The human resources landscape is evolving: it is now 2025, and one of the most lucrative and important jobs in the world has shifted from the hands of humans into the world of artificial intelligence. Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) is often on the front line of these set-up changes, whether it's addressing what needs to change to support increased agility, how to maintain workforce engagement, or what changes need to be made to optimize the operation. With a visionary approach to AI-powered technology for the enterprise, Workday is making the things you do every day even better – and developing enterprise applications that are more intuitive, accessible, and conversational.

This blog post examines the top changes coming in Workday HCM in 2025 and beyond—and explains why nailing these transformations with Workday HCM Training is essential for both HR professionals and business executives.

A New Era of Embedded AI in Workday

At Workday, we see AI as something that is built directly into the fabric of the HCM suite, versus being something that is bolted on. Leveraging Workday's advanced new AI architecture, users are now seeing intelligent automation across some of the most critical HR functions, comprising:

  • Talent acquisition
  • Compensation analysis
  • Career development
  • Workforce planning
  • Performance management

Workday AI simply doesn't automate tasks—it continuously learns based on data and suggestions, predictions, and decisions in real-time. It can, for instance, identify flight-risk employees in advance, suggest internal job opportunities with a skills match, and formulate optimized compensation offers in line with the market.

This AI model built into the system represents a significant advancement from traditional automation, in that humans don't have to touch the model, and it results in more accurate decisions. HR, in turn, can move away from administrative work to strategic planning.

Welcome Workday Illuminate™ and Intelligent Agents

One of the most buzzed-about releases of 2025 is Workday Illuminate™, our next-generation AI platform unveiled at Workday Rising. Illuminate™ was created to enable intelligent, autonomous workflows with AI agents – mini-programs that can accomplish actions independently using learned behavior and data patterns.

Examples include:

  • Recruiting Agents, which write job descriptions, grade candidates, and in some cases, will even reach out to candidates.
  • Payroll Agents that color-code exceptions, suggest fixes, and automate compliance validation.
  • Manpower Planning Agents that alter headcount predictions according to demand and FTE turnover.

There is a reason that it is proving to be a skill that professionals must master with Workday HCM Training, with the advent of setting up, deploying, and tracking AI Agents.

Dynamic Skills Cloud: Your Unique Career Path

Workday's Skills Cloud has matured in 2025 to be a central engine of employee experience. Using machine learning, Skills Cloud captures and categorizes employee know-how at a corporate level to generate dynamic talent profiles.

New AI enhancements include:

  • Live matching of skills with open positions
  • Smart career pathing and learning recommendations
  • Generation of job descriptions using changing market trends
  • Combination with feedback on performance for dynamic updating of skill profiles

This allows organizations to drive internal mobility, keep talent, and address skill gaps in advance. It also advances DEI by helping to limit the dependence on resumes and shallow qualifications.

To capitalize on this, Workday HCM Training now covers skill taxonomy, matching logic, and how to leverage the Skills Cloud for recruiting, upskilling, and retention.

Talent Acquisition and Onboarding Solutions AI

2017 has been a big year for AI and Automation for

. Today, it automates whole phases of the recruiting process, such as:

  • Writing job descriptions using GenAI
  • Sourcing of candidates according to predictive fit scores
  • Conversation-based bots to automate the scheduling of interviews
  • Role, location, and performance-based onboarding plans

Its suggestions are also increasingly tailored as the system learns from past hiring successes.

AI-Powered Performance and Compensation Reviews

In Performance management, AI is now doing the heavy lifting when it comes to analyzing:

  • Continuous feedback
  • Goal achievements
  • Peer reviews
  • Manager notes

It can then suggest promotion eligibility, training programs, or adjustments to compensation.

Also in Workday Compensation, AI provides recommendations for compensation offers using up-to-date benchmarking, internal equity, and budget forecasts.

In addition to appropriate scenarios, Workday HCM Training provides tasks where users can simulate compensation plan modeling and performance review processes while engaging the AI to aid in data-driven decision-making.

The Role of Workday Assistant and Conversational AI

Workers now demand consumer-quality digital experiences — and Workday delivers with its beefed-up Workday Assistant.

Now live across the platform, this AI chatbot enables users to:

  • Check leave balances
  • Ask HR policy questions
  • Submit expense reports
  • Request time off

Using natural language processing (NLP), Workday Assistant provides a conversational interface that increases self-service penetration and decreases the number of support cases.

By 2025, Workday Assistant will be able to even proactively recommend actions, like reminding a manager to review goals, or advising an employee that a learning module is overdue.

The HR system administrators and support staff will also have to become trained in conversation design, fallback logic, and user analytics for the assistant. These are part of the advanced Workday HCM Training courses.

Workforce Planning with Predictive Analytics

No more guesswork on planning for the future of the workforce. Workday HCM now leverages predictive analytics to model:

  • Turnover risks
  • Hiring needs
  • Labor cost projections
  • Internal capacity vs. external demand

When AI reveals these insights, the HR and finance teams can then model the headcount impacts together to gain a better understanding, for example, of the impact of a hiring freeze, contract worker use, or employing or contracting talent in another location.

These planning functions are embedded in and spread across Adaptive Planning, providing companies with a single source of truth.

Workday HCM training will also cover the interpretation of planning dashboards, scenario modelling, and collaboration across teams.

Responsible and Ethical AI

With automation comes great responsibility. The 2025 improvements from Workday are tools like:

  • Bias detection in recruiting algorithms
  • Explainability DASHBOARDS for showing how AI made a decision
  • Audit trails for AI-generated content
  • Role-based governance over agent permissions

AI governance is not only an IT issue anymore-HR professionals also have to be aware of and apply best practices here to prevent unintended discrimination or violations of the law.

Conclusion

Workday in 2025 isn't replacing HR professionals — it is making them more powerful. By streamlining routine activities, surfacing insights, and facilitating more personalized interactions at scale, Workday HCM enables HR to focus on people, not processes.

But power is also something that requires upskilling.  Those who invest in Workday HCM Training will be equipped not only to use the new tools but also to lead the transformation.

Whether you are an HR analyst, system administrator, or a Workday consultant, knowing how to configure and control AI in Workday HCM is a mission-critical skill.

It's a future of HR that is here, and it's intelligent, automated, and human.