Future of Work - A Workday Podcast

What’s holding AI adoption back in HR? Workday’s Cristina Goldt and AI expert Harper Carroll believe it’s because leaders might be hiding the working gears. In this conversation, they challenge the 'black box' status quo, revealing why your employees will never adopt a tool they aren’t allowed to interrogate. Together, they unpack the trust–adoption paradox and explain why visibility drives confidence.

AI was supposed to take the grunt work off our plates. Instead, many teams are spending their time checking, correcting, and translating AI output back into the flow of work. In this episode, Jon Lexa, VP of GTM and Operations at Sana, joins Callie Kemmer, Senior Director of AI Strategy, Growth, and Operations at Workday, to examine why enterprise AI still struggles at the last mile—and what it will take to move from impressive output to work that businesses can actually trust and act on.

While AI promises speed, many leaders are instead battling 'workslop'—the friction of low-quality, AI-generated output that creates more cycles instead of fewer. Join Workday’s Kathy Pham and researcher Kate Niederhoffer as they discuss how to bridge the gap between AI hype and reality to ensure technology strengthens human discernment.

80% of the global workforce is deskless, yet most tech is still built for a desk. In this episode of the Future of Work Podcast, Joshua Secrest and Josh Bersin discuss the frontline imperative and how "invisible software" can bridge the innovation gap to stop the massive revenue leaks caused by understaffing.

We’ve entered a paradoxical era of work. While AI is saving employees an average of 10 hours a week, a "productivity bubble" has emerged. Instead of using that found time for innovation, many are spending nearly half of it reworking and contextualizing AI’s output. Are we becoming faster at the expense of our own critical thinking?
In this episode, Aashna Kircher, SVP of HR Products at Workday, and Jacqueline Carter, Managing Partner at Potential Project, dive into the psychological and structural shifts required to thrive in the age of AI. They move beyond the technical hype to explore "automation bias," the biological pull of the "easy button," and why the most important skill of 2026 won’t be prompt engineering—it will be discernment.

In this Season 2 premiere episode, Workday CMO Emma Chalwin and President of Product and Technology Gerrit Kazmaier pull back the curtain on the "Productivity Bubble."Gerrit explains why the shift from deterministic to probabilistic systems has created a massive verification gap. Learn why the next era of work isn't about faster tools, but a fundamental shift in human reasoning and leadership judgment.

Learn why the next era of SaaS isn't about more features, but about removing the human friction from the business process.Workday President of Product and Technology Gerrit Kazmaier joins Justin Furby, Workday's vice president of investor relations, to discuss the shift toward agentic AI that personifies reasoning, moving beyond simple automation to create systems that finally deliver on the ROI promise of the cloud. He explores how, by opening the platform with thousands of AI-ready connectors, the future of SaaS is an intelligent, interconnected ecosystem that acts as a proactive collaborator, not just a database.

Is your organization actually getting value from AI, or are you just measuring logins? In this episode, Workday Ventures leaders sit down with the founders of AI-first companies Laurel and Uplimit to pull back the curtain on enterprise AI. We move beyond the hype to discuss why "adoption" is a vanity metric and how to identify the "aha moments" that turn skeptical employees into power users.

For decades, we’ve used technology to help us check boxes faster. But what happens when the boxes start checking themselves? In this episode, Workday leaders Peter Bailis, Jerry Ting, and Clare Hickie explore the leap from generative AI to agentic AI, a shift that moves us beyond the "blinking cursor" and into a world of autonomous digital labor.

Workday's Liz Jennings is joined by Kunal Sethi, vice president of HR Digital Strategy at Medtronic, to explore how AI is reshaping the future of human resources. From early wins across more than 200 AI use cases to building a unified HR strategy, this conversation highlights how Medtronic is turning AI into a catalyst for both efficiency and human impact.