Ready or not, the AI evolution happening inside Workday is going to change how everyone interacts their tenants. The rollout of AI Agents promise to give administrators, managers, and power users new tools and processes for doing their jobs.
And for everyday users? The Self-Service Agent is positioned to change the way you work faster than any other agent on the roadmap.
With hundreds of built-in skills, it doesn’t require much configuration to start answering the questions your workers ask every day. If you’re already using Workday Assistant, this one’s for you.
What Is the Self-Service Agent?
The Self-Service Agent (SSA) is a conversational AI agent built natively into Workday that lets employees and managers get answers and complete tasks using plain language field available on every page — no ticket, no navigation, no hunting through menus.
Ask it a question, get an answer. In many cases, it can take action directly in the chat — no need to launch a separate task or leave the conversation.
How it Works
Users can query the Self-Service Agent in conversational language and use it to complete self-service requests, including:
- Data retrieval (“What are my current medical benefits?”, “Show me my last pay stub.”)
- Task identification (“How do I promote one of my direct reports?”)
- Manager-centric tasks such as viewing team goals or learning statuses.
- Find and review policy-related documentation based on knowledge articles.
Once enabled, the Self-Service Agent can be accessed via the Agent Chat icon in the upper right of the screen, next to your notifications and inbox.
This icon will persist throughout much of the Workday UI, including on task initiation screens:
When you access the Agent Chat icon, Workday will open a pane on the right side of the screen where you will interact with the agent.
The SSA allows you to query Workday in conversational language and will do its best to retrieve information you request.
In addition to data retrieval, the Self-Service Agent can quickly identify and link to specific tasks in Workday.
In some cases, the SSA is able to take action directly in the chat, without launching a task in Workday-proper.
Employee Use Cases
Manager Use Cases
Beyond the built-in data retrieval, the SSA can also surface relevant policy documentation — pulling from your Help knowledge base to answer questions like “what’s our parental leave policy?” without routing that request anywhere.
Configuration & Maintenance
Configuration for the Self-Service Agent is controlled via the Agent System of Record (ASOR). The ASOR is where AI agents in Workday are enabled, configured, and managed. In short, it is Workday’s means for deploying agents and then placing guardrails around their capabilities.
For the Self-Service Agent, the key configuration decisions are about Skills — which ones are active, and who has access to them.
Available via the Overview tab, the Configure Agent task allows you to control what information and tasks an agent has access to, and which security groups can use the agent to access each of those items. This is how the Agent System of Record defines guardrails around what agents can and cannot be used for.
When configuring an agent, Workday breaks the available actions into groupings referred to as Skills. Each agent Skill is essentially a set of tools (data or tasks) which can be accessed by the agent. For the Self-Service Agent, Workday will broadly define each skill as employee self service or manager self service, helping indicate the population which may need access to each. Individual skills can be toggled on/off as desired and permissions to leverage each skill can be granted to individual security groups.
Flex Credit Usage
Using the Self-Service Agent will spend 1 flex credit per action. Workday defines each “action” as any sort of information retrieval or transactional action taken on behalf of the user.
Complexity can come into play as well: a simple data retrieval like “show me my last pay stub” will cost less than a multi-step transaction like requesting time off across multiple absence types.
One exception worth noting: if the agent can’t complete a request directly and instead guides you to the right task in Workday via a link, that interaction does not consume a Flex Credit.
Not familiar with Flex Credits? Learn more about Flex Credit entitlements, usage, and the Platform Consumption Console (PCC) here.
What happens to the Workday Assistant?
Many Workday customers are currently leveraging the Workday Assistant chatbot. This lightweight, quick-to-implement feature was Workday’s first foray into self-service chat functionality and was first released in 2020. It provides somewhat similar functionality to the Self-Service Agent, but in a much more limited format.
Put simply: the Self-Service Agent will replace Workday Assistant.
Workday has announced that Assistant will be deprecated in the 2027 R2 release, expected in September 2027.
The good news is that the Self-Service Agent is a meaningful upgrade. This also means is that organizations who’ve already integrated Workday Assistant to Microsoft Teams or Slack will need to begin planning their transition to SSA.
Miscellaneous Considerations
- Proxy access won’t work here. The SSA is not supported for implementer accounts or via Proxy. If Proxy is part of your standard testing workflow — and for most HRIS teams it is — you’ll need to plan for an alternate validation approach before go-live.
- Policy Intelligence requires the Help SKU. If your organization doesn’t have it, the SSA won’t be able to pull from knowledge base articles. It will be limited to Workday data only.
- Verify your UMSA status before planning anything. Workday AI Agents require the Unified Master Services Agreement addendum. If you’re not on it yet, no agents are available to you — check with your CSM first.
