Workday Inc. announced the formation of a dedicated AI research team alongside a PhD fellowship program aimed at advancing enterprise artificial intelligence systems.
The newly established Workday AI Research unit will concentrate on developing AI technologies tailored for business applications, while the Workday AI Research PhD Fellowship will provide $50,000 in annual research funding per doctoral student. Participants will receive mentorship from Workday’s AI researchers and gain access to career opportunities within the company.
The initiatives follow recent research findings from Workday’s AI team, including a method for agent memory that demonstrated 12% higher precision and 8% better overall memory quality while operating 31% faster than a benchmark system. In another study, dividing tasks among specialized AI agents improved accuracy by 5.8%, and research on data deletion revealed that information removed from an agent’s memory remained recoverable from summaries approximately 20% of the time.
Workday, which provides enterprise software for human resources, finance, and IT to over 11,500 organizations globally—including 65% of the Fortune 500—stated that the research has been accepted for publication at major machine learning conferences such as the International Conference on Machine Learning and the International Conference on Learning Representations.
Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product and technology at Workday, said the new initiatives address emerging challenges in AI adoption, including privacy, auditability, efficiency, and enterprise-grade accuracy as AI agents increasingly handle contextual tasks on behalf of employees.
