New AI agent aims to ease tracking of staff performance

It is among Workday platform's digital tools to help firms focus on higher-value work

- Sharon Salim Business Correspondent

Global enterprises, including those in Singapore, will be able to tap a new solution that can help them review their employees' work performance.

Dubbed the “performance agent”, it is one solution human resource and finance platform Workday has come up with to help employers focus on higher-value work.

“It takes so much time, and it’s a lot of work. I think that maybe performance reviews have a bad name because of how much work goes into writing good ones,” said the company’s chief technology officer Peter Bailis, who was speaking at a press panel on Sept 16 at the Workday Rising conference held in San Francisco.

To write a great performance review that makes a fair and constructive assessment, he added, managers often need to dig up an employee's goals and one-on-one check-in notes.

“It’s to gather that context, so you can have a complete picture across sources of information: What did this employee contribute? How did they stack up against their goals?”

With the future agent’s help, bosses can start the process by providing relevant data points, such as an employee’s resume and inferred skills, and historical performance data.

Ms Jess O'Reilly, the company’s general manager for Asean who is based in Singapore, said one of the biggest challenges for organisations and their HR teams is being bogged down in repetitive work, leaving them with very little time to be strategic.

She said artificial intelligence agents are all about context. “Because you can throw a lot of data at an agent, but if it provides the right context, it’s going to be very powerful.”

Drawing a full year’s worth of data across Workday and other systems like software management tool Salesforce, the future agent can offer managers a comprehensive starting point on an employee’s contributions.