No bullets today. Read the whole thing.

A few months back I published a breakdown of Workday's Flex Credits. The metered pricing. The grace period nobody reads correctly. The setup most teams still have not finished.

Practitioner stuff. The kind of thing I write so the people who build this for a living can walk into a budget meeting and not get caught flat.

It was neutral. Deliberately so. I do not sell Workday. I do not sell against Workday. I take the architecture apart and tell you what it does.

Then a reader forwarded me a sales email. From an account executive at a Workday competitor, going out to prospects.

And there, pasted into the pitch, was my work.

Not quoted. Lifted.

My headline, word for word. My subtitle, word for word. My summary. My grace period section, sentence for sentence. Dropped into sales material and aimed at buyers, to scare them off a platform I had analyzed without taking a side.

Neutral analysis went in one end. FUD came out the other.

And the targets were people on tight budgets, handed fear dressed up as my analysis and told to think twice. That is who it was built to spook.

Precision is the whole job

Whole passages, copied. Not a link with a pull quote. Identical down to the punctuation. I have the side by side.

They did not ask. They did not license it. They took a piece written to be vendor neutral and reframed it as a reason to fear one specific vendor.

Here is the part that got me. They did not even use my name. In the email I am "someone." I am "this person." They wanted the credibility of the analysis without the inconvenience of the byline.

They took the work and left the author in the parking lot.

I wrote about a pricing model. They turned it into a weapon. The fear was not in my work. They added it.

This was never really about the copyright

The copyright is real, and there are ways to handle that. I used them. Quietly. That part is done.

But the bigger point is bigger than one lifted article, and it belongs to all of you.

Independent practitioner writing only has value because it is independent. The entire reason you read a breakdown from someone like me instead of a vendor deck is that I am not running a play. The moment a vendor can strip-mine that work and bolt it onto a sales narrative, every independent voice in this space is worth a little less. Yours included.

Citation is a contract. You can quote me. You can argue with me. You can tell your customers I got it wrong.

What you cannot do is take my name off the analysis, take the neutrality out of it, and resell it as the case for your product.

That is not citation. That is laundering.

Watch your own bylines.

Your analysis is an asset. Treat it like one.

If a vendor ever quietly decides your independence is theirs to spend, notice it. Keep the evidence. Handle it. Quietly if you can, loudly if you have to.

I did not name the vendor here. Not because it is a secret, but because the lesson travels further than the grudge. Today it was my article. Tomorrow it is yours, and you find out from a forwarded email like I did.

I write about architecture over branding because branding has a shelf life and the architecture is permanent.

Turns out the same is true for a byline.

— Mike

P.S. I ran this past Justin, my in-house UX tester and resident seventh grader. Gave him the one-sentence version: someone copied my writing word for word, dropped it into their own thing, and never said it was mine.

He did not look up from his phone. "That's plagiarism. That's an automatic zero."

They teach this in elementary school. There is a rubric. There are consequences. My kid, who lost his volleyball shorts twice last month, knows you cite your sources.

One of us had a legal department. The other had a homework folder. Only one of them needed this explained.

tldr;

Two weeks ago the Bus Factor post said: you documented the what, and the why is still in your head. This is where the why goes instead.

Not a wiki. Not a documentation project. A ledger: four lines per decision, three minutes, written the day the decision happens.

The test for what earns an entry: if you’d have to explain it twice, it’s an entry.

The format: Date. Decision. Why. What we rejected. (Landmine, optional but recommended.)

The first copy of the why goes in the object’s own notes field (yes, the ones sitting blank in your tenant right now). The ledger is the commit log.

The audience is Month-14 you, audit-season you, your eventual successor, and the AI you will one day point at your tenant. In roughly that order.

I was dealing with an issue a few years ago that I want you to sit with: why does the offer approval route through a comp partner when the requisition is flagged remote? An HR Partner complained that it was a “useless routing step”.

Nobody knew.

So we did what every HRIS team does. Archaeology. Dug through old tickets. Searched Temas back three years. Found a thread that referenced a meeting that referenced a decision made by someone who left in 2019 (no notes, obviously, the meeting was the notes).

And then we did the other thing every HRIS team does. We kept the step. Because deleting a rule you don’t understand is scarier than living with one you can’t explain.

That’s how tenants calcify. Not through bad decisions. Through good decisions that outlived their reasons.

You cannot out-document the tenant

I know what the responsible voice in your head said after you ran the Bus Factor audit. “We need a documentation initiative.” Runbooks. A config workbook refresh. A wiki with a taxonomy and an owner and a quarterly review cadence.

Don’t.

I said it two weeks ago and I’ll say it harder now: a wiki nobody reads is just guilt with a URL. What-documentation is a photograph of a moving system. It’s stale the first time a release touches the config, which is to say, immediately. You will spend forty hours building it, feel wonderful for a month, and then it will depreciate in exactly the way the knowledge in your head does, except now there are two things rotting instead of one.

The problem was never the what. The tenant will tell anyone the what (that’s what a tenant is). The thing that dies when someone leaves is the why. And the why has a property that the what doesn’t:

The why never changes.

A decision happened once, on a specific day, for specific reasons, with specific alternatives on the table. That’s history. History doesn’t go stale. Which means you don’t document the system (unwinnable). You document the decisions (four lines, done forever).

The ledger

Here’s the entire practice. A running log, one place, append-only. Every entry:

DATE:      2026-03-11

DECISION: Comp eligibility rule excludes interns

WHY: 2019 acquisition brought 400 interns on a stipend structure that breaks the merit matrix

REJECTED:  Separate comp plan (Finance refused the headcount)

LANDMINE:  The intern flag feeds the benefits eligibility integration. Touch one, test the other.

That’s it. That entry takes three minutes to write and it just answered every question your successor, your auditor, and your own confused future self will ever ask about that rule. The Bus Factor post used this exact example as the knowledge trapped in your head. Now it’s trapped in a text file instead. Progress.

What earns an entry? Simple test: if you’d have to explain it twice, it’s an entry. The weird BP step. The security group shaped like a question mark. The integration you modified instead of replaced with an orchestration. The report you built because the delivered one lies. Anything where the config makes sense only if you were in the room.

Write it where the body is buried

Workday gave you a notes field on almost everything. Business process definitions have comments. Calc fields have descriptions. Condition rules, custom reports, integrations, security groups. Copious fields, shipped with the product, sitting blank in every tenant I have ever touched.

So the first copy of the why goes on the object itself. Paste the WHY line (dated) straight into the calc field description, the BP comment, the condition rule notes. Your successor doesn’t find it by knowing your ledger exists. They find it by opening the thing that confused them, which is the only place you can guarantee they’ll look.

Engineers figured this out fifty years ago: comments live in the code, history lives in the commit log. The note on the object is the comment. The ledger is the commit log. You want both, and here’s why the ledger doesn’t collapse into the notes fields:

Notes hold current state. People overwrite them. The reversals, the rejected alternatives, the story of how you got here: that’s the log’s job.

Cross-object decisions are homeless. The offer-routing decision touches a BP, an integration, and a security group. Which object gets the note? All three get a pointer. The decision itself lives in the ledger.

You can’t grep the tenant. Aggregating every comment field across every object type into one view is not a delivered experience. Your ledger is searchable today, from your phone, in one keystroke.

And this is where the robot argument gets teeth. When you eventually point an AI at your tenant, a dated why sitting in the object’s own description is context the model cannot miss. You’re not just keeping receipts anymore. You’re annotating the substrate.

The rules that keep it alive

Every documentation initiative you’ve ever watched die was killed by ceremony. So the ledger has exactly five rules, and four of them are about staying small.

Write it the day the decision happens. The why has a half-life of about a week. By Friday it’s fuzzy. By month three it’s vibes. By month fourteen it’s archaeology.

Two copies, both cheap. The why goes on the object, dated. The full entry goes in the ledger, which lives in one place (a doc, a channel, a text file; searchable beats structured). Thirty extra seconds. Worth it every time.

Three minutes, max. If an entry takes longer, you’re writing documentation again. Stop. Four lines. If it takes more than three minutes you will quit by August, and I’d rather have a scrappy ledger you keep than a beautiful one you abandoned.

No template committee. The moment this gets a SharePoint taxonomy, a review workflow, and a governance owner, it dies. It’s a ledger, not a program. Protect it from process the way you’d protect anything you actually need.

Append, don’t edit. When a decision gets reversed, that’s a new entry with its own why. Now you have the one thing no config workbook on earth contains: the story of how you got here.

Who you’re actually writing it for

Month-14 you. Seena Mojahedi’s framing from the last post: the SI leaves what-documentation because that’s what the SOW pays for, and around month fourteen something changes that nobody internal has the why for. The ledger is the thing the SOW never buys. Write it yourself, in real time, and Month 14 becomes a Tuesday.

Audit-season you. “Why is this configured this way” is the entire genre of auditor questions. Watching someone answer from a dated ledger entry instead of a shrug changes the temperature of the whole engagement.

Your successor. Someday there is one. The what they can read in the tenant. The ledger is the only artifact that makes them competent instead of merely credentialed.

And the robot. This is the part I need this audience to hear: sooner or later you are going to point an AI at your tenant. When that happens, the model will read your configuration fluently and explain it confidently, and without the why, some of what it confidently explains will be wrong (the config shows the intern exclusion; it does not show the acquisition, the stipend structure, or Finance saying no). Your ledger is the context layer. It’s the difference between an agent that knows why the rule exists and one that hallucinates a plausible reason and routes work accordingly. Clean your data before you buy the robot, yes. But also: keep your receipts, because the robot is going to ask.

Start with the audit

You don’t need to backfill a decade. You’ll never do it and the guilt will kill the habit.

Take the three or four spots the Bus Factor audit flagged (the ones where the honest answer to “who else knows this?” was nobody) and write those entries this week. From memory, dated today, flagged as reconstructed. Then keep the ledger going forward, three minutes at a time.

Your tenant is a decade of business decisions wearing a software costume.

Start keeping the receipts.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Tenant Archaeologist

P.S. Justin keeps a log in Justin’s 3D Lab. Not of printer settings (the printer knows the settings). Of failures: what got messy, what he changed, why the fix worked. I asked him why he bothers. He said, “because I already printed the same mistake twice, and filament costs money.” A twelve-year-old independently derived the why ledger the second time a failure got expensive. Most of us are still waiting for the third or fourth.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

• Workday announced Sana for ITSM at the Sana AI Summit: agentic automation for onboarding, offboarding, access changes, and everyday IT requests. Built directly on the platform. Early adopters get it in the second half of this year.

• Buried in the announcement: the agent will “automatically trigger access changes when employees join, transfer teams, change roles, or leave.” That’s not a feature. That’s your JML integration layer becoming a product.

• This is genuinely good architecture. It’s also a career signal for anyone whose job security rests on being the only person who understands the spaghetti.

• The catch: the agent inherits your security model and your data. If those are duct tape, you just gave duct tape an execution engine.

• You have roughly six months before early adopter access opens. Use them.

The Announcement

At the Sana AI Summit in New York, Workday introduced Sana for ITSM. The pitch: most IT tickets shouldn’t exist in the first place. Password resets, software installs, access requests, all handled conversationally, inside Workday, routed through the same approval paths and audit trails your org already uses.

It’s Workday’s first formal step into the ITSM market, which puts them in the same ring as ServiceNow. That’s the market story, and the analysts will cover it just fine.

I want to talk about the sentence everyone skimmed past.

Read the Bullet Point Again

From the press release: Sana for ITSM will “automatically trigger access changes when employees join, transfer teams, change roles, or leave the company.”

Join. Transfer. Change roles. Leave.

If you’ve been in this ecosystem longer than a week, you know exactly what that sentence describes. That’s the joiner-mover-leaver layer. The Studio integrations. The provisioning feeds. The termination-triggered deactivation logic someone built in 2019 and nobody has touched since (because the person who built it left, and the documentation is a Visio diagram that lies).

That layer is the connective tissue between your tenant and every downstream system in the building. It’s also (let’s be honest) a meaningful chunk of why the HRIS team is untouchable at budget time. Nobody else understands it. Nobody else wants to.

Workday just announced they’re absorbing it into the platform.

This Is Good Architecture. Say It With Me.

Before anyone reaches for a pitchfork: this is the right design.

The agent lives next to the system that already knows who you are, what role you hold, who approves your access, and what the policy says. It doesn’t need a nightly file feed to learn that Maria transferred to Finance. It’s sitting inside the event. Actions flow through the same approvals and audit logs as human actions, so when the agent provisions access, there’s a trail.

Compare that to the current state at most orgs: an HR event fires, a Studio integration wakes up, a flat file lands somewhere, an identity tool ingests it, and four hours later (if the file didn’t fail) someone has a laptop login. We’ve been running swivel-chair provisioning with extra steps and calling it automation.

The Layer Cake holds. Workday stays the load-bearing wall. The agent is just a much better way to move things through the house.

The Part About You

Here’s the uncomfortable question, and I’m asking it because I like you:

I wrote last week that indispensability is organizational risk, not job security. This is what that looks like in practice. If your value proposition is “I am the only one who knows how the provisioning feeds work,” Workday just put an expiration date on it. Not tomorrow: Early adopters in R2, GA later, and enterprise reality means your org won’t touch it for a while after that. But the surface area is officially shrinking.

The people who come out ahead here are the ones who understood the why, not just the what. Why does the transfer feed suppress access removal for concurrent-job workers? Why does the term feed wait 24 hours? The agent can execute the what. Somebody still has to own the why (and defend it when the agent does something technically correct and contextually catastrophic).

That somebody should be you. That’s a promotion, not a pink slip. But only if you move first.

Duct Tape With an Execution Engine

Now the First Things First part, because there’s always a First Things First part.

The agent inherits your existing security model, your approval chains, your policy configuration. Workday is selling that as the trust story, and architecturally it is. But read it from the other direction: the agent is only as safe as the model it inherits.

That security group you cloned in a hurry during the acquisition and never rationalized? The agent inherits it. The approval chain that routes to a sup org that hasn’t had a manager since March? Inherited. The role assignments you keep meaning to audit? Inherited (and now attached to something that executes access changes automatically, at machine speed, without getting bored or suspicious).

A messy security model used to fail slowly, one confused human at a time. Give it an execution engine and it fails fast, at scale, with an audit trail politely documenting every mistake.

What I’d Do Before R2

Crawl, walk, run. Same as always.

Crawl: inventory. Every JML integration, every provisioning feed, every downstream system it touches. If you can’t produce the number, you’re not ready to evaluate the agent that replaces them. You can’t orchestrate what you can’t inventory, and you can’t retire it either.

Walk: document the why. Not the field mappings. The decisions. Every weird exception, every deliberate delay, every “we do it this way because of the 2021 incident.” That context is the thing the agent can’t infer and the thing your org will desperately need when it configures one.

Run: audit the security model. Before it becomes the operating system for an agent. This was already the right thing to do. Now it has a deadline.

The Bottom Line

Workday absorbing the JML layer is the platform doing what platforms do: eating the undifferentiated plumbing. It was always going to happen. The only question was whether you’d be the person who governs the thing that replaced the spaghetti (or the person who was the spaghetti).

Pick the first one. You’ve got until 26R2.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Recovering Spaghetti Chef

P.S. Justin recently lobbied for an automatic feeder for the dogs. It works great: dispenses on schedule, right portions, very impressive. He still got in trouble last week when Toby didn’t get fed, because the feeder jammed and nobody checked it. Turns out automating the task doesn’t automate the accountability. Somebody should put that on a slide at Rising.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

You scanned a piece of plastic hanging off a stranger’s backpack in the middle of a tech conference.

Bold move. I respect it. Here’s everything you were hoping this would be.

First, the important part

This tag was designed, printed, and invoiced by Justin. He’s twelve. He runs a fabrication operation out of our basement called Justin's 3D Lab, and when I commissioned this tag he charged me a 40% markup under a line item labeled “brand premium.” When I questioned it, he said: “You wrote a whole newsletter about vendors. I read it.”

Your scan just landed on his scoreboard. Every visit to this page is counted, because he is in an active competition with my best LinkedIn post ever, which reached 71,600 people and converted six newsletter subscribers. That story, and what it says about how our entire industry confuses reach with trust, is basically the thesis of everything I write.

So…Want to help a kid beat an algorithm?

What you actually get

The Department of First Things First is a weekly-ish newsletter for the people who run HR systems, not the people who buy them. Workday architecture, AI governance that survives contact with a real tenant, and the occasional enterprise software lesson delivered by the aforementioned twelve-year-old. Clean your data before you buy the robot. That’s the whole religion.

Start here: The Bus Factor Self-Audit — a one-page audit that tells you how much of your tenant’s “why” lives exclusively in one person’s head, and what breaks when that person takes a vacation. It’s free, it takes ten minutes, and half the people who run it get quietly horrified.

If we just met at Rising

If you were at the Shareathon AI roundtable on Sunday: the anonymized writeup of what that table said is going out to subscribers this week. Subscribing is how you get it. That was the deal.

If you’re a RUG leader holding one of these tags in your hand right now: flip it over. That title on the back is real, he earned it, and everything I said in the ten-minute talk about capture is demonstrated by the fact that you’re reading this sentence.

If you just scanned a randos backpack in a hallway: you’re my favorite kind of person. Come say hi.

I’m the one with the tag.

—Mike.

P.S. — Justin asked if this page has analytics. I said yes. He said, “good, because I want it on record when I win.” It is now on record.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

The “bus factor” is the number of people who’d have to get hit by a bus before your tenant is in serious trouble. For most HRIS teams, it’s one. It’s you.

Being indispensable feels like leverage. It’s actually a liability the org will eventually “manage” — and the thing being managed is sometimes you.

You did document. That’s not the problem. You wrote down the what. The why is still in your head.

Tribal knowledge isn’t expertise. It’s depreciating inventory. Treat it like inventory.

There’s a one-page Bus Factor Self-Audit at the bottom. Run it before your next vacation. Assuming you can take one.

Ten years ago when I started this gig, I took a week of PTO and brought my work laptop to Maine (Confession: 2026 will be the first year I don't. Please don't be like me).

Nobody asked me to. I just knew the annual comp process was going to throw an error somewhere around day three, and I was the only person alive who knew which condition rule was load-bearing and which one was decorative.

Day three. 2:14 on a Wednesday. The IM came in. I fixed it from a Adirondack chair on a deck at the lake in eleven minutes.

And I felt great about it.

That’s the part I want to talk about. Not the error. The fact that I felt great.

Your bus factor is one

Engineers have a name for this. The “bus factor.” It’s the number of people who’d have to get hit by a bus before a project is in real trouble.

Not fired. Not poached. Hit by a bus. The framing is grim on purpose, because the polite versions (“key-person dependency,” “knowledge concentration”) let you nod along without feeling it.

For many HRIS teams, the bus factor is one.

It’s you. You already know it’s you. And somewhere under the pride, you know that’s not a flex. It’s a liability with your name on it.

Indispensable and irreplaceable are not the same word

Here’s the trap. Being the only one who knows how the tenant works feels like security. If they can’t run payroll without me, they can’t get rid of me. Right?

Run that logic all the way forward.

An organization that can’t function without one specific person doesn’t think “we’re so lucky to have them.” Eventually it thinks “we have an unacceptable risk and we need to fix it.” And “fix it” rarely means a raise and a backup. It means reduce our dependence on that person.

Indispensability isn’t a moat. It’s a flag you’re waving that reads single point of failure, right here. And risk, given enough time, gets managed. Sometimes the thing being managed is you.

You did document. That’s not the problem.

I know what you’re going to say. I documented everything. You’ve got runbooks. A config workbook. That SharePoint nobody opens.

I believe you. And it won’t save you — because what you wrote down is the what (we started down this road last week, but let's expand).

“The Comp Eligibility rule excludes interns.” Great. That’s the what.

The why (why it excludes interns, which acquisition that rule survived, which VP will lose their mind if it changes, the fact that it’s quietly load-bearing for a downstream integration nobody remembers building) that’s not in the workbook.

That’s in your head. It’s been in there so long you don’t experience it as knowledge anymore. It’s just… how things are.

Month 14 is when the lights go out

I'm going to call him out again because I'm encroaching in his space. Seena Mojahedi has a name for the moment this becomes everyone’s problem: Month 14.

Your SI implements. They write the what documentation, because that’s what the SOW pays for. Then the SOW ends. For about a year, muscle memory carries the team. Then, somewhere around month fourteen, something changes that nobody internal has the why for, and there’s no consultant left to ask.

That’s the bus factor going off without anyone getting hit by a bus. The knowledge didn’t leave on a stretcher. It just left.

Tribal knowledge is a depreciating asset

Here’s the reframe that actually changes behavior.

Stop thinking of the knowledge in your head as expertise. Start thinking of it as inventory. Specifically, depreciating inventory. It loses value every time someone who shared it leaves, every time a process changes and the reason gets fuzzier, every release that buries the original logic one layer deeper.

You wouldn’t run a warehouse without knowing what’s on the shelves. You’re running the most important system in the company on an inventory exactly one person can see (and that person is tired and wants to take a real vacation).

The fix isn’t “write more documentation.” You’ll never out-document a system this complex, and a wiki nobody reads is just guilt with a URL.

The fix is to find out where your bus factor is actually one (which specific processes, which specific rules, which specific integrations) and start there. Not all forty things. The three or four that would genuinely take the org down.

So run the audit

I built a thing. It’s a one-page Bus Factor Self-Audit: a short, slightly uncomfortable set of questions you run against your own tenant to find the spots where the honest answer to “who else knows this?” is nobody.

It won’t fix your documentation. It’ll do something more useful: it’ll show you the handful of places where you’re the single point of failure, so you can stop pretending the other forty matter equally and go fix the ones that’ll actually hurt.

Alrighty, link is here. It's a Google drive link, so I'm guessing Google's going to want you to login first. Fill out the audit. Fix the holes. Then take the vacation. Leave the laptop.

I’m still working on that part too. Let's hope 2026 is the year for all of us.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Recovering Single Point of Failure

P.S. I told Justin I was writing about what happens when the only person who knows how something works disappears. He thought about it and said, “you mean like when you’re the only one who knows the Wi-Fi password and you go to bed?”

Yeah, buddy. Exactly like that. Except the Wi-Fi password runs TA Tech for a couple hundred thousand people, and it can’t go to bed.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

• I like to teach Justin where things started. Music, science, the whole origin tour. Last night it was Zork, the game that defined the text adventure (yes, Adventure came first, hold your letters).

• He walked into a dark room without the lamp and got eaten by a grue almost immediately. Indignant. “The game didn’t tell me.”

• It didn’t. Nobody documented it. Which is the exact reason your tenant has rooms you’re scared to walk into.

The origin tour

I have this thing I do with my son.

I show him where stuff started. Not the polished version. The origin through the genre-definier. We went from Muddy Waters, to Elvis, to the Beatles, to Springsteen, and then U2 (and discussed cultural appropriation along the way). From “why does the apple fall” to Newton actually writing it down. He’s eleven, twelve now (the birthday snuck up on me), and he’s got a better sense of where things come from than most adults I work with.

So last night I committed an act of parenting I’d been putting off for years.

I made him play Zork. The genre-defining text adventure. I was about his age when I first shoved a 5 1/4” floppy disk into the drive of a school Apple IIc to start my text adventure, and now it’s his turn. Just no more floppy disk. Time to go find it on Steam.

(And yes. I know. Colossal Cave Adventure predates it. Crowther and Woods got there first. I’m aware. But being first and defining the genre are two different things, and Zork is the one everybody else copied. Hold that thought. It’s going to matter at the end.)

Ninety seconds to a grue

Here’s how it went.

Justin, digital native, raised on games that hold your hand through a forty-minute tutorial, stares at a black screen that says “West of House.” No graphics. No arrow telling him where to go. Just a blinking cursor and the quiet contempt of 1980.

He finds the mailbox. He finds the house. He’s actually doing great.

Then he goes down. Into the dark.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

He types “go forward.”

He gets eaten by a grue.

He is OUTRAGED. “The game didn’t tell me I needed a light! How was I supposed to know?”

And I’m sitting there, trying not to laugh, watching my kid die in a forty-five-year-old game, and all I can think is: buddy, you just described every Workday environment I have ever walked into.

Your tenant has dark rooms

You operate in the light most days.

The stuff you touch every week is well-lit. You know where the switches are. You could move through it with your eyes closed.

But every tenant has dark rooms.

The integration that’s been running since 2019 that nobody can fully explain. The security group named “TEMP_2021” that turns out to be load-bearing. The calc field with a comment that just says “ask Barb.” (Barb left in 2022.) The business process with one step everyone is afraid to touch, because the last person who touched it caused a Career Limiting Event.

Those are dark rooms. And the thing about a dark room is that it’s completely fine. Right up until somebody walks into it.

A release drops. A vendor changes an API. A new analyst gets handed the keys and goes exploring. They walk into the dark, confident, with no light.

And the grue eats them.

The lamp is documentation. The lamp has a battery.

In Zork, the fix is simple. You grab the brass lantern from the living room before you go underground. The lamp is how you survive the dark.

In your tenant, the lamp is documentation.

Not the kind the SI handed you at go-live. That’s “what” documentation. “This integration moves data from A to B.” Great. Useless the second something breaks. Because when it breaks, you don’t need to know WHAT it does. You need to know WHY it was built that way. Why the field maps like that. Why that condition exists. Why somebody, three years ago, made a choice that looks insane until you understand the constraint they were under.

Most documentation tells you what. Almost none of it tells you why.

And here’s the part of Zork nobody remembers until it bites them.

The lamp has a battery.

It runs out. You can be standing in a perfectly safe room, lantern in hand, and the light just... dies. Because you wandered too long without a plan.

Tribal knowledge is a lamp with a battery.

The person who knows why the integration is built that way is your light source. And the day they take a new job, or go on a two-week vacation, or (the email we all dread) get hit by a bus, the battery dies. The room goes dark. And nobody left in the building remembers where the grue lives.

Month 14 is when the lights go out

There’s a specific moment this happens, and if you’ve lived it you already feel your stomach tightening.

The SI’s statement of work expires. The consultants pack up. The “what” documentation gets filed in a SharePoint nobody opens. And about a year later, something breaks in a room only the consultants ever walked.

You go to look. Pitch black.

You reach for the lamp. The battery’s dead. Everyone who carried it is gone.

That is a governance problem. You let your whole operation depend on light sources you didn’t own and couldn’t recharge.

How to not get eaten

You don’t fix this with a tool. You fix it with a walk.

Walk your dark rooms before the grue does. List every part of your tenant where exactly one person holds the light. That’s your bus factor. Every name that shows up once is a battery you don’t control.

Then write down the why. Not the what. The why. The constraint, the decision, the thing that’ll look batshit crazy to the next person who walks in cold.

It’s boring. It’s unsexy. It does not demo well. Nobody is putting “we documented our integration rationale” on a slide with a gradient.

But it’s the difference between an org that can lose a key person on a Tuesday and an org that goes pitch black the moment they do.

(I built a quick self-audit for exactly this. Five minutes, finds your dark rooms. Closest thing I’ve got to a flashlight you can keep. Link’s around here somewhere.)

The genre-definer, revisited

Remember the thing I made you hold your letters about?

Adventure came first. Zork defined the genre.

Workday wasn’t first either. PeopleSoft was running payroll while Workday was still a slide deck. SAP predates all of us. (I once worked for a vendor which built it’s payroll engine in COBOL. In 1977. Yes, they’re still around. I hope for my friend Earl Foster’s sake PASPR50.exe has been relegated to the great code gig in the sky.) But Workday defined the modern category, and everyone’s been responding to it since.

Being first is a footnote. Defining how everyone else thinks about the problem is the whole game.

Which is the actual reason I make my kid play the remake instead of the origin. The remake shows you what won. The origin shows you why.

Right now, in your tenant, somebody is about to walk into a dark room and reach for a lamp that isn’t there.

Grab the lantern. Write the why. Walk the rooms while you still have light.

The grue is patient. It’s been waiting in your tenant since 2005.

— Mike
Director HR Tech | Reformed Grue Bait

P.S. After dying twice, Justin asked me if real jobs have grues. I told him every single one does, buddy. Some of us just call them “undocumented integrations.” He nodded like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Then he grabbed the lamp and went back in.

P.P.S. What makes this gig fun is that story ideas come from everywhere. Laura Horton wrote a quick LinkedIn post which started these wheels turning when she posted about Workday config being a choose your own adventure story. That reminded me of Zork, then my failings as a parent, and then the fun began. Thanks Laura.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

A 12-year-old and his buddy built a working mobility device this week from free, open-source plans. No dad. No certified consultants. No SOW.

It worked for two reasons enterprise software almost never gets right: the documentation was good enough to follow, and the builders had the discipline to actually follow it.

Your implementation had an army of experts and you still can't take a vacation without the tenant catching fire. That's a first-things-first problem.

For the last week, I haven't been able to see my family room floor.

It's been covered in 3D-printed parts. Purple frame pieces. Blue wheels. A rubber mallet (don't ask). My son Justin and a friend have been assembling a TMT (a Toddler Mobility Trainer) that they printed downstairs in the basement.

It's an open-source device from a group called MakeGood. The idea is simple and kind of beautiful. They publish the plans for free, you print the parts on a consumer 3D printer, and you build a mobility trainer for a kid who needs one.

Theirs is going to a child at CHOP.

(Yes, I'm proud. I'm allowed one sentence. Moving on.)

Here's the part that's been rattling around in my head all week, because I can't turn this brain off:

Two kids built a working device, correctly, with no engineering degree between them. And the reason it worked is the exact reason most of our enterprise projects don't.

Reason one: the instructions were good enough.

MakeGood says the build takes "intermediate" 3D printing skill. Then they add that even beginners can do it "with a little patience."

Here's my read: A volunteer organization documented a physical mobility device so well that a sixth grader could assemble it from a set of plans.

Now think about your tenant.

It was built by an army of certified consultants. People with four-figure day rates and Workday Pro stacks longer than mine (going to need to be selective with those recerts this year). And you still can't tell me why the comp business process routes to that one approval step everybody's afraid to touch.

The difference isn't talent. MakeGood didn't have a bigger budget than your SI. The difference is that somebody did the unglamorous work of writing down the why, not just the what.

This is the Month 14 problem (shoutout Seena). The SI leaves you a config workbook that tells you what the switches are set to. It almost never tells you why. So the day the SOW expires, you inherit a machine you can operate but can't explain. And the first time the business asks for something new, you're reverse-engineering your own system.

A kids' 3D printing project shipped better build docs than that. Let it sting a little.

Reason two: they actually followed the directions.

Watching them work was the real lesson.

They didn't rush. When a piece didn't seat right, they didn't force it and move on. They stopped, checked the fit, figured out what was off, fixed it. Every piece had to fit perfectly before they'd go to the next step.

I have not seen that discipline on a project plan in years.

Because in our world, the piece doesn't fit, we know it doesn't fit, and we ship it anyway. The integration's flaky but the date's locked. The security model's a mess but go-live is Monday. The data's dirty but the steering committee wants a demo.

We force the piece. We move on. We call it Phase 2.

And then we act surprised when we're three releases behind, afraid to take PTO, and the only person who understands the build is the one person about to take a job somewhere else.

A twelve-year-old checked the fit before moving on. When's the last time your project did?

The first thing, first.

None of this is a knock on consultants or the platform. The platform is fine. The consultants are mostly good.

The point is that the boring stuff is the whole game. Document the why. Verify the fit before you move on. Don't force the piece because the calendar told you to.

A kid with a printer and a little patience can change a stranger's life. But only because somebody before him did the unsexy work of documenting it well enough to be followed.

That's the job. Most of us just forget it's the job.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Reformed Piece-Forcer

P.S. If you've got a 3D printer collecting dust and a free weekend, MakeGood publishes everything for free at 3dmobility.org. Print one for a kid who needs it. (They recommend Bambu Lab printers, which means Justin finally has justification for the fleet in the basement. Jenn remains unconvinced.)

If you don't have a printer and still want to help, Justin is going to print a second chair. You can help here.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

• A team of senior ex-Workday leaders (former EVP of Products, former CTO, former chief technology architect, former CISO) launched an AI-native HR system called Sol.

• The pitch: replace your HRIS. Not extend it. Replace it. First customers go live in early 2027, so there's no product to kick the tires on yet.

• The interesting part isn't the company. It's that the people who designed Workday's foundation are now betting the foundation is the wrong shape for agentic work.

• Workday's position is the opposite: extend the core, don't burn it down. Both camps are made of people who built the same system.

• What you do on Tuesday: nothing dramatic. Treat it as a forcing question for the foundation you already run.

  ---

A few months ago our tennis club owner asked Justin to 3D print a locker for the new Tennixx ball machine. Sounds simple.

It wasn't.

The thing had to survive getting knocked around courtside, and it had to print in less than geological time. Those two goals fight each other. Strong wants thick walls and a lot of material. Printable wants thin and fast.

So he iterated. Five prototypes in OpenSCAD, each one printed, each one tested, each one wrong in a new way until it wasn't. Prototype five prints in a reasonable window and you can drop-kick it. (We tested that. For science. 😅)

Here's what that project taught him, and re-taught me. You don't find out whether a design holds by looking at it. You find out when you knock it around.

I thought about those five prototypes when a company called Sol showed up in my LinkedIn feed (thanks Dana! BTW - just spent a weekend in Niagara. Canada gets two thumbs up from me!)

Not because it's another HR startup. Because of who built it.

Sol was founded by Pete Schlampp, Jim Stratton, Jon Ruggiero, and Erin Yang. If those names don't mean anything to you, let me translate:

Schlampp ran Products and Strategy at Workday. Stratton was Workday's CTO. Ruggiero spent fifteen years there as SVP and chief technology architect. Yang spent thirteen years there, including running technology investing at Workday Ventures. Their CISO, Josh DeFigueiredo, was Workday's CISO. Their "Chief Work Officer" title is a phrase Workday itself coined.

These are not founder randos with a Figma file and a dream. This is the product and architecture brain trust of the system most of you log into every morning. They know exactly where every body is buried in that object model, because they buried some of them.

And the homepage they put their names on says this: "Work changed. Your HR system didn't."

That's the strength problem, scaled to the enterprise. They looked at the foundation they built, decided it won't survive the load that's coming, and walked off to design a new one.

Here's the actual claim, stripped of the launch copy:

Sol's argument is that HR systems capture transactions, not how work gets done. Read that as a builder, not a buyer. Your HRIS is, at its core, an effective-dated record of state changes. Hire. Promote. Transfer. Terminate. A worker object, a position, a sup org, a business process that moves a transaction from A to B. It's a very good foundation for what it was built to do.

The bet Sol is making: agents don't live in that world. An agent doesn't fire a discrete staffing event and go quiet. It needs continuous context. Who's doing what, with whom, right now, and why. The model that's brilliant at recording that someone changed jobs on the 1st is not the same model that captures how the work itself flows. One is a ledger, the other a nervous system.

An HR Executive piece in April put it well: every HRIS built in the last four decades was designed around a single concept, the employment relationship. None of them were built to track a workforce that now includes things that aren't employees at all.

If you've ever tried to make your tenant represent something it wasn't designed to represent, you already feel this, everyday.

The part where I refuse to let this be a press release with my name on it.

Workday is not sitting still, and they do not agree. Their bet is that you extend the core, you don't replace it. Agent System of Record went GA earlier this year. Sana is quickly iterating (so quickly in fact, it's hard to keep up with the changes). Extend and Orchestrate let you build on the same security and business-process spine. The bull case, argued most clearly by Josh Bersin, is that you unlock the data, the security, and the rules you already have, and let agents ride on that foundation.

So this is not a startup versus an incumbent. This is a real architectural disagreement between two groups of people who built the same system, looking at the same problem, and reaching opposite conclusions about whether the foundation survives the transition.

One group says the object model is the moat. The other group left to bet it's the anchor.

That's a way better story than "cool new vendor.”

My read, for whatever a practitioner's read is worth:

Sol's critique bites in exactly the places you already curse at. The moments where your tenant fights you because work went fluid and the model wants a clean transaction. Dotted-line everything. People doing three (or in some cases 30) roles. Project work that doesn't map to a position. Anyone who's tried to model real organizational life in a system built on the employment relationship knows the foundation has opinions, and they aren't always your opinions.

Where it's overblown: four decades of payroll, compliance, audit, security, and integration plumbing do not evaporate because a homepage says "agentic foundation." That plumbing is boring and load-bearing and it's the real reason ripping out an HRIS is a multi-year root canal. "AI-native from the ground up" is a beautiful sentence. It's also, right now, a sentence. There is no product until 2027.

Which is the thing I keep coming back to in this newsletter. "Agentic foundation" is a claim. It's not an architecture until someone shows you the data model. Branding has a shelf life of about nine months. The model is permanent. Read the model, not the logo.

So what do you do with this on Tuesday morning, when you have a tenant to run and a config backlog that does not care about Silicon Valley?

Nothing dramatic. You don't rip anything out for a product that doesn't exist yet. Anyone telling you to is selling something.

But you let it do one useful thing. You let it become a forcing question for the foundation you already run.

Go ask your current platform the questions Sol is implicitly asking. Can it register an agent as a real entity in the system, not a footnote? When an agent takes an action inside a process, does it land in the record itself, where you and Legal can see it, or in some side analytics tool? Can you scope and revoke what an agent is allowed to touch without filing an IT ticket and waiting a sprint?

If you've been reading this thing for a while, you know I already planted this flag. Sol just turned that argument into a funded company run by the people who'd know.

Here's where I land.

As a product, Sol is easy to ignore for now. No GA, no number, no tenant to break.

As a signal, it's the opposite of ignorable. The people who poured the foundation walked across the street and started selling rebuilds. You can disagree with them. Workday clearly does. But you can't wave them off, because they know the load limits of the thing you're standing on.

Prototype five won because Justin stopped trusting the render and started kicking it.

The question this launch puts on your desk isn't "should I buy Sol." It's whether you can say, with a straight face, that your foundation survives the load that's coming, or whether you just like how it looks in the render.

You find that out by loading it. Not by admiring it.

That's the whole job.

—Mike.

P.S. — Prototype five has been at the club a few days now, while we wait for filament to come for the “real build” (logo included, of course). The ball machine lives in it. It gets kicked, dropped, leaned on, ignored. Prototype five does not care. Justin who is now at the club more than me due to summer camp, checks daily to see whether anyone's broken it yet. Nobody has. He's twelve, and he already gets the thing half the vendors in my inbox don't: you don't get to call it done until the real world has had a real chance to wreck it. The rest of us are still working on that one.

tl;dr

There’s a war in HR tech nobody names, because naming it means admitting your org chart was designed by a raccoon. It’s the war between the people who buy the talent tech and the people who own it. These are never, under any circumstances, the same people.

TA sees a demo at a conference, has what can only be described as a religious experience, and signs a contract. Then HRIS gets handed the bill, the integration, the security model, and a Tuesday meeting that opens with the three most terrifying words in enterprise software: “so, quick favor…”

The fix is stupidly simple, which is what makes it enraging: put the person who buys it and the person who has to keep it alive in the same room before anyone signs anything. That’s the whole reform. We cannot, as a species, seem to do it.

Let me tell you about the calendar invite.

It arrives on a Tuesday, because of course it does. No agenda. No context. Just a title sitting there like a ransom note: “Quick sync — new ATS integration.”

And you, the HRIS person, stare at it. Because you have questions. Questions like: what new ATS? And: integration with WHAT? And, increasingly: am I being fired in this meeting, or worse, given a project?

You join the call. And over the next thirty minutes you learn that three months ago (THREE MONTHS) the talent acquisition team went to a conference. And at this conference, they saw a demo. And the demo was, and I cannot stress this enough, beautiful. Clean data. One radiant, photogenic candidate gliding through a hiring process like a salmon who has never known struggle. And TA gazed upon this demo, and they wept, and they signed a contract.

And nobody told you. Because why would they? You’re just the person who has to make it work.

Welcome to the Boundary Wars. Grab a helmet. (We didn’t budget for helmets. Use a coffee mug.)

Nobody Owns What They Buy (And They’ve Made That YOUR Problem)

Here is the structural insanity at the heart of all of this, and once you see it you cannot unsee it:

In most organizations, the people who buy the talent technology and the people who own the talent technology are completely different humans. Different teams. Different budgets. Different Saturdays.

The recruiting team buys it. I configure it. The recruiting team gets the credit. I get the 2 a.m. alert that says “requisition sync failed” (a phrase that has aged me roughly eleven years and counting).

I am, professionally and spiritually, the poor bastard who has to configure what the TA team buys. That is the most accurate sentence anyone has ever written about my job, and if you work in HRIS, you just felt it in a part of your soul you’d rather not discuss in public.

The Demo. Oh, The Demo.

Let’s talk about the demo, because the demo is where this entire catastrophe begins, and it is a masterpiece of controlled deception.

Every HR tech demo runs on what we in the industry call the “happy path.” This is a magical realm where the data is clean, there are no duplicate person records, every field maps perfectly, and the API has never once gone down at 9 a.m. the morning after a Workday release like a teenager refusing to get out of bed.

It is fiction. It is the software equivalent of a real estate photo shot with a fisheye lens. And TA (who, again, I genuinely do not blame, they are victims here too) looks at this and goes “yes, THAT, I want THAT,” not realizing the demo has the same relationship to their actual tenant that a cruise brochure has to a norovirus outbreak.

And then comes the phrase. The phrase that should be classified as a controlled substance. The two most expensive words in the English language:

“Seamless integration.”

There is no seam in recorded human history that has cost more to sew shut. “Seamless” is the word vendors invented so they would never have to say the true sentence, which is: “you will be doing this part, on a weekend, alone, possibly weeping.”

“It Just Sits On Top of Workday”

My personal favorite, because nothing — NOTHING — just sits on top of Workday. You do not casually rest things on top of Workday. Workday is not a coffee table.

There is a toll. There is always a toll. The field mapping. The security model. And my beloved: the headcount reconciliation, where TA’s shiny new tool insists you have 412 open roles, Workday swears it’s 389, and Finance strolls in with a spreadsheet that says 401 and the unshakeable confidence of a person who has never once been right but has also never once been told.

We call this a “single source of truth.” We have built a single source of three truths. It is Schrödinger’s headcount: simultaneously correct and catastrophically wrong until the precise moment someone opens the report in a board meeting.

Credit and Consequence: A Love Story With No Love In It

Here’s the asymmetry that turns a mild annoyance into an actual war.

TA gets the credit. The candidate-experience metric. The time-to-fill slide. The LinkedIn post with 1,400 likes about “transforming talent acquisition,” shared enthusiastically by people who have never once opened a business process diagram in their lives.

HRIS gets the consequence. The ticket. The Saturday. The release-cycle whack-a-mole where you fix one integration and two more pop up giggling. And the all-time classic: the security group nobody read, configured at speed, that quietly lets a recruiter see executive comp data they were never, ever supposed to see. (In the Department, we have a technical term for this. We call it a Career Limiting Event.)

Same software. Two completely different relationships with it. One of these people is at happy hour. The other is us. On a Saturday. Again.

So Whose Fault Is This? (Plot Twist)

And here is the part where I’m supposed to point at the recruiters and scream. Except (and I need you to really hear this) it is not their fault.

It genuinely is not. The recruiters are getting screamed at by a hiring manager about a req that’s been open for sixty days. Somebody sold them a tool that promised to make the screaming stop. They bought the aspirin. You would too. I would too.

The villain isn’t a person. The villain is the ORG CHART. It’s a buying process specifically engineered so the person who signs the contract and the person who inherits the total cost of ownership are in different departments, different budgets, and — crucially — different Saturdays.

You cannot fix that with a better integration. There is no integration on Earth powerful enough to repair a decision made in a room you weren’t invited to. The fix is letting the person who has to keep the thing alive sit in the room before the ink dries.

That’s it. That’s the reform. Put the buyer and the owner in the same meeting. It costs nothing. It requires no software. And somehow, across the entire profession, we treat it like cold fusion.

The Verdict

So here is where we are.

The Boundary Wars don’t end when TA wins or HRIS wins. They end when somebody — anybody — finally stops treating “buy it” and “own it” as two unrelated jobs performed by two unrelated people who meet for the very first time in a Tuesday calendar invite ominously titled “quick sync.”

Until that glorious day?

I’ll be right here. Configuring the thing you bought. Securing the thing you bought. Reconciling the thing you bought against the two other things you also bought.

On a Saturday.

You’re welcome.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Legal Guardian of Software I Did Not Conceive

P.S. Justin begged me for me to load a new filament type into the printer last week. “It’ll be easy, Dad. Just load it.” Reader, it was not easy. Three hours. Two clogged nozzles. One full recalibration. Several (ok, many) words I will not be reprinting here, because my mother reads this newsletter. He picked the shiny thing; I owned the integration. The Boundary Wars start young, and they start at home.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr; The label you use for yourself in meetings, on slides, and in your email signature is not just identity. It’s a funnel for the work that gets routed to you. “The Workday person” attracts tickets. “HR Tech Architect” attracts design sessions. Choose accordingly, and be honest about the cost of choosing wrong.

Tell me what you call yourself in meetings, and I’ll tell you what you’ll be doing for the next eighteen months.

Not your job title. Your label. The phrase you use when someone you don’t know asks “so what do you do?” and you have three seconds to land it.

The phrase you put in your email signature when nobody’s making you. The one you say when someone catches you at a conference and asks what you do.

That phrase is doing more than you think.

In HR Tech, the labels people use for themselves fall into four buckets. They feel honest. They feel modest. They’re also routing instructions for your inbox.

“The Workday person” / “The HRIS person”

Call yourself this and you’ll get tickets. Break-fix. The “can you just real quick” requests. The password resets that aren’t your job. You will not get a seat at the roadmap conversation. Ever.

“HRIS Analyst” / “Sr. HRIS Analyst”

Configuration projects, requirements gathering, the Friday EIB. Respected as competent. Rarely consulted as strategic. The bench player who never gets called into the strategy huddle.

“HR Tech Architect” / “Solutions Architect”

Design sessions. Integration patterns. Vendor evaluations. The “what should we do about agents?” conversation. You still touch the tenant when something interesting breaks. Mostly you’re drawing the blueprint someone else builds.

“Director, HR Technology” / “HR Tech Leader”

Budget conversations. Executive briefings. Headcount decisions. Vendor relationships. Roadmap defense. The CFO and CHRO calls. You don’t touch the tenant. You traded the keyboard for the calendar. Different rooms entirely.

Which is the whole point.

Each label trades hands-on credibility for strategic reach. Where you sit on that gradient decides which work flows to your desk. Not over years. Over weeks.

Most of my audience is in the modest-label camp. “I’m just the Workday person.” Said with a small shrug. Sometimes with pride.

I get it. I’ve been there. The modesty feels honest because the work is mostly tactical. You actually are the Workday person. Calling yourself anything else feels like cosplay.

But the modest label is a tax. You pay it every time someone forwards you a ticket that should have gone to Tier 1. Every time a VP wants a calc field built and comes to you because you’re “the Workday person.” Every time you’re not in the room when the AI vendor presents because the meeting is for “architects.”

The tax compounds. After three years of “the Workday person,” nobody on the leadership team can picture you doing anything else.

Where most career advice falls apart is that relabeling has a real cost.

Some peers will roll their eyes. Some bosses will think you’re getting above your station. You will go through an awkward period where the title on your email signature doesn’t match what HR has in Workday, and someone will absolutely send a passive-aggressive Teams message about it.

You will also, occasionally, get caught not knowing something an architect or a director “should” know. That moment is brutal. It is also part of the deal.

The label is a wedge. Not a magic wand. It opens the room to grow into. It doesn’t pre-fill the room.

So how do you actually change it?

Not by waiting for the promotion. Promotion follows label. Not the other way around.

Change it in the small places first. Your email signature. Your LinkedIn headline. How you introduce yourself at the next RUG meetup. The “About me” slide on your next deck.

Then change it in the medium places. How you describe your role to a recruiter. How you frame your last project in your one-on-one. How you describe what you do to your kids.

Then watch your inbox over the next ninety days. Different questions. Different cc’s. Different rooms.

Your title is what HR puts on your offer letter. Your label is what you put in your email signature. They don’t have to match. They often shouldn’t.

The work you want is downstream of the label.

Change it on purpose.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Self-Appointed

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

P.S. - Justin announced over dinner that he was no longer “a sixth grader.” He’s “a kidpreneur.” I asked what changed. He said, “Nothing yet. But now people will start asking me different questions.”

Smart kid.

TLDR;

Correction (June 17): An earlier version of this post said signing the UMSA automatically flips Sana Core on in Production and changes your login experience. That's wrong. I went back to the Sana Core for Workday release note: signing provisions Sana Core and drops a security-admin setup task in your tenant — but nothing activates, and no login changes, until an admin completes that task and grants Workspace access. I've corrected the relevant sections below. I'd rather be right than loud. Thanks to the team at Workday for flagging it.

• The new Workday Flex Credits and Platform Entitlement Policy took effect May 30, 2026.

• The grace period everyone is misreading: from May 30, 2026 through January 31, 2027, policy signers pay no overage charges on Application APIs. That is the whole scope. It does not waive your agent credit burn.

• The meter only works if you finished the setup almost nobody finished. Sign the UMSA. Stand up your Agent System of Record. Switch on the Platform Consumption Console.

• Signing the policy provisions Sana Core and queues a security-admin setup task. What you do with that task is where the real decision lives.

• The rate card is not a price list. It is a map. Some agents are cheap enough to explore all year, some are not.

Credit where it is owed. I would not be writing this piece, and frankly I might not be writing at all, if Jess had not started pulling this thread (and others) in public first (Jess is the absolute boss on working an Agile-led product management Workday team. Read her stuff. It was and still is a major reason why I believe in practitioner-led Workday content). Jess is an HRIS Manager in Minneapolis. A practitioner. Not an analyst, not a vendor voice. What follows builds on a public, on-the-record conversation where she walked through negotiating her own organization’s Workday agreement out loud. That is the rarest kind of source in this space. Not a doc interpretation. A practitioner narrating the actual commercial process while she lived it. The framing here builds on her notes. The modeling is mine.

Let’s go.

1. The gate nobody mentioned

Flex Credits do not exist in a vacuum. You cannot buy them without the Universal Main Subscription Agreement in place first. The UMSA is the master agreement that governs the whole relationship. The Flex Credits and Platform Entitlement Policy sits on top of that structure and governs how the credits are priced and consumed.

So the order matters. The UMSA is the foundation. The Flex Credits policy is the consumption layer that rides on it through your Order Form. If you are evaluating Flex Credits, you are not flipping a standalone switch. You are adding a metered consumption layer to an agreement you already have.

That is worth understanding before you sign, because a consumption policy is an operational decision, not only a commercial one. Ask your account team directly what changes when you sign, including anything that touches access or authentication in Production, and on what schedule. Get the answer in writing. Treat the paperwork and any downstream change as one planned event, and brief security, identity, and the help desk before the pen hits paper, not after.

One clarification, because this is exactly where people get the wrong idea. The UMSA unlocks the use of your entitlements. It does not hand you more Flex Credits. If you want more, or you run past what you have, you sign a Flex Credit Order Form to buy them. And Workday is watching. It monitors your consumption through the PCC and will flag you as you approach your entitlement levels, with a nudge to start looking at purchasing credits before you run out. The gate lets you in. It does not refill the tank.

Here is the asymmetry that catches people. UMSA is required for non-production and production tenants for Workday-built agents. It is not required for non-production tenants for self-built agents. So your sandbox tinkering on a custom agent does not trip the requirement. The moment you take a Workday-native agent toward Production, it does.

Check your own status in about thirty seconds. On Workday Community, open your profile, click your organization name under your title, and read the Subscription Service Agreement value. If it says MSA, you have not opted in and you are gated. If it says UMSA, you are clear and the features are automatically available.

Most practitioners have never looked at that field. Go look.

2. The setup nobody finished

Signing the UMSA opens the door. It does not walk you through it. There are two configuration jobs waiting on the other side, and neither turns on by itself.

Job one: the Agent System of Record.

The ASOR is the control center for your digital agent workforce. Discover agents, register them, manage them, audit them. It is where governance actually lives. And standing it up is a manual security exercise across six domains.

Five live in the new Agent System of Record functional area:

• Agent Compliance

• Agent Management Hub

• Manage: Agents

• Reports: Agent Reporting

• Setup: Agents

One more lives in the System functional area:

• Reports: AI Agent Security

You enable the functional area, activate pending security changes, enable each domain security policy, grant View and Modify to your security groups, then activate again. One caveat that will bite you: today you can only configure unconstrained groups on ASOR security policies. And there is no migration tool. You repeat this in every tenant, by hand. Sandbox, implementation, Production. Each one.

Configure an agent and Workday auto-generates an Agent System User account for it. That ASU is how the agent authenticates. External agents, partner-built or your own, route through the new Agent Gateway on regional endpoints, OAuth 2 only. If you have integrations pointed at old endpoints, that is a migration conversation, not a checkbox.

Job two: the Platform Consumption Console.

The PCC is your meter. It is also off by default. To turn it on, a security admin creates a security policy on the Management Dashboard: Platform Consumption Console domain in the System functional area, adds the relevant security groups, grants View, and activates pending changes.

Two things worth knowing about the PCC. First, Workday is precise that the dashboard data is usage data and not customer content, and that the console itself is not part of the Workday Service. Read that as: it is a courtesy meter, not a contractual one. Second, and this is the one that matters, any customer with a Workday tenant can now turn on the PCC to view document storage. Flex Credits visibility, both complimentary and purchased, is UMSA only.

Six domains for the ASOR. One for the PCC. Seven security configurations standing between you and a working, observable agent stack. None automatic. That is the gap between what is documented and what is real.

3. The task nobody scheduled

Here’s what I got wrong the first time. And here’s what actually happens.

Signing the UMSA does not change your login. It does not flip Sana Core on in Production. Your users are not going to wake up to a new front door.

What it does do: it provisions Sana Core in your tenant and drops a “Set Up AI Admin Security Permissions Task” onto your security admin. Nothing turns on until someone completes that task and adds users to the Sana Workspace.

So the switch doesn’t get thrown automatically. It gets handed to your security admin. Quietly. As a task.

And that’s the part still worth watching. A procurement team signs the paper. A security admin — who may have been in exactly none of those procurement conversations — inherits a config task they didn’t ask for and might not fully understand. If procurement and security aren’t talking (and in most orgs, they aren’t), that task either sits unowned, or it gets rubber-stamped by someone who doesn’t realize what they’re switching on.

That’s not a Monday-morning incident. It’s slower and quieter than that. It’s a configuration decision that lands in an inbox with no context attached. Which, if you’ve done this job long enough, you know is its own kind of dangerous.

4. The rate card, decoded

Now the part everyone wants and almost nobody has modeled.

First, in summary, what you get for free. Complimentary Flex Credits, renewed annually, scaled to company size. Workday sets the actual allotments, so confirm yours with your account team.

The point is not the figure. It is what the figure buys.

Here is the rate card translated into plain practitioner terms. Every one of these is a real consumption meter from the Workday’s published Flex Credit Rate Card*.

*The chart is not the full rate card, just a summary.

The meters are metered in different amounts. A self-service action and a talent rediscovery run are both “one event,” and one costs 1 credit while the other costs 750. That is the whole game.

A credit is not a credit

Take that same 200,000 complimentary allotment from the top tier. Watch what it buys depending on which agent you switch on.

Same pool. Two-hundred-thousand-to-one spread between the cheapest and most expensive thing you can point it at. The complimentary allotment is built to feel abundant, and for low-cost exploratory skills it is. For high-cost skills it is a rounding error.

The sleeper that should scare you

Payroll Data Monitoring. Five credits per 10 worker records per run. That reads as cheap. Do the unit math and it is 0.5 credits per worker, per run.

Run it across a 100,000-worker population, one run is 50,000 credits. Schedule it weekly, the way you would actually run missing-data monitoring, and you are at 2.6 million credits a year against a 200,000 allotment.

You exhaust the entire annual complimentary pool in four runs. The first month.

Even a monthly cadence is 600,000 credits a year. Three times your allotment, from a single agent configuration that a payroll admin could switch on without anyone modeling the cost. This is not a contract negotiation team carefully redlining 400 documents. This is one scheduled job quietly running against your full headcount.

Model the per-worker, per-run skills before you turn them on. Those are the ones that scale with your population, and population is the one number that does not flatter you.

The platform draw nobody connects to agents

The same credit pool covers platform consumption overages. Core Platform API requests bill at 60 credits per 10,000 calls once you exceed your baseline entitlement, which is 6.5 million calls for our analysis (and that floor climbs if you’re running Student, Accounting Center, Procurement, Extend, Prism, or Financial Management — each one raises the baseline).

Go one million calls over baseline and that is 6,000 credits. Ten million over and you are at 60,000 credits, nearly a third of your complimentary allotment, gone to integration traffic that has nothing to do with agents. Modified Workday integrations and non-Workday integrations count toward the limit. Prebuilt unmodified connectors, Built on Workday apps, and traffic between Workday and the acquired platforms like HiredScore and Adaptive do not.

Your agent strategy and your integration architecture draw from the same well. Budget them together or get surprised together. One timing note: this is the one drain the grace period covers. API overages are waived for policy signers through January 31, 2027, which is exactly why you should use the window to find your real API baseline before the meter starts.

The prerequisite tax

A credit balance is necessary, not sufficient. Several agents require an underlying SKU before you can spend a credit on them. The Talent agents are the clearest example. Recruiting, Talent Mobility, and the Fetch skills all require HiredScore AI for Talent. So the most expensive skills on the card, 750 credits a pop, also require a paid SKU underneath them. You pay to unlock the right to burn.

Check the prerequisites doc before you build a business case on any agent. The credit cost isn’t the whole bill.

5. The grace period and your move before January 31

Here is the urgency, and it is the part everyone is about to get wrong.

There is a grace period. It is real, it is published, and it is narrower than the hype will tell you. Per Workday Community (the Simplified Platform Access post, May 2026), customers who have signed or will sign the Flex Credits and Platform Entitlement Policy pay no overage charges on Application APIs from May 30, 2026 through January 31, 2027.

Read that scope twice. Application APIs. Not agents. Not your Flex Credit burn.

So here is what the grace period actually does. If you blow past your Platform Entitlement for API calls while you tune integrations and agent traffic, those API overages are waived through January 31. That is genuinely useful, because Workday just simplified the entitlement model down to APIs only. Document Storage and Integration Events came out of the Platform Entitlement Policy entirely. Document Storage is now a flat 10 terabytes for every customer. APIs are the only metered platform component left, and the grace period gives you room to find your real API baseline before the charges start.

Here is what the grace period does not do. It does not waive your agent consumption. Run the payroll monitoring job from a few sections back, burn 2.6 million Flex Credits against a 200,000 allotment, and that overage is billable today. The grace period does not touch it. Your complimentary credits let you explore agents in production up to your allotment. Past that, the agent meter bills from day one, grace period or not.

The takeaway most people will miss: the free room is on the platform side, where it is easy. The real money is on the agent side, where there is no grace at all.

And the window only helps if you can see your consumption. Which loops back to setup. No UMSA, no credit visibility in the PCC. No PCC, no meter at all. No ASOR, no agents to meter.

Your move, in order:

1. Check your agreement. MSA or UMSA. Thirty seconds on Community. If you are MSA, start the UMSA opt-in conversation with your account team now, because everything else waits on it.

2. Brief the auth change before you sign. Know which security admin inherits the setup task — and get them briefed before procurement signs, not after.

3. Stand up the ASOR. Six domains. Every tenant. No migration. Start in a sandbox so the runbook is solid before Production.

4. Turn on the PCC. One domain. Confirm you can actually see Flex Credit consumption, which means confirm the UMSA went through.

5. Know your exposure. Use the window to find two numbers, not one. Your API baseline, which the grace period protects until January 31. And your agent burn, which it never protected. Model the per-worker and per-requisition skills hardest, because those are the ones that scale with your size. Walk into February with both numbers, not a hope.

The grace period is a gift with a deadline and a narrow scope. The scope is the part people will miss.

6. What is permanent and what is noise

You know my thesis. Vendor product names have about a nine-month shelf life. The architecture underneath is the thing worth learning.

The specific rates will change. Workday has signaled that pricing and design-phase skills can move or disappear. So do not memorialize the numbers. Do not build a deck around any singly figure. The rates are a snapshot, and the snapshot has the shortest shelf life of anything here.

What is permanent is the shape. Workday moved from buy-a-SKU-get-unlimited-use to metered consumption, where you pay for the work the agent performs and the meters are denominated in wildly different units. That model is not going back in the box. The names will churn. Sana, Illuminate, whatever comes next. The consumption architecture is the new floor for the agent and platform layer — to be clear, this is the model for the AI/agent SKUs, not your whole Workday footprint. Most of the platform still works the old way.

Learn the floor. Use the window to learn it with real data instead of marketing math, and learn both numbers: the API baseline the grace period protects, and the agent burn. The clock started May 30. It stops January 31.

And before you click the X in the upper right of your screen, open a new browser tab and go look at your agreement field.

- Mike.

Special thanks to Jess for reading the meter out loud before the rest of us thought to look. Notes, modeling, and any errors here are mine.

tldr;

My 12-year-old figured out anchor-high-discount-down pricing in ten seconds, and "Dad time" as a real cost line in ninety.

Workday Flex Credits work the same way: the rate card is knowable, your actual bill isn't — until you're in production with real users.

Test environments don't consume credits, so your test data is lying to you about the cost.

Practitioner move: run a production pilot before you sign, model the agents that will get adopted (not the demo path), negotiate the flex mechanism not the flex number.

The kid brain and the practitioner brain run the same algorithm. The buyer brain has been trained out of it.

So I posted last week about Justin's first big 3D print order: sixteen tables for the tennis club. The P.S. mentioned that he'd correctly identified labor as a sales lever and was now pricing in Dad time on filament loading and printer support.

A bunch of you wrote in about that P.S. Which is hilarious, because I spent 1,800 words on practitioner confidence and you all wanted to talk about the 12-year-old pricing his father into the deal.

Fine. Let's talk about it. Because the next forty-eight hours got even better.

The Pricing Conversation

After the order came in, Justin sat down to figure out his price for future orders (this one was sold at cost, which is also a correct sales lever to test your potential market. Told you…this kid is scary sometimes).

Materials per table: $30.55.

His first instinct: charge double. Sixty bucks. "Two times cost" is the rule of thumb every tween-with-a-side-hustle defaults to, and honestly, it's not wrong as a starting point.

I pushed back. Sixty doesn't account for failed prints, electricity, printer wear, or his time. The real cost per unit is closer to forty or forty-five once you stack everything in. At sixty, his margin survives one failed print (we’ve had many) and that's about it. I told him to look at seventy-five.

He thought about it for a bit.

"Yeah, I'll do seventy-five. If somebody really wants one and can't afford it, I can come down. That feels better than starting at sixty and having to go up."

I just stared at him.

The Move

That's pricing strategy. That's anchor-high-discount-as-a-lever. That's the move every SaaS rep uses on you in Q4 and you're somehow still surprised when they "find some flexibility" on the renewal call. He landed on it in the time it takes to microwave a mini bag of Pop Secret.

The reason it works isn't magic. Humans hate price increases more than they like price decreases. Going from $60 to $75 feels like betrayal. Going from $75 to $65 feels like a gift. Same fifteen-dollar gap, completely different emotional response.

Justin hadn't read a behavioral economics paper. He hadn't sat through a sales training video. He’s in sixth-grade Social Studies. He just thought about how it would feel to be the person on the other side of the conversation.

The Cost Conversation

The follow-up was sharper.

I started walking him through why $30.55 wasn't his real cost. Filament, sure. But also failed prints. Electricity running four printers. Eventual nozzle replacements on the equipment. Build plate wear. The time he spends slicing, post-processing, gluing, and cleaning up.

His response was, instantly, "What about Dad time? You're loading filament for me."

Reader, I had not raised the topic of Dad time. He just understood that anything keeping the printer running was a cost.

He'd grasped, in about ninety seconds, what most enterprise buyers don't: the unit you're modeling is almost never the unit you're paying for.

Which brings us to Flex Credits.

What Justin Just Figured Out About Workday Agents

If you haven't had to think about Workday Flex Credits yet, you're about to. They're the consumption-based pricing model for Workday Agents (the Sana-based AI tools rolling out across the platform). You don't pay a flat fee. You pay for what you use. Test environments don't consume them. Traditional ML tools don't consume them. They're specifically for Agents, in production, with real users hitting them.

Which means here's what you actually know before you sign:

• The rate card.

• Your headcount.

• Your guess at usage.

Here's what you don't know:

• Which agents your population will actually adopt.

• How often they'll hit them.

• What a "popular" agent looks like at your scale.

What the bill looks like in month four when somebody builds an agent that gets embedded in three high-traffic business processes.

You can't know any of that until you're in production. The Flex Credits FAQ on Community will give you the structure. It will not give you your bill. The bill is a function of usage, and the usage is a function of behavior, and the behavior is unknowable until the thing is live.

This is the same problem Justin hit with the tables.

He could model materials. He could not model the failure rate until he ran the batch. He could not model his own labor until he was elbow-deep in a four-printer relay. The sticker number ($30.55) was the cleanest, most knowable variable. It was also the smallest piece of the actual cost.

Workday Flex Credits will work the same way. The rate card is the cleanest, most knowable variable. It is also the smallest piece of the conversation you should be having.

The Practitioner Move

If you're building toward an Agents rollout (and if you're a Workday customer, you are, whether you've gotten the signal yet or not) the practitioner version of Justin's instinct is this:

1. Run a production pilot before you commit. Test environments don't consume credits, which means your test environment is also lying to you about your costs. Buy enough credits for one real workflow with real users for one real cycle. That's your ground truth. Everything else is the rate card multiplied by a guess.

2. Pick the agents most likely to get adopted, not the ones easiest to demo. Demo agents are cheap because nobody uses them. The agents that get adopted hit your credit balance hardest. If you're modeling cost based on the demo path, your bill will be wrong in the same direction every time.

3. Negotiate the mechanism, not the number. Anchor on what happens when usage exceeds projections, not on what the projections are. The projections are wrong. They're always wrong. Justin's move (quote high, leave room to come down) is the same move you want from your CSM. Ask for the flex band, not the flex number.

The Bigger Thesis

Here's the part that really bothers the s&!% out of me.

A 12-year-old figured out, in ninety seconds, what enterprise buyers routinely miss in seven-figure Workday conversations. He's not smarter than the buyers. He's just not trained to ignore what's right in front of him.

He doesn't have a procurement playbook telling him "license cost is the cost." He doesn't have a vendor deck telling him orchestration is the future. He doesn't have a webinar pre-loading the answer. All he did was look at the whole picture and asked what it actually takes to get the table out the door.

That's the practitioner brain. First principles. No vendor framing. No domesticated buyer reflexes.

The kid brain and the practitioner brain run the same algorithm. The buyer brain runs a different one (a trained one) and that's how you end up signing a Flex Credits commitment at a number you'll outgrow in month four.

Charge $75. Discount when it makes sense. Run the pilot before you sign.

A 12-year-old figured it out. Your renewal is coming.

— Mike

P.S. Justin has now extended the breaded chicken billing model. Filament loading remains the base service. Post-processing has been quoted at "lemonade rates." I am told these are non-negotiable. The Department of First Things First's first pricing analyst is, apparently, also its first finance director.

tldr; The Salesforce envy is real, but the gap isn't celebration (or the lack thereof). It's leverage. The Workday practitioner community already exists (it's just self-organized by necessity). The vendor is sending mixed signals. The deeper sting is structural: in our ecosystem, the architect and director roles go to consultants, not practitioners. We don't fix that by waiting for a jacket. We fix it by self-organizing harder and using the leverage we already have. Flex Credits proved it works.

I'll be honest with you. I get the FOMO.

When I scroll past my Salesforce friends collecting Trailblazer badges, stacking certifications like Pokémon cards, wearing the rainbow jackets to Dreamforce, there's a part of me that thinks: "why don't we have any of that?"

We get Workday Pro. Which is a transactional cert program. Useful, marketable, but not exactly an identity. There's no jacket. No campfire. No "I'm a Workday-er" t-shirt I'm putting on my LinkedIn header.

The Nick Moores promotion was a signal that maybe (maybe) that's starting to shift (for those of you not in the know, Nick has been a developer advocate for Workday since 2021, and an integrations consultant before that. He's been quietly been building a presence for years. He knows his stuff).

Then, in the 2026 layoff round, they cut their community manager.

So the signals are confused. But honestly? That's not the part that matters.

The community already exists. The vendor just hasn't shown up (fully).

Look around. The RUGs. The Customer Sharing Movement. The Unsafe Harbor podcast. Workday Gold. HRIS Careers. And that's the tip of the iceberg. There's so much more good, solid content that practitioners are putting out there. The DMs that fly between practitioners every time a release note drops. The Slack channels nobody talks about publicly (I have a WhatsApp thread from Rising 2025 that's still alive - Go Social Squad ‘25!). The conference hallway conversations that are more useful than the keynotes (I once had a brilliant conversation about building a Slack integration with Workday two full years before Workday did in a Las Vegas elevator. Again, Eric, thank you. You’ve truly been a friend ever since).

The ecosystem is bottom-up by necessity. The vendor didn't build it. We did.

It's actually pretty good. Quieter than Trailblazers. Less manufactured. Fewer chants. The energy is operators talking to operators, not vendor-led PR cosplay. There's a kind of dignity to that.

But the gap is real. And it isn't really about jackets.

The real sting: who gets the title?

In our ecosystem, the "Solution Architect" and "Director HR Technology" roles disproportionately go to consultants who rotated through six tenants and built a personal brand on LinkedIn. Practitioners (the people who've actually lived in one tenant for eight years, who know where the bodies are buried, who've made the system survive three CHRO changes and a reorg) get a Workday Pro cert and a LinkedIn post when they get their certification.

That's a leverage gap.

Salesforce admins have an ecosystem that translates community participation into career mobility. Recruiter pings. Conference badges that mean something on a resume. A clear path from "I work in Salesforce" to "I architect Salesforce." That path exists for Workday consultants. It barely exists for Workday practitioners.

So when the Trailblazer FOMO hits, that's actually what we're feeling. Not the jackets. The economic ecosystem the jackets are downstream of.

The good news: we have more leverage than we think.

The Flex Credits walk-back proved it. Practitioners pushed back. Publicly and persistently. The vendor moved. Let's call it a market correction triggered by practitioner pressure.

The lesson is: when the practitioner community speaks with a coordinated voice, the vendor listens because they have to.

So here's the actual ask:

Stop waiting for the jacket. The jacket isn't coming, and frankly, after looking at the Trailblazer ecosystem up close, I'm not sure I want one.

What I want is the vendor to back the community that's already here. Sponsor the practitioner-led podcasts. Send Nick to RUG meetings. Promote practitioners into architect and director roles, not just consultants with implementation badges. Stop treating community as a marketing function and start treating it like a product input. And for the love of all things proper, BRING BACK BRAINSTORMS.

And until they do? Keep self-organizing. Show up to your RUG. Subscribe to the practitioner newsletters. Quote each other. Recommend each other for roles. Build the muscle the vendor hasn't built for us.

We don't need the jacket.

We need the leverage. And we already have it.

P.S. I asked Justin if he wished his volleyball team had cooler uniforms. He said, "the team that wins the championship gets a banner at the club. The jerseys don't matter that much." Then he asked why grown-ups care about jackets. I didn't have a great answer.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | No Jacket Required

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tl;dr

My son Justin just completed an order for 16 custom 3D-printed side tables for our tennis club. He almost passed on it before he started, because he didn't think he could do it.

Once he got out of his own head, he did exceptional work: researched a Creative Commons base design, modified it for tennis (added ball holders so balls don't roll away), and proposed adding the club's logo. The owner ordered 16 on the spot.

The framework that closed the deal is the same one that closes any deal, in any industry. Listen to the actual problem. Show up with a working solution. Add the detail nobody asked for. The hardest part is usually getting yourself to start.

Our tennis club just installed Zenniz line-calling on every court. If you don't follow tennis tech, it's basically Hawk-Eye for amateur clubs. Cameras, AI, automatic line calls. It's slick, it works, and it's almost entirely killed the line-call argument that has been ruining doubles matches since the invention of doubles matches.

It also killed our courtside tables.

The little tables that used to bolt onto the net post had to come off to make room for the main system mount. So now there's nowhere to put a water bottle, a phone, or a tube of balls between sets. Players were grumbling. The owner was hearing about it constantly. Nobody had a good answer (I know, first world problem. I fully acknowledge my privilege).

Jenn and I were talking about it on the way home from a clinic, and she said the obvious (AKA smart) thing.

"Why doesn't Justin 3D print one?"

She floated the idea to the owner. He was interested. One of his juniors was going to help out the club. He didn't need a deck. He didn't need a roadmap. He needed a table that could survive a tennis club.

Then we told Justin.

The Part Where He Almost Bailed

Justin's first reaction was not enthusiasm.

He actually screamed "I can't do that,” and promptly hung up the phone on his Mom.

Now, let’s put his reaction into perspective. He runs a four printer farm in our basement. He's been modeling in Fusion 360, Tinkercad, Canva, and Bambu Studio since he was ten. He has produced more functional, finished objects in the last year than most adults will in their lifetime. None of that mattered in the moment. The minute it became real, with a real customer expecting a real product, his brain immediately went to all the reasons he wasn't the right person for it.

It was too big. He'd never done a real order before. What if it didn't fit together? What if the panels warped? What if the owner hated it? What if, what if, what if.

This is, by the way, a very specific feeling that I have watched grown adults experience (me too!) in conference rooms hundreds of times. Same posture. Same furrowed brow. Same internal monologue. "I'm not the right person for this." Mostly delivered by people who, by every measurable standard, are exactly the right person for this.

This time, it took one conversation once we got home. Some "you have literally already built harder things than this." Some "the worst case is the owner hates it and we eat the filament cost." Some appeals to the obvious upside (real money, his name on a product in a real business).

And then, somewhere between the third and fourth point, the imposter syndrome shut off and the maven flipped on.

What He Actually Did

From that point forward, he was sprinting.

He found a Creative Commons table design he liked as a base (because the smart move is never to start from scratch when somebody has already solved 60% of the problem for you). He modified the dimensions to work as a courtside companion. He sized it to drag around for tournaments without throwing your back out, but strong enough to be knocked around and not break.

Then he made two decisions that I want to flag, because they are the entire ballgame.

First, he added circular ball holders to one of the panels.

Three little wells, sized to hold a tennis ball, so they don't roll off the table the second you set them down. Anyone who has played tennis for more than fifteen minutes knows this is the single most relatable design problem in the sport. Tennis balls are round. Round things roll. Tables are flat. Flat plus round equals annoyance. Justin solved for that, on his own, because he plays the sport and he has personally experienced the exact moment of frustration the table needs to fix.

Nobody asked for ball holders. He just understood the use case.

Second, he proposed the club's logo on the top.

Not a sticker. Painted on with a machine. Multi-color, right on the panel. The owner had not asked for any branding. Justin offered it because, on some intuitive level, he knew that a generic side table is something you order from Amazon. A side table with the club's logo on it is something the club owns.

The logo is the difference between a piece of furniture and a piece of identity.

He built the prototype. Hexagonal top, triangular panels in the club's colors, structural base in black PETG (stronger plastic to survive being knocked around), ball holders, logo on top. Walked it into the pro shop. The owner picked it up, set a Gatorade on it, looked at the logo, and ordered sixteen.

A sample is in the photo (above). The last panel is currently out at a vendor getting the logo printed. The basement smells like warm plastic. There is a four-printer relay running in shifts. Toby has assigned himself to quality assurance and currently sleeps on the couch next to the “farm”. We are operating at full tilt, and Justin has, in the last 72 hours, gone from "I can't do this" to texting me production schedules.

It is a hell of a thing to watch.

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The Three Things That Closed the Deal

This whole story comes down to three moves. They are stupidly simple, and they apply whether you are selling tables, software, or services.

1. Listen to the actual problem

Not the problem in a category report. The problem the customer is actually complaining about, in actual words, in the actual room.

Jenn heard it first. The Zenniz install created a real, specific, daily friction. Players had nowhere to put their stuff. The fix didn't need to be sophisticated. It needed to be a table.

How many vendor demos have you sat through where the AE has clearly never read your annual report? Where the discovery call was a checklist of features they wanted to demo, not questions about what you actually need? Where they show you the agentic AI demo when you said the meeting was about merit planning? The reason most enterprise software pitches fail is not that the product is bad. It is that nobody bothered to find out what the customer was actually trying to do.

2. Show up with a working solution, not a roadmap

The owner was interested in the concept when Jenn mentioned it. But the order didn't happen until Justin walked in with a thing the owner could pick up.

That is a profoundly different sale. The buying decision was not "do I trust the roadmap." The buying decision was "do I want sixteen of these."

The HR Tech version of this is the team that walks into a steering committee and says "I built a working prototype of the thing you asked for, here is the screen, here is what happens when I click this button" versus the team that walks in with a Visio diagram, a list of dependencies, and a Q3 milestone called "TBD."

Which team gets funded? You already know.

3. Add the detail nobody asked for

Logo. Ball holders. Pick your favorite.

The logo is the obvious customization (branding makes it feel owned). The ball holders are the non-obvious one, and they are the more important one. The ball holders only exist because the person designing the table actually plays the sport and has personally lived the moment of frustration the design needs to solve.

That is practitioner empathy (Thanks Jerome!). It does not come from a requirements document. It does not come from a workshop. It comes from someone who has been in the seat the customer sits in.

In Workday terms, the logo is the embedded help text and the org-specific landing page. The ball holders are the business process change you made because you knew the manager was going to bounce out at step seven if you didn't change that approval to a notification. Both matter. The second one is what separates implementations that get adopted from implementations that get tolerated.

The Fourth Thing, Which Almost Killed the Deal

The framework above describes what Justin did. It does not describe the part that almost stopped him from doing any of it.

He almost said no.

Before the design. Before the research. Before the prototype. Before the order. There was a moment where the entire deal hinged on a 12-year-old's willingness to believe he was the right person for the work.

If a 12-year-old with a 4-printer farm can see the path through the fear, why are we, with 20 years of logic-based experience, still stalling? You have sat on an idea you knew was right because "that's not really my call to make." You have deferred to a consultant on something you knew more about than they did. You have watched a vendor pitch a half-baked solution to your CHRO and not pushed back, because who are you to push back? You have written a draft of a recommendation that you knew was correct and never sent it, because, “what if you were wrong?”

The work was never the hard part. The hard part is always the moment before the work, where you decide whether you are the kind of person who does this thing or not.

The HR Tech industry has a chronic, unaddressed practitioner-confidence problem.

The people closest to the system, the ones who actually understand the data model, the security framework, the manager experience, are constantly deferring to people who are paid more, sit higher, or talk faster. Meanwhile, the analysts publish, the consultants bill, the vendors demo, and the practitioners stay quiet. We treat "I'm just the admin" as humility when it is actually the single biggest blocker to better systems.

Justin almost talked himself out of his first big sale. You have probably talked yourself out of your last good idea. That's the bigger story.

The Bottom Line

The framework is real and it works. Listen, prototype, add the detail nobody asked for. You will close more deals, internally and externally, than the people who don't.

But the framework only matters if you actually start. And the part that nobody warns you about is that starting is the hardest part of every meaningful piece of work you will ever do.

My 12-year-old got over it in one conversation. Some practitioners I know have been stalling on the same idea for three years.

Be more like Justin. Once he flipped, he did not look back.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Production Support, Domingo-True Lab

P.S. Justin asked me last night what his “profit margin” should be. I told him to factor in materials, electricity, printer wear, and his time. He thought about it for a few seconds and said, "What about Dad time? You're loading filament for me." I told him he could pay me by playing doubles this weekend with me. He said "deal" and went back to slicing the next batch. The kid who, four days ago, didn't think he could do this is now correctly identifying labor as a sales lever and pricing in his father. The Department of First Things First just hired its first pricing analyst. He bills hourly and accepts payment in breaded chicken cutlets.

P.P.S. This was a huge Proud Dad moment for me. So of course, I made a video of production. If you're interested, here's the video:

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

Sana AI Summit on May 21 was a coronation, not a product launch. Aneel publicly handed Workday's AI future to Joel Hellermark, the 28-year-old self-taught Swedish prodigy who is now Chief AI Officer.

Aneel re-staged Dave Duffield's 2016 "don't screw it up" line. In front of customers. Twice in a decade. Workday's own copy called it a "refounding."

Sana for ITSM is the ServiceNow shot. Sana for Travel and the agent demos showed real agentic workflows for hiring, access requests, and expense filing.

The agent layer is a new governance attack surface. Agents are not just doing the work. They are learning your approval patterns and proposing to rewrite your policies.

The new Flex Credits rate card quietly dropped or deferred integration events, documents, and storage from the meter. A customer-friendly retreat. The new pricing risk now lives entirely in agent consumption.

What you do Monday: track Joel not the brand, treat agents as a governance object, get the agent consumption assumptions from your AE before your next renewal.

I told Justin I was going to a tech summit in New York. Sana. Workday's new AI brand. Big day, big speakers, fancy library.

His response was pure gold.

"So you were hanging with billionaires."

Yeah, son. I guess I was.

That's the right framing for what happened at the New York Public Library on May 21. Not a product launch. Not a roadmap update. A coronation.

Act I: The Hand-off

The day opened with the 1977 Powers of Ten film. Chicago picnic blanket to the observable universe and back. Designed to make you feel small.

That was on purpose. Joel Hellermark, founder and CEO of Sana, wanted you small. He wanted you small so the next part felt big.

Three acts. The first one is the only one practitioners need to study.

Aneel Bhusri walked on stage in a Björn Borg jacket. The Swedish apparel brand. Worn by the co-founder of an American enterprise software giant being interviewed by a 28-year-old Swedish AI prodigy he just acquired. The jacket is the slide.

He sounded somehow older than I remembered. Gravelly. He acknowledged it himself. Said he was a different guy than he was at 30. Said he now felt like an orchestration agent for Workday the company.

Joel did the interviewing.

The new guy hosted the founder. That is the entire blocking diagram of who is running the next chapter.

Late in the conversation, Aneel delivered the line that justifies the whole bet. Reasoning engines, he said, are weak at deterministic plumbing. The power comes from bringing the two technologies together.

Translation for the practitioner audience: Sana without Workday is a smart toy. Workday without Sana is yesterday's deck. The merger is the thesis. If you ever wondered why Workday bought a Stockholm learning company, that's why.

Who is Joel Hellermark, and why should you care

Short version: he is the closest thing enterprise software has to a generational prodigy story.

Taught himself C at 13. Built a chess program for fun. Founded his first company at 16. Skipped university entirely. Learned to code from Stanford's free online courses. Founded Sana at 19 out of a converted hair salon in Stockholm. Named Sweden's "Super-talent of the year." The Guardian's 10 under 35 changing the world. Aneel calls him "one of the most brilliant minds in AI."

He is now in charge of Workday's AI future.

Internal title: Chief AI Officer. Internal mission, in his own words, is to be the Hermes of Enterprise AI. No more bad UX. Software you actually want to use.

"Don't screw it up"

Late in the Act I interview, Aneel got quiet.

He reminded Joel that at Workday Rising 2016, Dave Duffield said the same four words to him. In front of customers.

Don't. Screw. It. Up.

Now Aneel was saying it to Joel. In front of customers again.

This is the moment to stop scrolling.

The line was a public ritual in 2016. Aneel just re-staged it. That is not a coincidence. Founders do not perform their predecessor's parting line by accident. They do it when they want the room to witness a transfer of authority. The company Aneel built is being handed to a brilliant kid who was not born when Workday's first customers signed.

Aneel called this a refounding moment. The pre-event LinkedIn copy used the same word. A complete re-founding of how work gets done.

Their word. Not mine.

When the vendor uses the word refounding, what they are telling their customers is: the company you bought from is being rebuilt while you are still inside.

The three things you actually need to know

Strip away the philosophy, the GDP forecasts, and the closing meditation on what stays human. Here is what changed on May 21 for the people turning the wrenches.

One. Joel is the heir. Not co-leader. Not strategist. The face of the next decade. If you are building governance, integrations, or roadmap plans against Workday, the person whose taste matters most is now the one who learned coding from Stanford YouTube videos. The branding will keep moving. His taste is the constant. Track him, not the press releases.

Two. The agents are real and they are coming for your queue. Sana for ITSM and Sana for Travel were both announced. Both are agent-led, not feature-led. Demo flows showed the agent brokering a Salesforce admin access request, drafting an offer letter for a $151,000 SGD Senior AE in Singapore, and booking a Stockholm trip while filing the expense in Workday in one motion. Three pillars Joel kept returning to: multiplayer interface, living memory, proactive agents.

Three. Workday is going after ServiceNow. Sana for ITSM means Workday is no longer staying in the HCM and Financials lane. Fulfill requests. Automate ticketing. Manage assets. Build workflows. That is ServiceNow's deck rendered in Workday's typeface. Your platform is now a horizontal competitor to a different ecosystem entirely. I think Workday is going try and move up and down the big business tech stack as much as possible.

The slide that should keep you up at night

The Sana for ITSM demo had a Salesforce access flow. Kai Tran, a Sales Lead in APAC, needed admin rights to set up new-hire territories. The agent scoped it down, surfaced the precedent (same scope Marcus has in EMEA, approved 12 months ago without escalation), and asked the approver to sign.

That is a credible agent demo.

The next slide is the one I want every HRIS lead and access governance owner to look at.

The agent comes back and says: You always approve these. 8 of the last 8 CRM admin requests from Sales leads were approved without changes. Want me to take regional CRM admin off your plate going forward?

Then it offers a draft policy update. Auto-approve when a Sales lead requests their own region's CRM. Escalate when scope crosses regions. Reversible toggle.

The agent is not just doing the work. It is learning your approval patterns and proposing to rewrite your governance.

This is a new attack surface for HR tech and access governance. Not malicious. Just new.

If your access policy can be amended by an agent recommending the change based on observed behavior, then your approval queue is now training data for your future policy. Practitioners need a vocabulary for this before the audit team does.

Share

What they did not say

Day-long thought leadership session. No Flex Credits discussion from the stage.

Which is interesting, because Workday actually had good news to share.

Go read the new Flex Credits Platform Policy rate card. It will be published next week. Compare it to the model they rolled out at Rising 2025. Integration event overages are deferred to 2027. Document events are gone. Storage is gone. The three buckets the analyst class spent six months calling a budget black hole have been quietly pulled off the meter.

That is a customer-friendly retreat. Workday heard the pushback and walked it back.

So why didn't they say it from stage?

Because the new meter is a single-bet meter. Everything you already do at scale, the integrations you run nightly, the documents you store, the events you fire, is now off the table. What's left on the meter is agent consumption.

The thing your tenant cannot yet size, because your tenant has not deployed it.

Workday swapped a known-quantity risk you could model in a spreadsheet for an unknown-quantity risk you cannot model until the agents are live. That is a real tradeoff and arguably a better one for most customers. But the FinOps muscle required to land it is different. You are no longer sizing integration volume against a credit pool. You are sizing how often a Recruiting Agent will work a pipeline and how often an IT Support Agent will pre-broker an access request and how often a Travel Agent will book and file an expense in one motion.

That conversation does not happen from a stage. It happens in a sales motion with your AE.

Other things that did not get said from the stage:

- No migration path for customers already invested against the Illuminate naming

- No customer reference architecture for Sana for ITSM

- No deployment story for how Sana actually grounds against your Workday tenant

- No GA timing beyond the headline launches

The analyst class will spend the next two weeks writing about what Workday announced. Most of them will not go find the rate card.

Acts II and III, briefly

Act II zoomed out. Anton Osika from Lovable on vibe coding democratization. Tyler Cowen on AI as radical evolution with a 2.5% annual GDP growth rate, exceeding baseline forecasts. Then the panel's dark moment. Jasmine Sun described standing in front of a humanoid robot in China and feeling viscerally that this thing could kill her. Benjamin Labatut, the only pessimist on the stage all day, asked why we are not paying more attention to that feeling. Nobody had a good answer.

Act III went philosophical. Geoffrey Hinton in person, not virtual (I am officially walking back my virtual stage comment). AI may outstrip mathematicians inside a decade. We are creating beings and optimizing for intelligence when we should be optimizing for care. Sara Imari Walker on assembly theory and what makes something alive. Anu Athluru closing with the question. What stays human when machines can do the work? Her answer was seven things. Taste. Grit. Care. Craft. Story. Purpose. Meaning.

Soul was the descriptor on the final slide.

It was, in case it wasn't already obvious, a very European summit. Swedish CEO. Swedish prodigy. Swedish brand on the founder's back. American enterprise software's center of gravity just shifted across the Atlantic by about 4,000 miles.

It rained all day outside the library. Inside, it was a TED talk sponsored by Workday. Light on product, heavy on framing. That is a tell too. When you cannot show the product working outside a carefully crafted demo yet, you show the philosophy.

What you do Monday

You do not change anything Monday. But you start tracking three things.

One, watch what Joel says, not what Workday says. Vendor branding has a shelf life of about nine months. Joel's taste does not. He is the new center of gravity.

Two, treat the agent layer as a governance object, not a feature. Every agent that can rewrite a policy needs an owner, a kill switch, and an audit trail before it ships into your tenant. If your governance forum does not have agent governance on the agenda by Q3, you are late.

Three, before your next renewal, ask your AE for the agent consumption assumptions baked into your Flex Credits sizing. Not the rate card. The assumptions. How many agent operations per user per month. How they modeled it. What happens at 2x. If they pause, you have learned something useful.

Aneel said this is a refounding moment. He is absolutely right. The company you have been buying from for ten or fifteen years is becoming a different company.

The kid who didn't go to college is in charge of getting it there. The founder who built the cloud HCM category just told him don't screw it up.

The rest of us go back home to a tenant we still have to run on Monday. Same configurations. Same approvals. Same governance committee meetings.

For now.

So what stays human when machines can do the work? Anu's answer was taste, grit, care, craft, story, purpose, and meaning. Mine is shorter.

The judgment about whether to let them.

— Mike

P.S. — I told Justin about the day on the train ride home. About Aneel and Joel and the Powers of Ten film and Hinton not being virtual (he did think that was cool).

He didn't ask about any of that.

He asked if the food was good.

That's about right.

tl;dr;

I got an invite to the Sana Summit on May 21. I'm going. The room will be Geoffrey Hinton, Tyler Cowen, Ethan Mollick, Aneel Bhusri, and somewhere in the back, me. Most of the recaps Friday will read like Davos liner notes. I'm publishing this before the event so I'm on the record about what I refuse to be impressed by (and what I'm actually watching for).

I had to read the email twice.

The Sana Summit. May 21. The New York Public Library. Geoffrey Hinton on the (virtual) stage. Tyler Cowen. Ethan Mollick. Sara Imari Walker. Aneel Bhusri.

And somewhere in the back of the room, me. A Sr. Manager from the basement of an HRIS team at a Fortune 10, holding what I assume will be a name badge in a font I cannot read.

I don't fully know why I got invited and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Maybe the newsletter. Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe the RUG. Maybe CVS is a big enough customer that at least one of us was going to end up there. Maybe someone in Workday's orbit reads this and decided the practitioner column deserved a chair. Probably some of all of that.

What I do know is what I'm bringing into the room.

The product story already shipped. In March, Sana for Workday went live worldwide. Sana Self-Service Agent. Sana Enterprise. All priced through Flex Credits. Bersin already wrote his big take. Sapient too. Twelve hundred customers are already registered on the Agent System of Record.

Thursday is not a roadmap event. It's a consecration. Workday is buying philosophical legitimacy by putting Aneel Bhusri on a stage with a Nobel laureate. Every vendor does this when they want to graduate from "enterprise software" to "intellectual authority on the future of work." The photos will be tasteful. The recaps will be reverent. The analyst class will spend a week quoting it.

Most of the room will be fine with that. I am going to take notes anyway.

So here it is. The pre-commitment.

Here's what I won't do.

I won't post selfies with Hinton. (Probably won't get close enough to anyway.)

I won't write a recap that opens with "what a privilege to be in the room with such brilliant minds." If you see that sentence in a newsletter Friday, the writer has been captured.

I won't let Tyler Cowen's productivity numbers sit unchallenged when they map poorly onto an actual Workday tenant.

I won't nod through the Aneel Bhusri keynote without asking the questions the keynote will not answer.

Here's what I will do.

I'll watch the gaps. What's not said about Flex Credit math when an agent pilot ramps to production. What's not said about the security model when Sana Enterprise reads and writes across Slack, Salesforce, SharePoint, and Box at the same time — all under the Workday security groups you've been meaning to clean up since 2022. What's not said about who owns the governance review the day an agent recommendation breaks comp equity six months after twenty people approved it by not questioning it.

I'll do my best to bring the basement into the room. Not loudly. Just in the questions I ask and the parts I choose to remember.

And Friday, when the consecration recaps are everywhere, I'll write back. From inside the room. Un-consecrated.

The cool kids' room is in midtown Manhattan Thursday afternoon. Surprisingly, I'll be there.

The actual work is in the basement, where it's always been. I'll be back there Friday.

— Mike

Practitioner Un-consecrated

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

P.S. Justin asked me what I was doing this week. I told him about the conference. He asked who was going. I told him Nobel winners, Wharton professors, and his Dad. He looked at me for a second and said, "Wait - they invited YOU?"

Same question I had, kid. Same question I had.

• Last week I said Workday is becoming PeopleSoft. This week, what you do about it.

• Some of the most sophisticated Workday customers on the planet have already decoupled their stack this way. Workday underneath as the deterministic engine. An experience layer on top.

• Three layers: the deterministic engine, the integration fabric (where everyone botches it), and the experience layer (where the war is actually being fought).

• Workday knows all of this. Their instinct is to own all three layers themselves, and Flex Credits is the receipt. That’s exactly the wrong move, for them and for you.

Last week’s post did a jawn (that's Philly for a thing).

It also triggered the email I should have expected but didn’t. From a reader:

“Okay Mike. Great thesis. What am I supposed to do with this on Monday morning?”

Fair. Diagnosis without prescription is just complaining in a nicer font.

So here’s the prescription. The short version is decoupling. The long version is three layers, a failure mode at each one, and one specific move you make this quarter. All of it set against the fact that Workday is actively trying to solve this problem, and in my view, trying to solve it the wrong way.

But before any of that, we need to deal with a thought that’s rattling around in your head right now.

Why This Isn’t Theoretical

Decoupling isn’t a hypothetical future-state. The most sophisticated Workday customers on the planet have already done it. Quietly. Years ago. While the rest of the industry was still arguing about whether the native inbox was good.

I’ve confirmed the pattern across three companies.

A former CHRO at a major e-commerce platform walked me through their decoupled stack in a recent (2025) conversation. Workday as the engine. A purpose-built experience layer on top. Employees do not touch the ERP. They touch the front door the company built for them.

A major social platform runs similar architecture. I know because I was interviewed for (and offered) the integration architect role on their Workday implementation by the SI doing the work. I turned it down. I saw the stack. Workday underneath. Experience layer on top. Same pattern.

And Google’s version is public record. gHire is their in-house recruiting front end. It sits on top of their HRIS stack, not inside it. It exists because Google’s recruiters needed a tool built for recruiters, not a tool built for compliance officers who happened to work in recruiting.

Three of the most demanding HR tech environments on the planet. Three different industries. Three independent decisions to decouple. Same pattern.

Here’s what they figured out that the rest of the industry hasn’t: the front door was never going to be the deterministic engine.

They knew it ten years ago. The difference now is the rest of us can actually afford to act on it. You don’t need Google’s engineering bench anymore. LLMs collapsed the cost of building a decent conversational front door from “moonshot project” to “quarterly initiative.” The experience layer used to be a capability you had to build. Now it’s a capability you can buy, configure, or compose.

The playbook is the same. The price of admission just dropped by three zeros.

So let’s go.

Layer 1: The Deterministic Engine

This is Workday. It’s also your financials system, if you have one. It’s the load-bearing stuff. Payroll. Benefits. Time tracking. Compliance reporting.

This layer has one job: be right. Every single time. When the paycheck drops, the math is the math. When the I-9 is filed, the form is the form. There is no room for “creative” in this layer. There isn’t much room for “fast” either.

That’s a feature, not a bug. This is the layer that keeps you out of court.

The failure mode here is treating the engine like it’s the whole system.

This is the mistake most of the HR tech industry has been making for fifteen years. We built massive, compliance-hardened transactional databases and then asked the 19-year-old applying for a retail job to navigate them. We asked the store manager with five active alarms to execute a 14-step requisition process on a cellphone, or an old tablet. We handed the engine to people who should never have to touch it.

(The “Moat is a Tollbooth” thesis applies here. The decades of business rules that make the engine powerful are the exact same decades of business rules that make it unbearable for end users. The engine’s strength and the engine’s UX are the same variable, measured from different sides.)

The move this quarter: narrow the engine’s job description.

Take thirty minutes and list every workflow where your end users touch Workday directly. Time off. Pay stub access. Benefits enrollment. Job requisitions. Performance check-ins. Org chart lookup.

For each one, ask a single question: does this workflow belong here because it requires the deterministic guarantees of the engine, or does it belong upstream in something that isn’t here yet?

You’re not ripping anything out. You’re making a list. That list becomes the input for Layer 3.

Layer 2: The Integration Fabric

This is the connective tissue. APIs, middleware, event streams, identity, webhooks, the whole plumbing situation. It’s the layer that lets the engine talk to everything else without the employee ever knowing a handoff happened.

Nobody wants to talk about this layer. It doesn’t photograph well. You can’t put it on a Rising keynote slide. There are no “Top Ten Integration Fabric Innovations of 2026” listicles. It is the unfinished basement of your architecture. (I know all about unfinished basements. I routinely lose to a 12-year-old at ping-pong in one).

Which is why it’s where most orgs quietly die.

The failure mode here is accumulation. Not design.

You didn’t decide to have 47 point-to-point integrations. You decided to have one. Then someone needed a connector to Greenhouse. Then someone else needed a custom feed to a benefits broker. Then a vendor sunset their old API and you duct-taped a bridge. Then the acquisition happened and you inherited their spaghetti. Now you can’t name the person who owns the feed between your HRIS and your learning platform, because the person who built it retired in 2021.

This is the Invisible Spaghetti problem. I have walked into organizations that genuinely cannot tell you how many integrations are running. They don’t know the number. They don’t know what breaks if half of them die tomorrow. They don’t know which ones are point-to-point and which are orchestrated through middleware, because they don’t have a coherent middleware strategy. They have a middleware accident.

The move this quarter: run the real integration audit.

Not “how many do we have.” The real one. For every integration touching your HRIS, document four things:

What’s it doing. Who owns it. What breaks if it dies. Whether it’s point-to-point or orchestrated.

If you can’t draw the whole integration map on a whiteboard in ten minutes, you have a middleware problem. That’s the project. Not a new AI pilot. Not another vendor demo. The project is getting the fabric readable.

(You cannot orchestrate what you cannot inventory. Write it down.)

Layer 3: The Experience Layer

Here’s where it gets interesting. And where the Workday story gets complicated.

The experience layer is the front door. It’s where employees actually live when they interact with “work.” It might be a conversational AI that answers their policy questions. It might be an embedded flow inside Slack or Teams where they request time off by typing a sentence. It might be a candidate experience platform that handles the entire pre-hire journey before anyone touches the ATS. It might be an agent that watches your calendar and proactively flags PTO conflicts before you create them.

What it is NOT, in a healthy decoupled architecture, is your HRIS with a nicer skin.

The whole point of the experience layer is that it lives above the engine and the fabric. It’s purpose-built for humans, not for compliance. It can be consumer-grade fast because the stuff that has to be deterministic is happening a layer down. The experience layer can rewrite itself every quarter. The engine shouldn’t change in five years.

The failure mode here is putting the experience layer in the wrong place.

Which brings us to Workday.

Workday sees the problem. They are not stupid. They have watched the same twenty years I’ve watched, and they know the ERP-as-front-door model is over. That’s why Illuminate happened. That’s why HiredScore got absorbed. That’s why Sana got bought for a billion dollars. That’s why the keynote narrative at Rising has quietly pivoted from “your system of record” to “your system of action.”

The problem is their answer to the decoupling question is: we will own all three layers.

Sana is being pitched as the experience layer. Illuminate (or whatever it’s called next quarter, because the branding has a shelf life of about nine months) is being pitched as the orchestration fabric. The core tenant remains the deterministic engine. One vendor, three layers, one throat to choke.

And look, I understand the commercial logic. For Workday, decoupling is a revenue problem. If the experience layer becomes a competitive market and the ERP quietly becomes headless infrastructure, Workday becomes a utility. Utilities don’t trade at software multiples. So the strategic imperative is to make sure the experience layer is ALSO Workday. Sana isn’t just a feature. Sana is a defensive maneuver against becoming PeopleSoft.

But the whole reason the three-layer architecture works is that the layers have different incentives, different release cycles, and different evolutionary pressures. The engine wants to be boring and stable. The fabric wants to be observable and governable. The experience layer wants to be fast, opinionated, and disposable. You cannot optimize for all three from inside the same vendor.

When a vendor tries to own all three layers, they always optimize for the engine, because that’s the moat. The experience layer ends up being “our engine with a conversational interface on top,” which is the exact thing decoupling was supposed to fix. It’s a tollbooth with better lighting.

And if you want the receipt that Workday has already privately conceded the engine-only future? Look at Flex Credits.

We covered the mechanics in the Sana Field Guide a few weeks back. Here’s what the pricing model really tells you. Workday is charging per-credit for integration access to your own data in your own tenant. Every agent action. Every data query. Every API call. Metered. Priced. Tolled. It's not a huge line item on a per-call basis, but it's there.

That is not the pricing behavior of a company that believes it’s going to win the experience layer on its merits. If Workday genuinely believed Sana was going to be the front door that every employee uses every day, the agent actions would be free (or functionally free) and they’d monetize through stickiness, data gravity, and expansion into the adjacent systems. That’s the platform playbook. That’s what a company does when it thinks it’s going to own the next decade.

Flex Credits is the opposite playbook. It’s the pricing behavior of an incumbent that has already privately accepted utility status and is trying to maximize the current quarter before the market catches up. It’s extraction. It’s rent collection on the path to data that the customer already owns.

The “moat is a tollbooth” metaphor used to be about UX friction as a tax on users. Flex Credits makes it literal. It is a financial tollbooth on the drawbridge between your data and the experience layer you’re trying to build. Same metaphor. Two layers of meaning.

And here’s the thing about tollbooths. Sophisticated drivers find the back road.

The move this quarter: define your experience layer independently of whatever your ERP vendor is selling you.

Write the brief. What does your front door actually need to do? Who uses it? What does “good” look like? What security posture do you need? What integrations does it require into the fabric?

Answer those questions before a single vendor shows up at your door. Because if you show up to the Sana pitch without your own brief, you’re not evaluating a product. You’re watching a movie. And you’ll leave thinking you need a front door because you saw one on the screen, whether or not it’s the right door for your house.

(If it is Sana, great. Buy it. But buy it because it matched your brief, not because Workday already had your checkbook. Although, a compelling counter argument - Workday acquisition API calls are free. More to come on that Friday.)

The second move, parallel to the first: start building the skill on your team. Someone needs to own conversational design. Someone needs to own agent governance. Someone needs to own the UX review for anything that touches your employees. That is not an IT job. It’s a product job. And if the only product thinking on your HR tech team is “the business asked for it so we built it,” you are going to get steamrolled the minute the experience layer becomes the ballgame.

Tune the Instruments Before You Hire the Conductor

Three layers, three moves. Engine audit. Fabric inventory. Experience brief.

You’re doing them in parallel, not in sequence. But they have to be in proportion.

If your engine is on fire, don’t write the experience brief yet. If your fabric is the Invisible Spaghetti, an experience layer on top is just going to make the spaghetti invisible at higher resolution. The layers build on each other, and skipping the hard ones to get to the fun one is how you end up with a million-dollar AI agent politely surfacing broken data to the CHRO.

You cannot decouple what isn’t inventoried. You cannot orchestrate what isn’t governed. You cannot build an experience layer on a fabric that nobody can draw on a whiteboard.

Tune the instruments first.

The Point of All of This

Some very large organizations have figured this out. They built the engine-plus-experience-layer architecture when it cost tens of millions of dollars and required a platform team the size of a small bank.

The rest of us get to build it in 2026, when the same architecture costs a defined project budget, lots of AI tokens, and an experience brief.

The PeopleSoft comparison wasn’t a prediction of Workday’s death. It was a warning about what happens when one vendor confuses “the load-bearing wall” with “the whole house.” The practitioners who win the next decade aren’t the ones who leave Workday. They’re the ones who figure out how to make Workday disappear, while it quietly does its job underneath.

The goal isn’t to get off Workday.

The goal is to get your employees off Workday.

While it stays exactly where it belongs. Downstairs. In the basement. Running the plumbing. Out of sight.

P.S. Justin and I were having this exact conversation the other day. Not the architecture one. The router one.

Justin pointed at the mesh router (now placed on his workbench instead of being shoved in the rafters) in the basement and asked, “What is that box?”

Me: “That’s the internet.”

Justin: “So the internet’s really good down here because of that box, right?”

Me: “Yes. You are correct.”

That is the whole post. In two sentences. From a 12-year-old.

He didn’t care what brand the box was. He didn’t want to log into it. He didn’t need to understand the firmware. What he understood, instantly, was that the box makes the WiFi work, and the WiFi is what he actually cares about. Engine layer. Experience layer. Separated. Correctly.

If a 12-year-old can figure out decoupled architecture in one sentence, your HRIS team can too.

Make the plumbing invisible. The kids already figured it out.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Basement Architect

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tl;dr

• Workday won the last war (UX, cloud, APIs) the same way PeopleSoft won the one before it. Twenty years later, the pattern is repeating, with Workday in the PeopleSoft seat.

• The SOR isn’t dying. It’s being demoted to substrate. Value is moving up the stack to the system of insight / system of reasoning. Leadership has stopped asking “what’s our headcount” and started asking “what should we do about attrition in engineering.” Substrate is not useless. It’s deterministic. It’s foundation.

• Visier shipped an Analytic AI Agent Platform in December 2024. UKG calls Bryte “a system of action.” Eightfold just published “The End of the ATS Era.” These aren’t theories. They are shipping products.

• Workday is spending $1 billion-plus trying to catch up via acquisition — HiredScore, Evisort, Paradox, Flowise, Pipedream, Sana. Six deals in eighteen months. In 2023, their own VP of People Analytics publicly named the exact gap they are now trying to close.

• If you work inside a Workday tenant all day, you need to know what layer of the stack you are working on. It is not the one with the gravity.

The Founding Mirror

January 2005. Pleasanton, California. Dave Duffield is standing in a conference room inside the company he spent eighteen years building. It hasn’t, technically, been his for several days. The Oracle deal closed on January 7th. But there are still employees in that room who built their careers around the idea that PeopleSoft was different. They trusted him. He has to tell them it’s over.

“There were people crying,” he would later recall. “Men crying, in that room.”

He calls it the worst moment of his life.

Within weeks, Duffield and Aneel Bhusri walk out of Pleasanton and start over. Cloud-native this time. Same founding premise Duffield had in 1987: enterprise software shouldn’t be miserable to use. The competition back then was IBM dinosaurs; mainframe relics designed for administrators, not humans. PeopleSoft beat them because Duffield thought software should look like it was made for the people who had to use it.

They called the new company Workday.

Twenty years later, Workday is Pleasanton. It is the incumbent. It’s the system everybody else is building around. The UI that was revolutionary in 2006 is the UI that makes a retail manager want to throw a laptop out the window in 2026. The APIs that were once “open” are now table stakes, and in some cases a liability (more on that in a minute). The automatic updates are a regression, not a feature.

And somebody inside the building has been telling them what’s coming for at least two years. The call is coming from inside the house.

This is a piece about that.

The Demotion

Here’s the framing:

HR tech has had four eras. Each one has been disrupted by the next. We are inside the third disruption.

Era 1: the Mainframe. IBM. Unisys. The dinosaurs. Character-based green screens, transaction codes you had to memorize, batch payroll running at 2 AM. One HRIS admin for every 5,000 employees, a three-ring procedure manual on the desk, and a weekly phone call to the data processing department because nobody else in HR could talk to the system. Won on: centralization. The first time employee data existed in digital form at all. Died when client-server computing made distributed compute possible (and a former IBM engineer named Dave Duffield decided enterprise HR software shouldn’t be miserable to use).

Era 2: the On-Prem System of Record. PeopleSoft. SAP R/3. Oracle HCM before the cloud. Client-server architecture. SQL databases. Graphical interfaces. Real-time reporting. Help documentation that actually worked. Won on: dragging HR software out of the mainframe and into something that looked like the rest of the enterprise application stack. Died when the cloud rewrote the economics, SaaS rewrote the purchasing model, and mobile made every on-prem interaction feel like a time warp.

Era 3: the Cloud System of Record. Workday. SuccessFactors. Oracle HCM Cloud. UKG Pro. Dayforce. Same file cabinet, better UX, open APIs, SaaS economics, predictable releases. Won on: UI revolution plus integration openness. This was the game for a decade-plus. Workday won it, hard.

Era 4: the System of Insight. The System of Reasoning, depending on who you ask. Visier. UKG Bryte. Eightfold. Gloat. Phenom. Fuel50. Beamery. Every insight-first vendor is adding the ability to act. Every SOR vendor is bolting on insight. They are converging on the same position from opposite directions. Only one side has the history of disrupting the other.

The shift is subtle, but it is the whole ballgame. Leadership’s question has changed.

They do not ask “what’s our headcount.” Workday can answer that. They do not even ask “why is headcount growing.” Workday can help with that, if you spend a year cleaning your data model.

They ask: “What should we do about attrition in engineering?”

That is a fundamentally different product category. The SOR can’t answer it. The SOR can support an answer. It cannot produce one. And leadership has lost interest in systems that merely store what you already know. They want systems that tell them what to do.

The System of Record is not dying. Nobody is turning off payroll. Workday still handles the deterministic plumbing: I-9s, tax withholding, comp cycles, the stuff that keeps the lawyers off your neck. That work continues. That work is important.

It just isn’t where the value is anymore.

The System of Record is being demoted to substrate.

Who’s Actually Building It

If you want to know where the compass is pointing, watch what’s shipping.

Visier launched their Analytic AI Agent Platform in December 2024. Claimed to be the first of its kind in the category. They built agents that analyze people data and make recommendations, across whatever data sources you point them at, with full security and governance. Their CEO, Ryan Wong, said the quiet part out loud at the time: “Unlike other agentic platforms that focus on automation of workflows, we’re fixated on unleashing AI agents to analyze people and work data to quickly deliver the answers and recommendations that drive workforce impact.”

Then in November 2025, they shipped an MCP server. A universal connector letting any AI agent (Claude, Copilot, whatever) pull governed people insights with a single secure protocol. Ike Bennion, their VP of Product, said this on the launch call:

“The market is quickly realizing that building DIY agents on top of context-poor APIs is a recipe for chaos.”

Read that again with your Workday hat on. Whose APIs do you think he’s describing?

UKG Bryte, their agentic AI platform, is sold in UKG’s own press releases as “a system of action.” They are not hiding the framing. Jason Averbook (former HR digital transformation lead at Leapgen, now at Mercer) called the Workforce Intelligence Hub (Bryte’s operational command center) “a monumental leap forward... elevating workforce data to the same strategic importance as CRM and ERP.” An HCM vendor is publicly positioning its insight layer at the same altitude as Salesforce and Oracle ERP. Five years ago that would have been a pitch deck dream. Now it is a launch tagline.

Eightfold just published a blog post titled “The End of the ATS Era.” It opens with the sentence: “The ATS was built for record-keeping. The Intelligence Revolution demands action.” That is a vendor making the full-frontal attack on an entire category. You can call it marketing. You can also notice that they are saying it loudly and that nobody at Workday is disagreeing in public.

Around those three, the supporting cast tells you this is a pattern, not an outlier. Gloat on internal talent marketplaces (production-grade integrations with Workday and SAP). Phenom on the experience layer, which regular readers know I have been writing about for six months. Beamery on workforce planning fused with external labor market data. Fuel50 on career pathing, recently a Visier MCP partner. Galileo, Josh Bersin’s own AI tool, with 400-plus sub-agents integrated into ServiceNow Now Assist and HiBob.

Insight-first vendors adding agency. SOR-first vendors bolting on insight. They are meeting in the middle.

Only one side has the history of being the disruptor.

What Workday Is Doing About It (And Why It Rhymes With 2023)

Workday is not sitting still. Give them that.

They have:

• Acquired HiredScore (AI talent orchestration)

• Acquired Evisort (contract intelligence)

• Laid off 1,750 employees — 8.5% of the workforce — in February 2025 to “invest in AI”

• Acquired Flowise (low-code agent builder)

• Acquired Paradox (conversational AI for high-volume hiring)

• Acquired Sana for $1.1 billion (AI knowledge, learning, and agent platform)

• Acquired Pipedream (iPaaS with 3,000+ connectors)

• Replaced the CEO. Eschenbach out. Founder Aneel Bhusri back in, February 2026

• Lost their CTO, Peter Bailis (the face of Workday Illuminate, the AI strategy’s public front) to Anthropic. As a Member of Technical Staff. After eleven months in the job.

Six major acquisitions in eighteen months is not a strategy. It is a shopping spree with a corporate card and a deadline.

The Pipedream acquisition is worth flagging separately. Most coverage lumped it in with the rest of the AI buys, but for architects it’s the quietest and most significant signal in the sprint. Workday’s integration stack (EIB, Core Connectors, Studio) was built for a specific world: deterministic, enterprise-to-enterprise data flow on scheduled runs. That stack is good at what it was designed for. It is not the stack the agent era needs. Agents touch three thousand SaaS tools in real time, not ten ERP systems on a nightly batch. Buying Pipedream is a quiet acknowledgment that the integration model Workday built the company on isn’t the one they need to win the next war. That’s an architectural concession, and it’s the right one. It is also not something you say out loud at Rising.

The theory of what they are building is coherent enough. Sana as the new “front door for work,” replacing Illuminate as the AI brand. Flowise as the agent builder. Pipedream as the orchestration layer. An Agent System of Record on top to govern the whole fleet. Altogether: Workday becomes the insight layer and stays the system of record. One vendor, whole stack, all the budget.

I want that bet to pay off. I work in this ecosystem every day. A successful Workday pivot is good for me, good for my org, and good for anyone reading this who’s chosen to specialize in the platform. I am not rooting for Pleasanton to fail.

I am, however, noticing what the script looks like.

Because in 2015, Josh Bersin (the most widely-read HR tech analyst in the world) wrote, explicitly, that “Workday understands this from their PeopleSoft playbook.” The founding DNA of the company was “don’t let happen to us what happened to PeopleSoft.” That awareness is now the company’s tell.

And in 2023, Phil Willburn (Workday’s own VP of People Analytics, founding member of the function since 2017, former US Intelligence Community analyst, a practitioner running people analytics for Workday’s own 18,000 employees with Workday’s own tools) told David Green on the Digital HR Leaders podcast, on the record:

That sentence went out to podcast subscribers in 2023.

That was before Visier built the Analytic AI Agent Platform. Before UKG shipped the Workforce Intelligence Hub. Before Eightfold declared the end of the ATS era. Before Workday itself started writing checks to close the gap Phil had already named in plain English on somebody else’s podcast feed.

A senior Workday insider diagnosed the exact problem the insight-layer vendors are now eating Workday’s lunch on. He did it publicly. He did it two-plus years before the acquisition sprint started. Product didn’t pick up. Or picked up too slowly.

This is what the innovator’s dilemma looks like rendered on a specific timeline with a specific quotable source. Workday knew. The internal analysis was there. The diagnosis was published. And the organization (twenty thousand people, $9 billion in revenue, a Gartner leader every year) couldn’t move fast enough to act on it until the threat was already shipping.

PeopleSoft had the same problem in 2003. Too many fronts. Too many acquisitions to integrate. An existing revenue stream they couldn’t cannibalize. Duffield saw it. Couldn’t stop it.

Oracle paid $10.3 billion.

I am not predicting that outcome for Workday. I am noting that the script they are running off is one we’ve seen before, that the previous run ended in a Pleasanton conference room with grown men crying, and that the guy whose name was on the building saw it coming and couldn’t stop it either.

But What About Extend?

I can hear the seasoned architects already. “You can’t argue Workday is losing the action layer without addressing Extend.”

Fair. Let me address it.

Extend is Workday’s billion-dollar bet that you’ll build your custom apps inside the walled garden. Inherit the data model. Inherit the security. Stay in the family. It’s pitched as the moat that keeps the action and reasoning layers tethered to the platform.

It’s also Workday’s PeopleTools moment.

PeopleSoft had PeopleTools. Same pitch, same architectural promise, same lock-in story. Customers built on it. They built deeply. And those PeopleTools investments became the technical debt that made the cloud migration brutal. The customization platform didn’t save PeopleSoft. It accelerated the dependency and made the inevitable platform shift hurt more on the way out.

Extend is running the same playbook. Adoption is concentrated in a thin slice of enterprise customers with real engineering teams (the rest of the install base has no Extend footprint and isn’t going to develop one). The credit economics make build-vs-buy math favor buy in almost every scenario. External vendors ship in weeks; Extend builds take months. And if Extend was actually keeping the experience layer inside the garden, Workday wouldn’t have spent a billion dollars on Sana to bolt one on top.

Extend doesn’t keep the value layer inside the walled garden. It builds a porch outside the back door. And the customers most invested in Extend become the most locked into a substrate they can’t easily leave.

That’s not the escape from PeopleSoft. That’s the same script.

What This Means for You

If you spend your days inside a Workday tenant (building business processes, maintaining integrations, writing calc fields, fighting with security groups, shipping BIRT reports nobody will read) you are working on the substrate.

That is stable work. That is real work. That is work that will continue to exist for as long as payroll has to be deterministic, which, legally, is forever. I am not telling you to quit. I am telling you to know what layer you are on.

Because the value layer - the part that gets budget, the part that gets keynotes, the part that turns into career-defining projects - is moving up.

If you want to work there, build the skills that live there. Data modeling is still table stakes (your SOR skills translate cleanly; you will be shocked how much of a Workday Prism build maps directly to an insight-layer product). But the new skill is reasoning about what the data means and who is allowed to act on it. Insight delivery as a product discipline. Agent governance frameworks. Knowing the difference between an agent that recommends and an agent that acts, and designing the guardrails between them.

And here’s the part regular readers have heard from me before: the insight layer is only as smart as the substrate beneath it. A reasoning agent fed garbage data produces garbage recommendations, just with more confidence and a prettier dashboard. Which means the Workday admin who keeps the plumbing clean and thinks about what the reasoning layer needs from it becomes more valuable in Era 4, not less. The career risk isn’t being on the substrate. The career risk is being on the substrate and only thinking about the substrate.

Watch Visier. Watch UKG Bryte. Watch Gloat. Watch Phenom. Not because you have to leave Workday. Because in five to ten years these vendors will either be the next incumbents or the acquisition targets of the current ones, and in either case the people who know how to architect on top of them will be in the rooms where the decisions get made. The Workday-only specialist in 2026 is in a similar spot to the PeopleSoft-only specialist in 2008. Not unemployed. Not underwater. Just working on a layer that fewer and fewer people are talking about.

Most practitioners don’t see this shift yet. Some do and aren’t talking about it. A few are quietly updating their résumés.

The ones who will come out of the next five years with the best careers are the ones who understand, right now, which layer they are building on, and are honest with themselves about whether they want to stay.

Close

PeopleSoft is still around.

Oracle still bills for it. The product still works. Public sector uses it. Universities run it. It does the things it has always done. You just don’t hear about it anymore. That is not death. That is the demotion. That is what being the substrate looks like after somebody else moves up the stack. It is also not where HR tech careers go to grow. Substrate pays salaries. It does not attract new ones.

Workday might not go there. I am not writing PeopleSoft’s obituary a second time. Sana is a real product. Flowise is a substantive acquisition. Pipedream gives them something Workday has genuinely never had; a living integration ecosystem with a developer community attached. Bhusri coming back to run the company is founder-mode energy and that is not nothing. There is a version of the next five years where Workday successfully buys its way from Era 3 to Era 4 and keeps the whole enterprise locked in through the transition.

There is also the other version.

The last time a company with twenty thousand employees tried to defend its substrate by acquiring everything around it, the guy in the Hawaiian shirt had to tell crying employees in a Pleasanton conference room that it was over.

And before he had to do that, somebody inside the building had probably been telling him for years.

P.S.

Justin asked if he could have my old MacBookPro that sits in the basement, still plugged in, taped power cord and all. I told him no, that one runs the media server. He asked what that meant. I explained that the 2008 MacBook Pro downstairs has been quietly serving movies and music to every device in the house for years, and will keep doing it until it stops, at which point I’ll probably finally go fully cloud (we’re like 90% of the way there anyway). He thought about it for a second and said:

“So it still does a job. It just doesn’t get to come upstairs anymore.”

Yeah, bud. That is what a System of Record looks like after it gets demoted. Still on. Still running. Still doing real work. Just doesn’t get to come upstairs anymore.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Hawaiian Shirt Adjacent

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

You just watched me talk for ~20 minutes about RAG, MCP, agents, and a 12-year-old who called the future of HR AI "the Wikipedia of work." If you scanned the QR code, you're already here, so I'll spare you the bio you just sat through.

Here's what this place is:

The Department of First Things First is a weekly-ish newsletter for the people who actually have to make Workday work. Not analysts. Not buyers. Not the conference circuit. The people who go back to their desks on Monday and configure the business process, audit the security model, and explain to a CFO why the agent demo isn't shipping in their tenant by Q3.

The talk you just sat through is what this newsletter sounds like every week. Same voice. Same lens. Same anti-encyclopedia stance.

Applied to whatever the ecosystem is doing this week.

Here are five posts to tell you whether to subscribe:

1.

Workday Didn’t “Fix” Their UI. They Just Bought a $1 Billion Skin.

Michael Domingo

Jan 28

Justin came to me yesterday asking for $10 to buy a “skin” for his video game.

Read full story

My son Justin asked me for $10 to buy a cosmetic skin for his video game character. It didn’t make him faster or stronger. He just looked cool while falling off a cliff. Then Workday released their Sana-driven UI and I realized they’d done the exact same thing for a billion dollars. This post breaks down what the new UI actually means for practitioners, where the security nightmares hide, and why a search bar on top of a messy warehouse doesn’t clean the warehouse.

2.

April 27

I promised I’d share this during the talk. Workday rebranded their entire AI strategy in nine months. Again. Here's what's actually shipping under the Sana banner, what's still slideware, and why the Illuminate-to-Sana pivot doesn't change a thing about what you need to build in your tenant.

3.

The Moat is a Tollbooth: Why the AI Panic Around ERPs is Only Half Wrong

Michael Domingo

Feb 25

tldr; Josh Bersin published a piece today arguing the market is irrationally punishing enterprise software (like Workday) over AI fears.

Read full story

Bersin argued that enterprise software is protected by a moat of decades-deep business rules. He’s right about the moat. But for the people actually using the system, that moat feels like a ten-lane tollbooth. This post introduced the framework I keep coming back to: the ERP isn’t going away. But the future is the ERP becoming headless infrastructure, buried so deep under experience layers and AI agents that the end-user forgets it exists.

4.

Put Down the Wrench: The Psychological Shift of Becoming a Solutions Architect

Michael Domingo

Feb 23

tldr; Transitioning from a Workday builder to an Architect isn’t about learning new modules. It’s a brutal psychological shift from fixing technical tickets to navigating corporate politics.

Read full story

The hardest part of moving from Workday analyst to architect isn’t learning a new module. It’s the psychological shift from fixing tickets to navigating politics. I break down what that transition actually feels like: the muscle memory trap, the instant gratification desert, and why the Kitchen Table Test (can you explain your architecture to an 11-year-old?) is the only metric that matters.

5.

I Let My 11-Year-Old Audit Workday’s UI. He Lasted 3 Minutes.

Michael Domingo

Feb 9

We talk a lot about “User Adoption” in HR Tech.

Read full story

I Let My 11-Year-Old Audit Workday’s UI. He Lasted 3 Minutes.

I handed my son Justin a Workday tenant and asked him to request a day off. He’s a digital native who can navigate any app in seconds. He lasted three minutes before giving up. If a kid who grew up with an iPad needs a Quick Reference Guide to use your system, your design is broken. This post is the one that makes non-technical leaders finally understand the UX problem.

If any of those landed, you’re in the right place. Subscribe and I’ll show up in your inbox weekly with architecture takes, vendor accountability, and the occasional story about my son accidentally explaining enterprise strategy better than a $50,000 consultant.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Keeper of the Layer Cake

P.S. If you want to hear me talk instead of read me type, I’ve been a guest on:

• Talent Experience Live with Devin Foster at Phenom — “Speed Meets Experience” (to be published)

• Unsafe Harbor with Christian Delcid — Episode 14

• Workday Gold with Keith Bitikofer — December 19th, 2025

All are worth your commute.

tl;dr: Gartner's Trend #1 for 2026 is AI-Native Development, and the industry buzzword is "Vibe Coding." In Workday-land, that means business analysts prompting apps into existence via Extend and the AI App Builder. The apps work on Tuesday. They break three weeks later, and nobody on the team can debug what the AI wrote. Architecture is the why. Vibes are the what. You need both, in that order.

My son Justin is now 12 🥳, and he loves AI image generators (especially Meshy). He'll type in a prompt for a "cool space robot," and the model produces something that looks awesome at first glance.

Then he looks closer.

The robot has seven fingers. Its right foot is actually another left foot. The lightsaber is a flashlight with a ribbon on it.

Justin wants to fix it. But he can't actually draw. Not a robot, anyway. He only knows how to regenerate. So he hits the button and hopes the next version is better. Usually it just has different problems. A missing arm. Eyes pointing in opposite directions. A dragon with three nostrils (don't ask).

Keep that image in your head for a minute, because Gartner just put it on the front page of its 2026 Top Strategic Technology Trends.

Enter the Vibe

Gartner's Trend #1 for 2026 is AI-Native Development, and the buzzword the analysts are rallying around is "Vibe Coding."

The pitch: generative AI has gotten so good at producing software that we don't need to write code anymore. You describe what you want, and the machine vibes it into existence. No syntax. No semicolons. No deep technical knowledge required.

Analysts love this. It's clean, it's democratizing, it fits on a slide. And in the Workday ecosystem specifically, it's about to cause a massive architectural mess.

The Build-vs-Buy Plot Twist

Remember when we all agreed we bought Workday specifically so we wouldn't have to build anything? Yeah. Gartner thinks that's over.

The prediction: by 2030, 40% of enterprise application portfolios will be custom-built on AI-native platforms, shifting the build-vs-buy equation back toward building. In Workday-land, that looks like a Tuesday.

It's a Tuesday. A smart, ambitious business analyst, fluent in PowerPoint and light on XpressO, opens Workday Extend and the new AI App Builder. Her VP wants a "quick app" to track something the core product doesn't handle. A specialized leave type, maybe. Or a contingent worker checklist. Or a talent mobility micro-workflow/survey.

She types a prompt. The App Builder thinks for a minute. Then, magic. An app appears. Fields. Business process. A condition rule. A notification. She clicks through it. It works.

She demos it Thursday. Her VP is thrilled. Her VP's VP is thrilled. Someone uses "citizen developer" unironically. She gets a spot bonus.

Three weeks later, the hyperdrive engine falls off the space robot.

The Seven-Fingered Robot in Your Tenant

The app breaks because somebody rolled out a new supervisory org the condition rule didn't understand (because it hardcoded the org list). Or a condition rule upstream changed. Or the custom object's reference id got renamed during a data cleanup (this one makes me crazy). Or the vibed calculated field worked in the sandbox but stopped working after the next weekly service update.

Pick one. Doesn't matter. Something always changes in a Workday tenant. That's the whole job.

Here's the problem. The BA didn't write the app. She prompted it. She doesn't know which calculated field is doing the lookup. She doesn't know why the condition rule fires in that specific order. She doesn't know what the custom object's security profile inherits from. She can't debug it, because there's nothing in her head to debug from. The code doesn't exist in her brain. It exists only on the screen.

So she does the only thing she can do. She goes back to the App Builder and types: "Fix the app."

The App Builder cheerfully produces new code. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it breaks something else. Sometimes it silently changes the behavior in a way nobody notices until the quarterly audit.

Regenerate. Hope. Repeat.

That's Justin with the robot. Except now Justin is in production, and the robot has access to your worker data.

Extend Isn't a Toy

Here's the part I want every HR tech leader reading this to seriously sit with for a second:

Workday Extend is not a low-code platform with an AI wrapper. It's a full development environment that happens to have an AI wrapper.

That distinction matters. Low-code platforms have guardrails. They constrain what you can do so the blast radius stays small. Extend doesn't work that way. Extend gives you access to the core Workday object model. Custom objects. Calculated fields. Business processes. Integration endpoints. Security groups.

If you vibe a website, the CSS looks weird. If you vibe a Workday app, you might accidentally create a security group that leaks your CEO's home address.

And it gets worse. Gartner also predicts that 80% of organizations will evolve their engineering teams into smaller, AI-augmented teams by 2030. Translation: fewer humans, more vibes. Which sounds efficient until the BA who prompted the app leaves the company, and the three admins remaining on the team have never seen the code, never seen the spec, and can't tell you why the condition rule fires the way it does.

That's not a tiny team. That's an accountability gap with a headcount rationalization on top.

What to Do (Because I'm Not a Luddite)

I'm not saying don't use the AI App Builder. Do it. I’m doing it too (Want proof? Check my GitHub). I'm saying use it the way senior developers use GitHub Copilot: as a drafting tool, not an authoring tool. The draft is free. The review is the job.

Gartner's own 2026 action plan gets this mostly right. Three moves worth stealing:

Establish a platform team. Centralized oversight. Standards. Governance. Somebody who can say "no, that's not how we do it here" without getting called change-resistant.

Implement real guardrails. Code review. Compliance checks. Security profile audits. Don't let an app ship to production just because it passed the "does it run in the sandbox" test.

Adopt an AI-first mindset, not a vibes-only mindset. Accelerate delivery, yes. But only after your team understands the architecture the AI is generating on their behalf.

I'd add one more, Workday-specific: every vibed app needs a named human owner in your Extend inventory. When the app breaks during the next release cycle, you know who gets paged. "The AI built it" is not a name on a support ticket.

The Bottom Line

Vibe coding isn't democratization. It's delegation without accountability.

Architecture is the why. Vibes are the what. You need both, in that order, or you're just prompting your way into a postmortem.

Justin has figured out that the generator isn't going to get the robot right on its own. He's started asking me to help him fix the fingers.

Your business analysts will figure that out too. The only question is whether they do it before or after the app ships during Open Enrollment.

— Mike