The AI Already Inside Workday Knows More About Your Workforce Than You Do
- Holly Hartman
- Apr 11
- 10 min read
FWS Ethical AI Series
By Holly Hartman, Fractional Chief AI Officer, FWS Enterprise LLC | April 2026
Workday is where your organization stores its most sensitive workforce data. It is also where AI is now making inferences about your employees, ranking your candidates, and flagging who might leave — often without the HR team realizing those decisions are being shaped before a human ever looks at the file.
The Scenario That Started This Conversation
Picture your director of talent acquisition. It is 9 a.m. She opens Workday Recruiting and pulls up a new requisition for a senior operations manager. The platform surfaces a ranked list. The top five have green indicators. A dozen more are yellow. Four names are grayed out near the bottom.
She does not ask who built the ranking model. She does not ask what data it trained on. She clicks the top name and schedules a screening call.
What she does not know is this: one of those grayed-out candidates applied for more than 100 positions at companies using Workday. He is African American, over 40, and has a disability. He has never received a single interview request. Not a hypothetical. That is the lead plaintiff in Mobley v. Workday — an active federal class action that, as of April 2026, is still moving through the Northern District of California with potentially hundreds of millions of affected applicants.
The question your organization needs to answer is not whether Workday's AI is capable. It is whether you know what it is deciding, on whose behalf, and whether you could defend those decisions in front of a judge.
Let's Be Fair
Workday is a genuinely powerful platform. More than 65 percent of Fortune 500 companies use it. [1] It integrates payroll, benefits, compliance, performance, learning, and recruiting in a single system. For HR teams managing thousands of employees across multiple locations, it is a legitimate operational backbone.
The AI features Workday has built are also genuinely useful in the right conditions. Skills Cloud helps organizations map workforce capabilities they may have never formally tracked. HiredScore, acquired by Workday in early 2024, surfaces internal candidates who might otherwise be overlooked. [2] Workday Illuminate, the next-generation AI platform launched in late 2024 and significantly expanded through 2025, brings predictive intelligence to HR and finance workflows. [3]
The problem is not the technology. The problem is that most organizations activated these features without a governance framework to match them. And unlike a misconfigured Slack channel or a browser extension that overshares meeting notes, ungoverned AI inside your HCM platform is making decisions about your people.
What Workday AI Is Actually Doing Inside Your Organization
Skills Cloud: The System Is Inferring Skills Your Employees Never Claimed
Traditional skills matching is straightforward: a candidate says they have a skill, a job requires that skill, the system finds the overlap. Workday Skills Cloud does something fundamentally different. It analyzes job history, learning activity, performance data, and external market signals to infer skills that employees have never explicitly identified on their profiles. [4]
The practical result: your employees are being evaluated on AI-generated attributes they did not create and may not even know exist. That inferred skills profile then drives internal job recommendations, succession planning decisions, and learning path assignments. If the inference is wrong, the person loses opportunities. If it reflects bias in the underlying data, the person may face systemic disadvantage.
The governance gap: Skills Cloud is used by more than 2,100 organizations and 30 percent of the Fortune 500. [5] How many of those organizations have reviewed what the system is inferring about their workforce?
HiredScore: The Acquisition That Changed the Risk Profile
Workday acquired HiredScore in early 2024. This matters beyond a product announcement. Workday noted at the time that it already had a certified bi-directional integration with HiredScore before the acquisition — meaning HiredScore data and recommendations had already been flowing into Workday Recruiting in a structured way. [6] The acquisition deepened and formalized what was already operating inside the platform.
Today, HiredScore AI for Recruiting and HiredScore AI for Talent Mobility are part of Workday's unified talent acquisition suite. The system ranks candidates, surfaces past applicants, suggests recommended action items, and syncs status updates back into Workday Recruiting automatically. [7]
That last part is worth pausing on. A recruiter sees a recommended action — advance this candidate, pass on that one — and the system syncs their decision automatically. The line between AI-assisted and AI-directed gets blurry very fast when the system is pre-loading the outcome.
Workday Illuminate and Agentic AI: What Is Coming Next
Workday Illuminate is the platform layer powering a new generation of AI agents embedded across HR and finance workflows. The Recruiter Agent automates candidate sourcing, outreach, and interview scheduling. The Succession Agent makes talent development recommendations. The Business Process Copilot Agent configures new HR workflows. The Case Agent handles HR ticket resolution. [8] These agents are moving from early access to general availability across 2025 and 2026.
Workday's AI is fueled by more than one trillion transactions per year. [9] That is not a flaw. It is exactly what makes the platform powerful. It is also exactly why governance cannot be an afterthought.
Two numbers from this case deserve your full attention. First, Workday's own court filings represented that 1.1 billion applications were rejected using its software tools during the relevant period. [11] Second, the court has now ordered Workday to produce a list of every customer that enabled HiredScore AI features. If your organization is on that list and those tools produced discriminatory outcomes, you may not be a bystander in future litigation. You may be the next defendant.
Workday denies liability and maintains the claims are without merit. The court has made no final finding of discrimination. What the court has found is that the allegations are plausible enough to proceed at every level — and that finding itself is a governance signal every Workday customer should take seriously.
The Governance Gap No One Is Talking About
Here is the most important thing to understand about Workday AI governance: there is no single master AI switch. There is a collection of features embedded across modules — Recruiting, Skills Cloud, Talent, Finance, Illuminate — each with its own configuration, default state, and data access. Whether any given feature is active in your tenant depends on which modules you licensed, when, and how your implementation was configured. There is no universal default state across all customers. [12]
Workday's public documentation describes what the features do clearly. What it does not provide is a universal admin map of which features are active in your tenant right now. The only way to know what is running is to audit your own tenant, module by module. Start with Workday Community or contact your customer success rep directly.
On data training, Workday publicly states: 'We never share customer data to train third-party public models.' [13] That is an important and specific commitment. What it does not fully address is whether customer or usage data is used to improve Workday-owned models. A 2023 Workday executive interview indicated the company uses anonymized customer data to train smaller domain-specific models. That ambiguity is a governance gap worth naming in your vendor contract.
For any organization using Workday AI, the governance question is not whether the features are useful. It is whether your HR team thinks it is using an assistant while the system is operationally shaping the candidate funnel.
Three Questions for Three Audiences
\Audience | Question to Ask This Week |
HR and People Leaders | Can you produce a list of every Workday AI feature currently active in your tenant — what it does, what data it touches, and whether a human reviews its output before it affects a hiring or workforce decision? |
Legal and Compliance | If your organization received a subpoena today related to Workday AI screening decisions going back to September 2020, could you produce an audit trail showing meaningful human review at every decision point? |
The C-Suite | Does your vendor contract with Workday address AI liability, bias audit rights, and your right to disable specific AI features? If not, when was it last reviewed? |
Three Things to Do This Week
Run a Workday AI feature inventory. Work with your Workday admin to identify which AI-powered features are active across Recruiting, Skills Cloud, Talent, and any Illuminate modules. Because feature activation is tenant and contract-specific, there is no universal path — start with Workday Community documentation or contact your Workday customer success rep directly. If your team cannot produce that list within a week, that is your first governance finding.
Ask your recruiter team how they are using HiredScore recommendations. Find out whether AI-generated rankings are reviewed before action is taken, or whether recommended actions are typically accepted without additional evaluation. Document what you find.
Pull your Workday contract and check for AI-specific provisions. Look for language on bias auditing, data training rights, AI feature disablement, and liability. If those provisions are not in your current agreement, that is a conversation to have with procurement and legal before your next renewal.
Governance Is the Organization's Job
Workday says it is committed to responsible AI. Its public responsible AI materials emphasize transparency, human-centric design, and bias mitigation. It uses independent third-party auditors to evaluate HiredScore outcomes. That matters.
It does not change the fact that your organization is the one making workforce decisions. It does not change the fact that federal courts have now ruled an AI vendor can be held liable as an agent of the employers using its tools — and that employers who enabled those tools are next in line. It does not change the fact that Mobley v. Workday is still active, still expanding, and still producing rulings that reshape the legal landscape around AI hiring every few months.
AI governance is not about being anti-technology. It is about making sure that when your organization uses AI to make decisions about people, those decisions are explainable, auditable, and defensible. Workday can give you the tools. Governance is yours to build.
Where Do You Stand?
Governance does not start with a policy document. It starts with a leader who decided to ask the question. If you are reading this, you already did. The next step is knowing where you stand.
What to Do Next |
Join Holly live on May 18th for the free AI Governance Webinar: Does Your Organization Have the Right Seats at the AI Governance Table? 60 minutes. Free 7-page Governance Committee Charter included. futureworkforcesystems.com/ai-governance-webinar |
This is Part 5 of the Shadow AI in Your Tech Stack series. Every post covers a platform your organization likely already runs. futureworkforcesystems.com/blog |
Ready to go deeper? A 30-minute conversation with Holly won't cost you anything — and it might save you the thing that costs everything. futureworkforcesystems.com/contact |
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Shadow AI in Workday?
Shadow AI in Workday refers to AI features embedded across the platform — including Skills Cloud, HiredScore recruiting tools, predictive attrition analytics, and Illuminate agents — that are actively making or influencing workforce decisions without organizational awareness, governance frameworks, or meaningful human oversight in place.
What data does Workday AI access?
Workday AI draws from worker profiles, job data, performance and talent data, learning history, recruiting pipelines, and in some configurations external market data. There is no universal default state — which features are active depends on which modules you licensed and how your tenant was configured. Confirm through your Workday admin console and Workday Community documentation.
How do I review HiredScore AI settings in Workday?
HiredScore AI features are managed at the tenant level within Workday Recruiting administration settings. Because configuration is tenant-specific, the exact review path should be confirmed through Workday Community documentation or your Workday customer success contact.
Does Workday use our employee data to train its AI models?
Workday publicly states it does not share customer data to train third-party public models. Its materials indicate it may use anonymized customer data to train domain-specific models it owns. The exact boundary should be addressed in your vendor contract.
What should enterprise leaders do about Workday AI governance?
Start with a feature inventory of every active AI capability in your Workday tenant. Review how AI outputs are used in hiring and workforce decisions. Confirm whether meaningful human review occurs before AI recommendations drive action. Check your vendor contract for AI-specific provisions including bias audit rights and data training restrictions. If those provisions are absent, prioritize adding them at renewal.
About the Author
Holly Hartman is the founder of Future Workforce Systems (FWS) and serves as a Fractional Chief AI Officer for mid-to-large organizations building AI governance infrastructure. FWS helps organizations move from AI-anxious to AI-ready — and from guardrails to governance — always through an Ethical AI lens. Because how we adopt AI matters as much as whether we adopt it.
Shadow AI in Your Tech Stack Series
Part 1 — The Bot in the Room (AI Notetakers) | Part 2 — The AI Already Inside Your CRM | Part 3 — We Bought Copilot (Microsoft 365) | Part 4 — The Shadow AI Hiding in Your Browser | Part 5 — Workday (this post) | Part 6 — Coming Soon
Disclosure
Published April 2026 | Last Reviewed April 2026
AI-Assisted Content: This post was developed with the assistance of AI research and drafting tools, reviewed and shaped by Holly Hartman's professional expertise and human editorial oversight. FWS uses AI tools consistent with the Ethical AI practices we teach — transparently, intentionally, and with human judgment at the center.
Rapid Change Notice: AI platforms evolve rapidly — features, defaults, privacy policies, and settings can change within weeks. Statistics and vendor information reflect what was publicly available at time of publication. Verify specific settings directly with your vendor before making governance decisions.
Not Legal Advice: This content is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, compliance, or professional advice. Consult qualified legal and technology professionals for guidance specific to your organization.
Spotted Something? contact@futureworkforcesystems.com
Sources
Futurum Research, 'Workday Rising 2025: AI Agents, Data Cloud, and Flex Credits' — https://futurumgroup.com/insights/workday-rising-2025-ai-agents-data-cloud-and-flex-credits-unveiled/
Workday Newsroom, 'Workday Announces Intent to Acquire HiredScore' (Feb 2024) — https://newsroom.workday.com/2024-02-26-Workday-Announces-Intent-to-Acquire-HiredScore
Workday Newsroom, 'Workday Illuminate Expands with New AI Agents' (Sept 2025) — https://newsroom.workday.com/2025-09-16-Workday-Illuminate-TM-Expands-with-New-AI-Agents-for-HR,-Finance,-and-Industry
Workday Skills Cloud product page; Harvard D3 Institute, 'A Cloud of Skills' — https://www.workday.com/en-us/products/human-capital-management/skills-cloud.html
Workday Skills Cloud product page (2026) — https://www.workday.com/en-us/products/human-capital-management/skills-cloud.html
Workday Blog, 'Workday Acquisition of HiredScore: A Conversation with Athena Karp' (Mar 2024) — https://blog.workday.com/en-us/workday-acquisition-hiredscore-conversation-athena-karp.html
HR Brew, 'Workday Launches New AI Capabilities and Expands HiredScore Offerings' (Aug 2024) — https://www.hr-brew.com/stories/2024/08/01/technically-hr-workday-launches-new-ai-capabilities-and-expands-hiredscore-offerings-to-clients
Workday Newsroom, 'Workday Illuminate Expands with New AI Agents' (Sept 2025) — https://newsroom.workday.com/2025-09-16-Workday-Illuminate-TM-Expands-with-New-AI-Agents-for-HR,-Finance,-and-Industry
Workday Responsible AI and Bias Mitigation page — https://www.workday.com/en-us/legal/responsible-ai-and-bias-mitigation.html
FairNow, 'Workday Lawsuit Over AI Hiring Bias' (updated July 2025) — https://fairnow.ai/workday-lawsuit-resume-screening/
OutSolve, 'Workday AI Lawsuit Explained: Implications for HR' (updated March 2026) — https://www.outsolve.com/blog/workday-ai-lawsuit-explained-implications-for-hr
Workday Community documentation — https://community.workday.com
Diginomica, 'Workday Rising 23: Workday Reveals Its Approach to Generative AI and Customer Data Privacy' (2023) — https://diginomica.com/workday-rising-23-workday-reveals-its-approach-generative-ai-and-customer-data-privacy
Law and the Workplace, 'AI Bias Lawsuit Against Workday Reaches Next Stage' (June 2025) — https://www.lawandtheworkplace.com/2025/06/ai-bias-lawsuit-against-workday-reaches-next-stage-as-court-grants-conditional-certification-of-adea-claim/
NYC Dept. of Consumer and Worker Protection, Automated Employment Decision Tools — https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/about/automated-employment-decision-tools.page
Seyfarth Shaw LLP, 'Mobley v. Workday: Court Holds AI Service Providers Could Be Directly Liable' (2024) — https://www.seyfarth.com/news-insights/insights/mobley-v-workday-court-holds-ai-service-providers-could-be-directly-liable-for-employment-discrimination-under-agent-theory.html
HR Dive, 'Judge Orders Workday to Supply List of Employers That Enabled AI Hiring Tech' (July 2025) — https://www.hrdive.com/news/workday-must-supply-list-of-employers-who-enabled-hiredscore-ai/756506/
Miller Shah LLP, 'Federal Court Lets AI Employment Discrimination Case Against Workday Move Forward' (May 2025) — https://millershah.com/blog/ai-employment-discrimination/
Comments