise-grade governance to this emerging digital workforce. Building on the company’s experience managing human workforce identities and access, Workday is positioned as the central nervous system for AI agent management.

The approach has three key components:

1. Centralized lifecycle management for agent onboarding, security, monitoring, and governance
2. A role-based agent architecture that mirrors human workforce structures rather than simple task automation
3. An open ecosystem that can manage both Workday and third-party agents, regardless of whether agents are added via the marketplace or natively built by customers and/or partners

Today, most organizations deploy AI agents as isolated solutions, task-based bots to handle repetitive jobs. Workday’s approach is fundamentally different. Its role-based AI agents operate with structured roles, predefined skills, and centralized governance under one system of record (such as the recruiting agent, payroll agent, and financial auditing agent). Workday designed these agents to augment—not replace—human decision-making, ensuring a ‘human-in-the-loop’ approach for critical business functions. Additionally, the solution manages both Workday AI agents as well as third-party and custom AI agents, providing organizations with a unified framework for governing their entire AI workforce, regardless of origin.

The Agent System of Record provides several critical governance capabilities:

• Unified identity and access management: The system establishes a consistent identity framework for digital workers, including role definitions, skill configurations, and granular access controls. This approach treats AI agents as a new workforce category requiring governance models that parallel human workforce management.
• Comprehensive lifecycle governance: The system provides governance across the entire agent lifecycle—from initial configuration through continuous monitoring, performance optimization, and eventual retirement. This prevents abandoned agents from continuing to operate beyond their useful lifecycle.
• Financial management and optimization: The system incorporates cost tracking, budget forecasting, and ROI measurement capabilities designed specifically for digital workers. These tools help organizations monitor agent-related expenditures and optimize resource allocation based on business impact.
• Real-time monitoring and intervention: The system continuously monitors agent behaviors, decisions, and outcomes. When anomalies emerge, automated intervention capabilities take action. This acknowledges the unique risks of autonomous systems making independent decisions at machine speed.

The Bottom Line: Organizations that fail to implement comprehensive agent management frameworks risk creating shadow digital workforces that operate without proper oversight.

Five years from now, AI agents are expected to be as common as SaaS applications. Companies that put governance at the core of AI adoption will lead the market by scaling AI responsibly, securely, and profitably. Workday provides enterprises with a solid framework for effectively managing agents, accelerating this journey.