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Workday Releases

The Workday product release calendar and AI feature waves - what ships, when, and what it means for engagements in flight.

2025R2 Active Feature Releases: bi-annual Patches: rolling
Feature Releases

Release Calendar

Workday ships two major feature releases per year (R1 in March, R2 in September) plus rolling patch releases for critical fixes.

Workday 2025R2
September 2025 - GA tenants updated September 6, 2025
Current
AI Workday Illuminate: Second generation of Workday's AI foundation - expanded natural language skills across HCM and Fins, and new agent orchestration APIs for custom agent builders.
AI Extend Agents GA: Workday-hosted agent runtime available to all Extend developers. Build agents that call Workday APIs, trigger business processes, and surface results in PRISM or Worker Profile.
HCM Manager Copilot enhancements: Onboarding task orchestration, compensation review guidance, and team skills gap analysis surfaced inline in Manager Home.
FINS Accounting Center AI: Anomaly detection on journal entries with recommended corrective actions. Reduces close-cycle review time for clients with high transaction volumes.
Platform WQL v2 GA: Expanded query coverage, improved performance on large datasets. Relevant for any Studio integrations that query Workday data directly.
Community release notes What's New in Workday
Workday 2026R1
March 2026 - Sandbox preview: January 2026
Upcoming
AI Agentic Skills v2 (preview): Skill chaining - agents that invoke other skills to compose multi-step workflows. Expected to simplify the onboarding and offboarding automation use cases the CoE is targeting.
AI AI Audit Trail: Granular logging of AI-driven actions and recommendations in Workday, supporting compliance review and explainability requirements from regulated clients.
HCM Skills Cloud expansion: 40% growth in inferred skill graph coverage, improved matching accuracy. Key input for any talent-mobility or skills-gap agent.
FINS Contract Intelligence GA: AI extraction and classification of contract terms, integrated with Procurement and Supplier Management.
Release calendar (Community)
Workday 2025R1
March 2025 - GA tenants updated March 1, 2025
Released
AI Workday Illuminate launch: New AI platform layer replacing prior ML models. Introduced natural language job architecture, AI-assisted recruiting, and the Illuminate API surface for ISV partners.
AI Extend Agents (beta): First release of the Workday-hosted agent runtime. Kainos participated in the beta - learnings are reflected in the Extend Agents playbook in Navigate.
HCM Pay Transparency enhancements: Automated pay range display and compliance tooling for EU Pay Transparency Directive and US state law mandates.
FINS Planning AI Assist: Forecast recommendations and variance explanations powered by Illuminate. Replaces the legacy Adaptive Insights ML engine for participating tenants.
2025R1 release notes
Workday 2024R2
September 2024 - GA tenants updated September 7, 2024
Released
AI AI Gateway for Workday: API layer allowing external AI systems (Azure OpenAI, Copilot) to call Workday with tenant-controlled data boundaries. Foundation for CoE's hybrid-AI architecture patterns.
HCM Skills Cloud v2: Inferenced skills from resumes, projects, and learning completions. Reduced the need for manual skills attestation on high-volume tenants.
FINS Spend Analytics AI: Spend categorisation, supplier risk flags, and savings opportunity identification surfaced in Procurement dashboards.
2024R2 release notes
AI Waves

Workday AI Feature Waves

Workday stages AI features in waves across the Illuminate platform. Wave cadence does not always align to the bi-annual release cycle - features can ship in patch releases between R1 and R2.

Wave vs. Release
A Workday "AI Wave" is a themed cluster of AI capabilities - often introduced in preview with one release and GA'd in the next. When advising clients on adoption timelines, distinguish between feature preview (sandbox only, unsupported) and GA (production-ready, supported SLA). Workday Community is authoritative; this page summarises what's relevant to Kainos delivery contexts.
Illuminate Wave 3 - Agentic Work
2025R2 onwards
Active
AI Agents as first-class Workday objects - they appear in org charts, can own tasks, and are subject to security domain policies. Extend Agents GA is the delivery vehicle for CoE-built agents in this wave.
AI Multi-agent orchestration: Workday-native agents can delegate to each other. The 38-agent catalog in the Roadmap section maps to this wave's capabilities.
Illuminate Wave 2 - Intelligent Work
2025R1
Complete
AI Natural language as the primary UI surface for worker self-service, manager decisions, and recruiter workflows. Illuminate NL layer replaces guided step-by-step BPs for common actions.
Illuminate Wave 1 - Augmented Work
2024R2 - 2025R1
Complete
AI Recommendations, anomaly detection, and AI-assisted authoring embedded into existing Workday surfaces without new UI patterns. Gateway and Skills Cloud v2 underpin this wave.