How Workday has shrunk its talent strategy for activating and strengthening AI skills to focus on three things

To find out where you are going, you need to know where you are.

Before Workday conceived any AI learning or adoption strategy for its workforce, leaders had to understand where employees were in both skills and feelings and identify their needs in the middle of this upheaval in the workplace.

“It's not just a technological transformation, it's really human,” said Chris Ernst, director of learning at workday. “Even if we are a technological business in Silicon Valley, when we started our upgrade trip on AI, we started with research, and we learned a lot.”

The company questioned employees to better understand the obstacles to the adoption of AI. What Workday discovered ended up informing the cornerstone of its AI adoption initiative: AI Daily.

According to the company, global discussion groups have revealed three key data points to build its strategy:

• 43% of working day employees lacked time to explore AI tools
• 37% said they didn't know how to use them effectively
• 37% revealed concerns about reliability and precision

“Once we have deeply understood our workmates,” said Ernst, referring to employees of the working day, “their needs, their concerns, their use cases, we went very large on this subject, and we launched a Upskilling business initiative … The purpose of this program is for all our 20,000 works to build the first to set up.”

Mindset. Changing workday mentalities is to give employees more exposure to AI tools and their capacities to really tackle reference fears on the impact of AI on their work.

“The room really concerns this fear and this concern,” Ernst told HR Brew. “The way we really worked on this … is through many events around the company.”

The company has launched its very first “fast ATHH”, inspired by the popular practice of great technology aimed at organizing hackathons, events for developers and teams to work together or in competition to solve problems or challenges with technology or a tool.

SKILLS. To approach the update in Workday, the learning team has created a digital academy for everything related to AI available for all employees. The content is organized by different user characters, so that employees can learn more about AI strategies or use cases according to their role or their specific project assigned to them.

The Academy is more used to choose your adventure: employees can identify exactly what they would like to do with AI, and the platform faces relevant training based on different personalities, such as “Innovator”, “Community” and “Analyst”, according to Ernst.

Habits. To promote good AI habits, Ernst asked all employees to set an objective of personal AI, to share this objective with their managers and to record quarterly on progress.

In addition, instead of communicating from top to bottom on the plans of the IA of senior executives, Workday has opened a town hall on a business scale to highlight the work of employees taking advantage of technology in an important or interesting manner which is really significant for workday affairs.

How are you doing!? “All this is to create the conditions to want to learn,” Ernst told HR Brew. “Our efficient are twice as much engaged in these technologies. We also found that those who are most committed to these technologies … believe that they have a 13% increase in the sense of having a career path. ”

Workday employees have reported that since the launch:

• 73% found that AI tools make them more productive;
• 50% said it provides them with new ideas; And
• 49% said it helps them be more creative.

“This is the largest business learning and development initiative that we have taken in 20 years as a business,” said Ernst.