Agents Need Plumbing: What Agent-Ready Tools Mean for Your Integration Landscape

Oct 8

2 min read

Workday's integration landscape has always been about systems talking to each other. EIBs move structured data, Core Connectors handle standard high-volume feeds, and RaaS reports expose live data to whatever needs it. This month, with Workday Rising opening in Las Vegas on 12 October, a new kind of participant is moving to the centre of that landscape: AI agents.

WHAT WORKDAY HAS ALREADY PUT IN PLACE

At DevCon in June, Workday introduced three building blocks. Developer Agent lets developers build agents on Workday in plain language from tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex. Agent-Ready Tools give agents controlled access to HR and finance data over the Model Context Protocol. Agent Passport tests agents before production, monitors them afterwards, and allows a single revocation to stop an affected agent. Workday has indicated Passport should reach general availability before the end of this year.

THE SCALE OF WHAT IS COMING

On its Q2 call in August, Workday said more than 5,500 customers now use at least one of its own agents, up over 35% in a quarter. Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday's President of Product and Technology, said employees inside Workday had built 22,000 agents in a matter of weeks. Whatever your view on the pace, the direction is plain. Building agents is getting easy. Knowing what exists in your tenant, who owns it and what it can reach is not.

WHY THIS IS AN INTEGRATION QUESTION

An agent that reads employee, payroll or finance data does so through the same fields, security groups and feeds as every other consumer of that data. That means the questions we have always asked about integrations now apply to agents.

Who owns it, and who approves a change to its scope?
Which data does it read, and when did that source last change?
What alerts fire if a feed is late, empty or different from normal?
Where is this documented, so the answer survives a change of team?

A FIVE-LINE INVENTORY TO START WITH

For each agent or integration in your tenant, record what it does in plain language, who owns it by name, which data and business processes it touches, when its access was last reviewed, and how you would know if it misbehaved. It does not need a specialist tool. A shared sheet kept current beats a sophisticated register nobody updates.

WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK

Before Rising, ask your integration owner for the current list of feeds touching payroll, benefits and finance. Those are the first places an agent will look, and the first places a weakness will show.