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By Dave Wachtel
Every day, employees do work that systems should be handling. They move information between tools, reconcile conflicting data, track down approvals, and translate requests from one team to another.
In doing so, these employees have become the integration layer holding fragmented organizations together. Their work-arounds reveal where processes break down, how decisions actually move forward, and where human judgment fills the gaps. For HR leaders preparing to introduce AI agents, this hidden coordination provides a map of how work truly gets done.
And as HR leaders move from experimenting with AI to deploying it at scale, that map offers a blueprint for where agents can create value and what human logic they must preserve. How employees respond to the resulting experience is also one of the clearest measures of whether the transformation is working.
These manual handoffs and work-arounds have become widespread. According to Workday research:
- 82% of employees report spending significant time coordinating or translating work between teams or business systems.
- 81% spend significant time moving information between systems or tools.
- 77% must reconcile conflicting data or reports.
- 70% reenter the same information in multiple systems.
These statistics demonstrate how work really gets done: who needs to approve a request, how teams resolve conflicting information, when a policy needs interpretation, what to do when the standard process does not apply. This is the operating logic AI must understand before it can take on more of this work.
Organizations must recognize that employees are not the obstacle to AI transformation. Instead, employees show leaders where transformation needs to happen, and they’re often the clearest measure of whether that transformation is working.
The True Measure of Transformation
Attitudes toward AI don’t divide neatly into enthusiasm vs. resistance. Even those who are ready to use AI may have questions about what it means for their role, their relevance, and their work. This tension makes it imperative for CHROs to address the cultural dimension of AI transformation beyond treating it as a communications footnote.
Organizations are pressuring HR leaders to help them move quickly while managing workforce uncertainty with transparency and care. This means these leaders must demonstrate how AI can improve employees’ work while communicating how humans fit into this new AI-powered system.
Leaders who attempt to solve the technology problem without addressing these cultural questions may find that adoption stalls at the edges. Without employees’ trust and a clear sense of shared purpose, even the best tools can feel imposing rather than empowering.
Luckily, the most human-centric approach to introducing AI is also the most effective one: Embed it into the systems employees use, govern it in ways people understand, and use it to augment workers’ knowledge rather than dismiss it.
Fragmentation as a Business Risk
The success of this approach depends on the strength of the foundation beneath the AI. When HR data policies and workflows are fragmented, agents can’t provide the consistent, trustworthy experiences people need. The same disconnection that creates friction for the workforce today might become an even greater source of risk with AI acting across it.
While disconnected systems affect every function, the consequences of fragmentation are especially significant for HR.
At the intersection of hiring, pay, benefits, workforce planning, performance, compliance, and employee experiences, getting an answer “almost right” means getting it wrong. A small mistake can affect paychecks, expose sensitive data, compromise hiring decisions, or create regulatory risk. Too often, an enterprise architecture problem shows up most consequentially in the function responsible for many of an organization’s highest-stakes decisions.
HR teams experience higher rates of fragmentation-related friction than the global average. Of HR professionals responding to a recent Workday survey, 66% said that changes to core systems are slow and disruptive vs. 61% globally, and 69% say different teams disagree about whose numbers are correct vs. 64% globally.
This fragmentation slows decisions, weakens the employee experience, increases compliance risk, and keeps HR reactive. It also limits what AI can do. When workforce data, organizational knowledge, and business processes are scattered, an agent can offer only a partial answer based on the partial information available to it.
Partial or inaccurate answers are not good enough for HR. Employees need to know agent recommendations are based on consistent information and that the agent respects the same permissions, policies, and controls that should govern the underlying process. Without that foundation, AI agents risk accelerating fragmentation instead of resolving it.
Turning Work-Arounds Into Governed Workflows
The best agentic AI should not become another technology for employees to learn. It should operate within the tools and workflows where work already happens.
But introducing AI does not mean discarding the human logic behind today’s work-arounds. Employees have developed practical ways to resolve conflicting information, navigate exceptions, and keep decisions moving forward when formal processes fall short. Instead of discarding these work-arounds, organizations should ensure agentic AI inherits that logic, standardizes it where appropriate, and embeds it into governed HR workflows while preserving human judgment.
For this to work, organizations must ensure that agents are trained to respect existing access controls. An agent should not be allowed to reveal information simply because it can technically retrieve it. It must operate according to the permissions of the person using it. Otherwise, a tool intended to make work easier can quickly create privacy, security, and compliance risks.
This is especially important when AI’s open-ended capabilities meet HR processes that demand predictable outcomes. AI may help a manager explore ways to organize a team or suggest development opportunities for an employee. But processes such as payroll, benefits eligibility, and compensation must follow established rules.
Lawful agents operating within the core system can ensure actions comply with established policies, permissions, and approval processes. It can also help HR teams become more proactive as compliance controls become more embedded. Instead of identifying a problem after a job requisition, compensation change, or leave decision has been submitted, an agent can surface the issue while considering the action. Human review should remain explicit for hiring, compensation, reorganizations, and other consequential workforce decisions, but agents help HR spend less time correcting avoidable problems after the fact.
This is how organizations can gain the flexibility of AI without sacrificing the reliability HR requires.
2 Million Hours a Year
Governance is essential, but employees also need to experience tangible value. That value is greatest when AI agents work inside the trusted systems and workflows that already govern HR, with the data, context, security, and permissions required to do meaningful work.
When 7-Eleven introduced agents to automate 95% of its store hiring, it reduced time to fill by 70% and saved store managers more than 2 million hours annually. Once hiring moved faster, managers got meaningful time back, and the technology delivered value within an established HR process.
With HR agents working in the background, Ace Hardware reduced hiring coordination friction across 70 countries and 5,600 locations and now schedules more than 200 interviews every day. These agents—grounded in compliance, aware of permissions, and governed from the start—can connect data, coordinate routine steps, and anticipate needs while operating within the policies, workflows, and approval structures the organization already trusts.
To fully embrace the benefits of agentic HR, leaders must communicate that new operating models drive transformation, not new tools. And they must view their people as a map, not a barrier.
Employees have already shown leaders where agents can create the greatest value. Their work-arounds reveal where systems and processes fall short. Their judgment shows what the technology must preserve. And their willingness to use AI provides a meaningful measure of whether the transformation is improving how work gets done.
The opportunity for HR leaders is to turn those signals into a more connected and responsive way of working. When agents operate within trusted HR systems, they can carry more of the administrative and coordination burden without compromising security, compliance, or accountability. That allows HR teams to focus on the judgment, strategic thinking, creativity, and human connection AI can never replace.
Dave Wachtel is General Manager for Core HR Products at Workday.
Want to learn more about how Workday equips HR leaders to put AI to work? Explore Workday.com/hr.