DEV Community: John Stein

Workday 2026R1 Readiness Guide: How to Reduce Risk, Test Smarter, and Certify Faster

John Stein — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:23:38 +0000

Most Workday teams know the feeling: every release window shows up like a surprise audit. Systems are stable today, but a single missed retirement, API change, or UI shift can derail payroll, reporting, or close; and suddenly everyone is working nights just to keep the lights on.

For 2026R1, you do not need another fire drill; you need a clear path. Instead of scrambling through release notes and spreadsheets, you can lean on Opkey’s expert advisory, readiness checklist, and AI‑powered automation to turn this release into a predictable, low‑stress cycle.

From Fire Drills to a Repeatable Playbook on Workday 2026R1

Workday releases can feel overwhelming, but many teams still face the same cycle: rushed testing, unclear ownership, and post‑go‑live surprises. The issue isn’t just the upcoming Workday changes; the lack of structure can be challenging when the focus is on, protecting what already works, and deciding what to adopt and when.

Workday 2026R1 introduces a mix of fixes, retirements, auto‑on updates, and opt‑in features across HCM, Financials, Payroll, Integrations, Security, and Reporting. Treating all of these changes as equal is what creates release fatigue. The teams that stay calm don’t “test everything”, they run a repeatable readiness model that blends impact analysis, targeted testing, and continuous enablement.

This five‑week Preview window (7 Feb–14 Mar) is your critical release preparation period. It exists to validate what’s changing; not to rescue accumulated tenant debt at the last minute. Opkey’s advisory and checklist give you a step‑by‑step way to use that window effectively, with clear actions before, during, and after the release.

Stay on top of the 2026R1 schedule with Opkey’s advisory

From Release Notes to Decisions: How Opkey’s Advisory Helps

Most Workday breakages don’t come from headline features; they come from silent breakpoints like retired APIs, deprecated report data sources, changed security domains, and UI shifts that quietly invalidate job aids. These risks are scattered across Workday release notes, PDFs, and “What’s New” reports, making it hard to see what truly matters.

Opkey’s Workday 2026R1 Release Advisory supports you by:

Highlighting high‑risk changes across integrations, reporting, security, and core business processes.
Distinguishing critical vs informational items, and auto‑delivered vs setup‑required features.
Mapping where retirements and deprecations will break existing workflows if you don’t act.
Suggesting Now / Next / Later adoption guidance for opt‑in and AI‑driven features.

This advisory works alongside the Workday 2026R1 Release Reference document, so every recommendation traces back to Workday’s own materials.

The 5‑Day Workday 2026R1 Certification Path

Yes, you heard it right! 5 Days...

If you rely on manual testing, Workday release certification can easily consume 4–6 weeks and still leave blind spots. Opkey compresses this into a focused 5‑Day Certification Path that covers what matters most for 2026R1.

Day 1: Impact Analysis

Automatically identify which business processes, integrations, reports, security roles, and custom configurations are affected by 2026R1 changes in your tenant. This replaces guesswork with a concrete impact map.

Day 2: AI‑Assisted Test Healing

Opkey’s agentic, no‑code platform uses AI‑powered self‑healing to update existing regression tests to reflect UI and process changes, so you don’t lose coverage every time Workday moves a field or step.

Day 3: Targeted Risk Execution

Run regression only where the risk is highest: retired APIs, critical payroll/time changes, key Financials data sources, and core HCM flows. This turns the truly critical items into a focused, manageable test set instead of an endless script list.

Day 4: Validation & Adoption Readiness

Validate opt‑in features and configuration changes, especially new AI capabilities and setup‑heavy items, and prepare your enablement materials (job aids, guides, in‑app help, stakeholder comms). This is where you decide what to go live with now versus later.

Day 5: Certification & Sign‑Off

Generate readiness reports, coverage metrics, and risk dashboards that give stakeholders go‑live confidence and auditable evidence for your Workday 2026R1 release.

Why Workday Teams Choose Opkey for 2026R1

Opkey combines advisory, automation, and analytics into a single platform, built specifically for complex SaaS releases like Workday.

With Opkey, Workday teams get:

Impact analysis in minutes – Know exactly what to test and where you’re exposed.
Pre‑built accelerators – Thousands of automated test cases and AI‑powered self‑healing scripts tuned for enterprise apps.
No‑code test automation – Empower HR, Finance, and functional users to contribute to automation in hours, not weeks.
Certified Workday partner support – Expert guidance across HCM, Finance, Payroll, Security, and Integrations in one unified platform.
Real‑time dashboards & alerts – Always‑on visibility into test status, risk, and release readiness.

Stay Ahead of the Workday 2026R1 Release

The Workday 2026R1 production date is approaching, and the five‑week Preview window is your chance to get ahead instead of playing catch‑up.

Let Opkey’s AI‑powered, no‑code automation handle the heavy lifting while your team focuses on strategic decisions and adoption.

Get a demo now to see how Opkey keeps your testing, impact analysis, and readiness reporting continuously up to date.

How Tariffs Affect Oracle SCM Users — and How Automation Helps

John Stein — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:34:03 +0000

If your supply chain team recently groaned at the latest tariff headlines, you’re not alone. Few things make an Oracle SCM admin’s day more “exciting” than being called to recalibrate landed cost setups, GTM rules, and sourcing hierarchies.

You may be searching for something that can alleviate the stress of these shifts. For those Opkey alongside Oracle SCM, you’re not in trouble—you’re simply standing at the center of a global trade shakeup with the best safety net possible. Tariff shifts don’t change what Oracle SCM does—they just crank up the volume on how important it is to have automation backing you up.

What Changes in the Real World

It’s no secret that tariff policy has been a headache for IT leads these days. As rates go up or down, your tariff logic and landed cost configurations in Oracle SCM will need frequent tune-ups. Each tweak—no matter how small—can throw risk across procure-to-pay or order-to-cash flows.

And there’s likely to be a one-time, all-hands-on-deck wave of updates around how you tag, calculate, and report duties. Refund claims, audits, and new “replacement” tariffs will have your reporting teams reaching for extra coffee.

In short, the tariff plot keeps changing. You’ll need to keep up—and keep your SCM setup airtight while you do it.

How Opkey Keeps You Cool Under Tariff Pressure

Speedy reconfigurations without panic-testing

When you adjust GTM rules, landed cost components, or sourcing logic, Opkey’s prebuilt Oracle SCM tests let you recertify end-to-end flows in record time. Think of Opkey as your right hand for quick validation—steadily verifying everything from cost rollups to invoicing— so you can make quick fixes without sleepless nights.

And, because Opkey supports cross-system testing (all Oracle Fusion modules, Workday, Salesforce, SAP, and hundreds of other apps and APIs), you’ll retain full visibility into workflows, end-to-end, as changes get pushed.

Surviving Oracle’s quarterly updates and tariff drama simultaneously

Opkey’s impact analysis and release certification capabilities show you precisely which flows are affected, so you test what you need and avoid breakages.

Meanwhile, self-healing tests automatically adapt when Oracle changes a field or page—saving you from the dreaded broken script.

Compliance without chaos

If you’re relabeling tariff basis fields (say, distinguishing IEEPA from other authorities), Opkey checks that everything populates correctly across integrations, OTBI reports, and audit trails. You’ll have real confidence in refund submissions and customs documentation—plus an internal controls approach that helps you meet audit requirements.

Automated regression packs also help you prove every trade and costing configuration was tested, tracked, and signed off—no manual screenshots required.

Scenario testing that keeps the whole chain in sync

When sourcing and planning teams start playing “what if” with new suppliers or trade routes, Opkey runs the continuous integration checks that keep data aligned across SCM, WMS, TMS, and Finance. Your HTS codes, landed costs, and duty amounts stay consistent, no matter how quickly you pivot.

Opkey is your risk reduction and acceleration layer—the platform that helps you adapt, test, and move faster with proof of control baked in.

Tariff volatility doesn’t have to derail your operations or lead to late nights or weekends lost for your team. With Opkey as your copilot, you can handle trade turbulence with confidence.

What It Takes: Building Enterprise-Grade Testing for Workday and Oracle

John Stein — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:23:10 +0000

Ten years ago, if you asked a CIO why they test, they said: “Compliance.”

Today? “Strategy, strategy, strategy.”

Enterprise testing for Oracle and Workday is more than a means of avoiding technical disruption (though post-go-live incidents aren’t any less of a blow than in ages past). Today, leaders expect testing to bring visibility to IT project timelines, speed up new integrations, and increase ROI on investments in cloud apps.

To put it simply, from the perspective of leaders across the C-suite, testing is the lever you pull to ensure business continuity for the course of your tenure.

Enterprise applications like Workday, Oracle, and SAP are releasing new features at a faster clip than ever before. That’s a good thing. Even the most grievous bout of nostalgia couldn’t see us pining for on-prem. But, we’ve also run into a problem. That complexity makes testing harder than ever.

Testing for both migrations and implementations, and for ongoing updates and changes, requires the ability to navigate billions of possible permutations of workflows across multiple apps.

So, just as we’re expecting more out of testing, it’s becoming harder than ever to execute. What gives? Well, the answer is either you can train a tactical team of the best test engineers… or update what you use and how you do it.

In our experience in the enterprise application management space, enterprises that succeed do five things:

Step Zero: Intelligent Discovery and Risk Assessment

Sounds simple, but you won’t get anywhere if you don’t know exactly what to test. Start with finding some means of intelligent change discovery (identifying updated configurations, business processes, and integrations). This means you’ll know from the get-go where to spend extra energy. Focus on what matters most, and you’ll slash test effort, while maintaining coverage.

Treat Data as a Strategic Asset

In enterprise applications, data means little unless it’s organized and analyzed in the context of the real-world scenarios where it’s put to work. Enterprise-grade testing platforms leverage capabilities like automated data mining and synthetic data generation to simulate system function. This approach ensures that you have an accurate picture of the functionality of your system.

Prioritize Self-Healing and Maintainability

The most enviable testing process isn’t the one that runs the biggest barrage of brittle scripts. Rather, it’s the one that automatically stays functional over time. Leaders get the best results out of tests that can self-heal when application elements change. This capacity to self-heal reduces work associated with maintenance cycles, simplifying update testing.

Move Beyond Scripts to Intelligent Test Agents

Scaling enterprise automation requires more than hundreds of Selenium or Power Automate scripts. The future lies in test agents. They’re autonomous, AI-enhanced entities that execute, adapt, and optimize testing intelligently. These agents provide flexibility and scalability that basic automation cannot match.

Enterprise Grade means Testing the Whole Enterprise

To truly be enterprise-grade, (beyond enterprise testing for Oracle and Workday) a testing platform must be able to seamlessly test workflows across disparate systems. Flexibility in this context is the ability of a piece of software to navigate novel scenarios and still be able to assure a change. If it can’t test the whole enterprise, we don’t want it!

Why Opkey Sets the Enterprise Standard

We believe in bold automation that fundamentally transforms how much you expect of your management systems, and how much you can get out of your business technology. It’s no wonder, then, that we’ve built these five pillars into our product.

As the leading enterprise-grade Oracle and Workday testing platform, Opkey empowers organizations to automate testing, increasing speed and drastically decreasing the instance of defects.

Opkey uses innovation to help you achieve a higher degree of enterprise reliability, helping organizations stay current with Oracle and Workday updates and reduce risk.

Beyond any measurable KPI, though, the surest indicator of success is when a partner tells us, “My people don’t lose sleep over this anymore. It’s just a non-event.”

To see how we can help you create an intelligent testing ecosystem, reach out to us.

A Readiness Framework for SaaS Transformation

John Stein — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 08:29:13 +0000

Are Your Business Users Ready for Change?

The Human Side of SaaS Transformation

SaaS transformation is usually framed as a technology project.

New systems. New modules. New integrations. New workflows.

But beneath the technology, there’s a far more decisive variable: People.

Even the most perfectly configured SaaS platform (Workday, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP SuccessFactors, etc.) fails when users aren’t ready. The best automation, analytics, and dashboards offer zero value if:

Employees revert to offline spreadsheets
Managers bypass new workflows
Teams don’t trust the new system

This is why readiness is more than a supporting activity — it is the foundation on which the entire transformation stands.

Why Business User Readiness Is Critical: Adoption = Real ROI

When leaders approve multimillion-dollar SaaS programs, they expect:

Faster processes
Better data quality
Improved compliance
Automation-driven efficiency
Real-time insights

But none of these benefits occur unless users adopt the system correctly.

Let’s say:

A new cloud HCM system is implemented to streamline promotions and performance management. But managers continue emailing HR or using spreadsheets because they’re unsure how to navigate the new screens.

Outcome?

HR is overloaded
Data becomes inconsistent
Compliance reports fail
Leadership incorrectly assumes the system is flawed

The real issue wasn’t the technology. It was readiness.

The Common Signs of Change Resistance

Resistance rarely appears as outright refusal. It shows up as patterns in user behavior.

How Resistance Appears in Real Life

Resistance Type How It Appears Real Example
Friction Users slow down or struggle to complete tasks Employee requires 4 tries to submit an expense because the interface feels unfamiliar
Fatigue Too many changes cause overload After receiving three “system change” emails in a month, users ignore the fourth
Missed Adoption Users bypass the new system Finance continues reconciling spreadsheets instead of using the new ERP module
These signals indicate that the people side of transformation was not addressed early enough.

The Readiness Framework for SaaS Transformation
A successful SaaS transformation hinges on four readiness pillars:

Awareness, Capability, Confidence, and Support
What is the expanded, actionable breakdown?

Awareness – Do Users Know What’s Changing and Why?

Awareness isn’t simply announcing a new system. It means explaining:

What is changing
Why it’s necessary
What it means for their role
What improvements they can expect
Instead of saying:

“We’re upgrading to Oracle Cloud next quarter.”

Say:

“Your procurement process will become 40% faster because manual approvals will now be automated.”

Awareness Checklist

Question Yes/No
Do users know the timeline?

Do they understand what will improve?

Do they know what old processes will disappear?

Has leadership communicated the business goals?

Awareness builds alignment, and alignment reduces resistance.

Capability – Do They Have the Skills and Tools?

Capability is the practical side of readiness — the doing. Users need to feel they can complete tasks without uncertainty.

Traditional Training Limitations

One-time workshops fade from memory
Lengthy LMS courses overwhelm users
Real workflows are forgotten under pressure

What Capability Actually Looks Like

Clear in-app walkthroughs
Hands-on exercises before go-live
Automated test environments where users can practice safely
Role-based training (not generic videos)

A payroll manager should practice: Running payroll, validating exceptions and approving runs; not generic “system navigation.” Capability ensures users don’t freeze when faced with real tasks.

Confidence – Do Users Trust the New System?

Confidence is emotional, not technical. Even capable users may resist if they don’t trust that the system will behave reliably.

Confidence Blockers Include:

Fear of making mistakes
Broken workflows during UAT
Confusing screens
Inconsistent system behavior

How to Build Confidence

Provide a sandbox where users can safely experiment
Show real-life success examples from other teams
Ensure continuous testing so workflows never “break”
Offer guides that appear inside the system when needed

If an approval workflow fails during testing, employees lose trust immediately:

“This is why I prefer the old method.”

Continuous testing restores trust by making the system dependable.

Support – Is Help Available After Go-Live?

The real adoption challenge begins after go-live — not during the project.

Forms of Effective Support

In-app help buttons
Embedded step-by-step guides
A searchable help center
Chat-based assistance
Office hours with super users

Strong vs Weak Support Models

Weak Support Strong Support
Users email IT randomly Clear help channels inside the app
Delayed responses 24/7 in-app workflows + searchable FAQs
No ownership Dedicated change champions
Users depend on memory Real-time guidance for every workflow
Support ensures long-term adoption — not just go-live success.

Measuring Readiness: The Metrics Leaders Should Track

You can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Readiness requires ongoing quantitative and qualitative measurement.

Quantitative Metrics

Metric What It Tells You
Workflow completion times Are users struggling?
Error rates Are tasks being done correctly?
Feature usage Are key capabilities being adopted?
Help-trigger frequency Where are users confused?

Qualitative Metrics

Method Insights Gained
Surveys User sentiment and fears
Focus groups Real examples of friction
UAT feedback Broken processes and UI pain points
A data-driven view helps leaders act before adoption issues escalate.

Enabling Readiness Through Technology

Technology accelerators turn readiness from manual effort into automated support.

In-App Guidance: Users learn inside the system — not through static PDFs.
No-Code Tools: These allow business users to automate repetitive tasks, validate workflows, and manage change rapidly without IT reliance.
Continuous Testing: Ensures that updates, patches, or configurations never break key workflows — preserving user trust.

Use Case:

A Workday update breaks a compensation workflow. Continuous testing catches the issue before users log in the next morning.
This prevents confusion, tickets flooding, loss of confidence, and more.

A Readiness-First Approach in Action

A global retail enterprise rolled out a cloud ERP across 18 countries.

Initial user tests showed:

30% error rate in purchase creation
Confusion in 5 out of 7 finance workflows
Low confidence from regional teams

After adopting the readiness framework:

Before After
High training hours Reduced training needs by 45%
Frequent errors 62% decline in workflow mistakes
Low confidence 80% user satisfaction score
Long onboarding 40% faster system adoption
The breakthrough wasn’t more training — it was a readiness-first mindset.

Build a Culture Ready for Continuous Change

SaaS isn’t a one-time transformation, it’s permanent evolution.
Your teams must be equipped not just for go-live, but for every change that follows.

A readiness-first approach ensures your business users:

Understand the change
Feel capable
Trust the system
Receive ongoing support

When readiness becomes part of the culture, adoption becomes natural — and SaaS investments consistently deliver value.

Reflection on “7 Ways to Kill IT’s Value to the Business”

John Stein — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:04:56 +0000

In Isaac Sacolick’s recent CIO Magazine article, “7 Ways to Kill IT’s Value to the Business,” Sacolick sheds light on some key issues IT personnel are facing, from the perspective of leaders across the IT space. To read the full article, click here.

Opkey’s CEO, Pankaj Goel, shared his insights in the article, noting that “the strongest transformations succeed when IT shifts from ‘deploying technology’ to building a dynamic, optimized transformation that evolves with the business.” In pursuit of IT excellence, test automation and continuous assurance are the missing backbone of durable business value.

The article rightly criticizes big-bang deployments and one-off AI pilots. After all, these methods rarely scale well. It’s important to “start small and scale without disruption,” as Raj Balasundaram, also quoted in the article, mentioned.

To scale without disruption, every step of the implementation journey must be backed by reusable test assets, quality gates, and real adoption metrics. Without an automation layer that evolves with each MVP, organizations just ship change faster while multiplying risk.

CIOs are warned against “flashy pilots” that promise instant ROI. These pilots often stall because there is no data governance, cost control, or effective deployment plan. Opkey’s perspective is that every AI or SaaS project should include a production grade testing strategy from day one: test data design, regression suites, security and compliance checks, and clear criteria for promotion to scale.

Sacolick also highlights a common occurrence: IT achieves on-time delivery, but end users abandon the solution, as post-go-live issues get in the way of real-world use. Opkey sees autonomous discovery, configuration, and testing as a continuous feedback loop with business users; user journeys, edge cases, and change requests need to be codified into automated tests that evolve with the process and design of your tech stack.

Sacolick also calls out the danger of workers adopting AI tools on their own, creating unmanaged risk. In the face of too much rigidity, well-meaning workers tend to flout restrictions in the name of efficiency.

The article notes that many IT teams “don’t plan beyond implementation,” turning capable systems into shelfware and accumulating technical debt.

The answer to many of these problems is clear as day: enterprises that embed automation into their operating model are the ones that turn IT from a cumbersome liability to a strategic asset.

Cross-Application Fatigue: The Hidden Cost of Overlapping Enterprise Applications

John Stein — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 08:55:10 +0000

Understanding Cross-Application Fatigue

Enterprises today rely on multiple software applications to manage sales, HR, finance, supply chain, and more. Each tool is designed to increase efficiency—but constantly switching between applications often leads to cross-application fatigue, a subtle yet powerful productivity killer.

Cross-application fatigue occurs when employees must navigate different applications, each with unique interfaces, workflows, and login requirements. The mental energy spent switching between these systems reduces focus, slows productivity, and increases the risk of errors.

Key symptoms include

Frequent context switching across apps
Increased human errors in data entry or workflow execution
Lower employee engagement and satisfaction
Delayed adoption of new enterprise tools

The Hidden Costs of Overlapping Applications

While investing in multiple enterprise applications can appear beneficial, overlapping systems often create inefficiencies that are rarely accounted for in ROI calculations.

Hidden Cost How It Impacts the Organization Example
Time Loss Employees spend extra minutes navigating multiple applications Switching between CRM, ERP, and HR systems to complete a single process
Data Silos Information doesn’t flow automatically across platforms Sales updates in CRM not reflecting in finance or supply chain apps
Training & Support Costs Teams need separate onboarding for each platform Learning multiple workflows increases training time and IT support tickets
Errors & Compliance Risks Manual processes increase mistakes Duplicate entries, misaligned approvals, or missing documentation
Employee Burnout Repetitive app switching increases stress Teams spend more time navigating software than performing value-added work
Even small inefficiencies compound over time. A five-minute delay per task across dozens of employees can result in hundreds of lost hours per month, which translates to significant hidden operational costs.

Why Traditional Solutions Fail

Organizations often attempt to reduce fatigue by consolidating applications, providing more training, or enforcing stricter workflows. While these approaches can help, they don’t solve the root problem: the friction of switching between multiple enterprise applications in real time.

Application consolidation may not be feasible for specialized or legacy systems.
Additional training doesn’t eliminate the constant need to switch apps.
Rigid workflows can frustrate employees and slow adoption.

To truly address cross-application fatigue, enterprises need a solution that unifies processes, automates repetitive tasks, and provides real-time guidance across systems.

How Opkey Eliminates Cross-Application Fatigue

Opkey’s platform is designed to help organizations streamline operations across overlapping enterprise applications. Here’s how it addresses fatigue and inefficiency:

Seamless Integration Across Enterprise Apps: Complete end-to-end workflows without constantly switching between systems.
Automated Testing & Validation: Detects errors and ensures processes run smoothly across applications, reducing downtime and risk.
Digital Adoption Guidance: Provides real-time, in-app guidance so employees can complete workflows without relying on extensive training or support.
Configuration Drift Prevention: Maintains alignment across systems, ensuring workflows remain accurate and compliant.

With Opkey, employees spend less time managing software and more time performing high-value tasks that drive business outcomes.

The Business Impact of Solving Cross-Application Fatigue

Organizations that tackle cross-application fatigue experience measurable improvements:

Higher productivity: Fewer interruptions and faster workflow completion
Reduced errors: Automated testing and validation minimize human mistakes
Better compliance: Prevents misalignment across systems
Increased employee satisfaction: Less frustration and reduced cognitive overload
Faster software adoption: Employees embrace new tools more readily when workflows are simplified

By addressing the hidden costs of overlapping enterprise applications, Opkey helps businesses operate more efficiently and competitively.

Conclusion

Cross-application fatigue is a silent drain on enterprise productivity that can lead to errors, higher operational costs, and frustrated employees. Traditional solutions like consolidation and training only treat the symptoms—they don’t eliminate the friction caused by multiple applications.

Opkey provides a unified platform that automates workflows, guides employees, and maintains system alignment, making cross-application fatigue a problem of the past. With fewer distractions and more streamlined processes, organizations can focus on driving business outcomes and growth.

Performance and Goals – Decoding Redwood Features in Oracle HCM (and Why Testing Matters More Than Ever)

John Stein — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 08:14:44 +0000

Oracle’s Redwood experience continues to transform the way HR teams interact with Performance and Goals modules. With a modern UI, intuitive workflows, AI-driven insights, and simplified manager–employee interactions, Redwood does more than change the look and feel—it fundamentally enhances productivity, decision-making, and engagement.

But every enhancement also brings a shared responsibility for HR, IT, and QA teams: ensuring that the new features work flawlessly for every user, in every cycle, without disrupting critical HR processes.

In this blog, we decode the latest Redwood features in Performance and Goals, explore how they benefit businesses, and highlight why continuous test automation is essential—especially with Oracle’s continuous quarterly updates.

Explore the Latest Oracle Cloud 25D Release Advisory, Download now!

Performance & Feedback Module – Redwood Features Explained

HR, Employee & Manager Responsive Pages Converted to Redwood

The Redwood UX transformation has been applied to all primary Performance and Feedback pages, unifying the experience for HR, employees, and managers. This is a major step in transforming the Human Capital Management experience to ensure higher adoption and more efficient use of core performance management processes across the organization.

What it means: All primary Performance and Feedback pages across HR, manager, and employee roles now run on Redwood UX.

Business benefits:

Cleaner, faster, and mobile-responsive workflows
Reduced training efforts due to intuitive navigation
Higher adoption of performance processes

Notifications Converted to Redwood

The conversion of Notifications to Redwood UX ensures a modern, visually consistent, and responsive experience across all Oracle Cloud applications. This update applies the Redwood design system to both in-app and email notifications for various processes, including Procurement, Performance, and other workflow approvals.

What it means: System-generated notifications (reminders, approvals, deadline alerts) now follow Redwood styling and logic.

Business benefits:

Consistent experience across all touchpoints
Improved clarity and actionability of notifications

GenAI Features for Manager Evaluation

The Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM Redwood experience embeds Generative AI (GenAI) directly into the Performance Management module, transforming the traditionally time-consuming and inconsistent process of manager evaluation.

What it means: Managers can leverage generative AI to summarize performance data, draft evaluations, and refine feedback.

Business benefits:

Faster evaluation cycles
More objective reviews
Better-quality feedback

All-In-One Evaluation – Mass Evaluation for Managers

This feature is designed to streamline the performance review process by allowing managers to evaluate multiple direct reports simultaneously from a single interface, significantly boosting efficiency during annual review cycles.

What it means: Managers can evaluate multiple employees in a unified view.

Business benefits:

Speeds up bulk performance cycles
Reduces navigation complexity
Minimizes manager workload during review season

Check-in Calendar Invites

Check-ins introduce a crucial feature for efficiency, i.e. the automatic generation of calendar meeting invites. When a manager or employee schedules a check-in within the system, they can now opt to create an accompanying .ics calendar file, which is instantly downloaded.

What it means: Check-ins can now automatically generate calendar invites for both employees and managers.

Business benefits:

Better scheduling discipline
Higher participation in check-ins
Transparent communication

Manager–Employee Check-ins (including In-Target Reports)

This feature serves as a streamlined process for fostering continuous dialogue between workers and managers, moving beyond traditional annual reviews.

What it means: Redwood improves the collaboration between managers, and their in-target reports through streamlined check-in UI.

Business benefits:

Improved coaching conversations
Real-time feedback tracking
Higher employee satisfaction

Competencies & Dynamic Skills as Part of Check-ins

Check-ins now feature seamless integration of both established Competencies and the more agile Dynamic Skills from the Skills Center as dedicated discussion topics. This ensures that career conversations move beyond annual reviews to focus continuously on real-time development.

What it means: Performance conversations now incorporate competencies and dynamic skills directly.

Business benefits:

Clear alignment with skill-building
Better development plans
More measurable outcomes

Control Check-in Templates

This feature allows HR administrators to precisely manage the availability of structured check-in documents across the organization.

What it means: HR can define and manage check-in templates for consistency.

Business benefits:

Standardized performance conversations
Governance over feedback processes

Scored Questionnaires

This feature integrates quantifiable feedback directly into the performance process.

What it means: Performance questionnaires now support automatic scoring.

Business benefits:

Objective evaluation criteria
Faster scoring and decision-making
Reduced manual effort

Mass Share Performance

This feature allows HR to share completed performance documents and check-ins with a large group of employees simultaneously.

What it means: Performance documents can now be shared with multiple stakeholders simultaneously.

Business benefits:

Faster review cycles
Better visibility for HR and leadership

Goals Module – Redwood Features Explained

Responsive Pages Converted to Redwood

This update focuses on migrating existing responsive setup and transaction pages to the modern Oracle Redwood design standard.

What it means: Redwood UI for employee, manager, and HR goal management.

Benefit: Unified, intuitive goal-setting experience.

Single UI for Performance & Goals

This feature consolidates performance management and goal setting into one cohesive interface.

What it means: Oracle merges the interface into a single cohesive workspace.

Benefits:

Faster navigation
Reduced cognitive load
Improved adoption by managers

AI-Suggested Goals

AI-Suggested Goals use machine learning to accelerate and enhance goal creation to reduce the effort required to write meaningful goals and improve overall corporate alignment.

What it means: Oracle uses AI to suggest organizationally aligned goals.

Benefits:

Smarter, consistent goal setting
Helps employees pick relevant objectives
Reduces HR workload

Secure Goal Actions with New Privileges

With this feature, organizations can precisely delegate who can perform critical tasks, thereby strengthening data integrity and audit compliance within the goals process.

What it means: Enhanced security framework around goal actions.

Benefits:

Reduced risk of unauthorized changes
Stronger compliance posture

Embedded GenAI Features

Embedding GenAI transforms the efficiency of goal management. Generative AI drastically cuts down the time spent creating quality goals and ensures better alignment with best practices.

What it means: AI-driven drafting for goals, descriptions, alignment, and progress reports.

Benefits:

Better quality goals
Saves time for employees and managers

Why Oracle Redwood Migration Requires Thorough Testing

Redwood isn’t just a UI upgrade—it’s a complete transformation of how the Performance & Goals modules function. With Oracle introducing AI-driven workflows, personalized responsive pages, and new security privilege structures, the complexity of testing has grown exponentially.

Here’s why enterprises can no longer rely on manual testing alone:

Redwood Is Constantly Changing—Not Just the UI

While the shift to Redwood brings visually sleek and user-friendly interfaces, every redesign introduces new components, layouts, and navigation paths.

These changes impact:

Page rendering
Field behavior
Workflow sequencing

-Cross-module dependencies

Implication: After every quarterly update, even a small UI tweak can break previously stable test scripts or user flows. This makes consistent regression testing mandatory.

AI Embedded into Performance & Goals Introduces New Testing Dimensions

Oracle has embedded AI across the performance lifecycle:

AI for manager evaluations
AI-generated feedback summaries
AI-suggested goals for employees
AI assistance in drafting goal descriptions
AI for identifying competencies and skills

AI behaves differently based on context, data, role, and model updates. This introduces testing complexities such as:

Data-driven AI output validation
Role-based AI visibility verification
Ensuring AI-generated text is appropriate and aligned
Checking that AI does not expose restricted or sensitive performance data

Why automation is required:

AI outcomes cannot be manually validated at scale. Automation frameworks with data-driven and role-aware capabilities are essential to ensure predictable behavior.

Personalization in Responsive Pages Increases Testing Combinations

Redwood responsive pages allow organizations to personalize layouts for:

Different user roles
Departments or business units
Performance cycles
Custom templates
Skill-based or competency-based configurations

While personalization improves user experience, it multiplies the number of scenarios that must be tested:

Each variation must render correctly
Each user type must see the right fields
Conditional sections must appear or hide based on rules
Workflows must remain consistent across custom pages

As personalization expands, even small errors can disrupt large-scale performance cycles.

Redwood Requires Additional & Updated Security Privileges

Oracle has tightened security controls across Redwood modules by introducing:

New privileges for goal actions
Updated permissions for mass evaluations
New AI-related security settings
Additional access controls for consolidated pages
Changes to role provisioning related to Redwood pages
Organizations using custom roles must now re-test:
Privilege mappings
Data access rules
What each role can or cannot modify
Whether privilege changes break downstream HR workflows

Oracle’s Quarterly Updates Introduce Continuous Change

Every quarterly update brings:

New Redwood components
Enhancement to AI behavior
Updated notifications
Security privilege modifications
Backend logic upgrades
API and workflow changes

Without automation, HR and IT teams often scramble to validate changes manually—leading to delays, defects, or production issues during critical appraisal cycles.

Redwood has transformed Performance and Goals into a highly dynamic ecosystem powered by AI, personalization, and enhanced security—but these same innovations have dramatically increased testing complexity. This is where Opkey’s Redwood Migration Accelerator comes in.

Here’s how Opkey can help

Opkey’s Redwood Migration Accelerator generates a detailed migration roadmap and outlines a risk-based testing strategy to help you optimize your resources, set realistic timelines and milestones, and track your migration progress. Opkey helps you achieve end-to-end testing coverage for critical business processes by performing regression testing, performance testing, and compatibility testing across browsers and devices, to preserve functionality and maintain the integrity of your business processes.

Risk Management and Quality Assurance

John Stein — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:13:35 +0000

Quality and Risk Management (QRM) are two sides of the same coin—each reinforcing the other to ensure reliable, high-performing enterprise systems. Quality assurance builds the foundation for stability, compliance, and seamless user experiences, but with today’s rapid technological changes, QA alone is not enough. That’s where Risk Management becomes essential.

Modern enterprises must anticipate, evaluate, and continuously manage risks as part of everyday decision-making—whether those risks stem from integrations, security vulnerabilities, regulatory changes, or system performance issues.

In this blog, we’ll explore what risk management means in the context of enterprise application (ERP) and software testing, how it differs from traditional quality assurance, and how organizations can deliver high-quality enterprise applications while proactively safeguarding against potential challenges and uncertainties.

Read Opkey’s HCM Industry Trend Review & 2026 Forecast, download now.

What is Risk Management?

Risk management in ERP software testing refers to the systematic process of identifying, analyzing, and prioritizing potential risks that may impact the performance, reliability, security, or compliance of an ERP system. It involves evaluating where failures are most likely to occur—whether in integrations, configurations, data flows, customizations, or business-critical processes—and creating a structured plan to mitigate or control those risks before they affect the business.

In software testing, risk management goes beyond just finding defects. It ensures that testing efforts focus on the most critical and high-impact areas during an ERP implementation or release. This includes assessing the likelihood of failures, estimating their potential business consequences, and aligning test coverage with real-world risks such as downtime, incorrect financial reporting, process disruptions, or compliance breaches.

Oracle Fusion Quarterly Update Example

Oracle Fusion Cloud receives mandatory quarterly updates that introduce new features, patches, regulatory changes, and UI enhancements every three months. These updates, while essential for innovation and compliance, also introduce uncertainty. Any change in Oracle Fusion can potentially impact custom workflows, integrations, security roles, personalization, or financial reporting. This is why risk management must be embedded into the software testing process.

When Oracle rolls out its quarterly update (e.g., 24D, 25A, 25B, 25C, or 25D), it may include changes to the Procurement module—such as updates in Supplier Qualification, new approval rules, or enhancements in Purchase Order processing.

Without risk management:

A change in approval workflow might break custom routing rules.
Updated APIs could disrupt integration with a third-party P2P system.
UI changes may invalidate existing automation scripts.
Incorrect configurations may impact financial postings.

What Is Quality Assurance?

Quality Assurance (QA) is the structured process of ensuring that a software product meets defined quality standards—functionality, performance, reliability, security, and usability—before it is released to end users. In the context of ERP systems like Oracle Fusion Cloud, QA involves validating configurations, customizations, integrations, data flows, security roles, and end-to-end business processes to ensure the system works as expected.

But QA is not just about finding defects. It is a preventive discipline designed to stop failures before they occur. This is where QA becomes deeply connected to Risk Management.

With risk management in place for Oracle Fusion Cloud:

Teams identify “high-risk” business processes before the update hits the test pod.
Testing is prioritized for critical flows like Invoice Creation, PO Approval, GL Posting, or SLA setups.
Automated regression tests ensure key transactions still behave as expected after the update.
Potential failures are detected early—long before the changes reach production.

How QA Supports Risk Management

Quality Assurance (QA) is a foundational pillar of effective risk management in ERP environments. While risk management identifies what could go wrong, QA ensures that those risks are proactively tested, controlled, and prevented. In fast-changing systems like Oracle Fusion Cloud, QA becomes even more critical because quarterly updates, new features, and regulatory changes are continuous.

Below are the keyways that QA enhances and strengthens the risk management process.

1. Early Identification of High-Risk Areas

QA helps detect potential issues early in the cycle by analyzing:

Module-level changes introduced in quarterly updates
Impacted configurations, workflows, and extensions
Integrations and APIs most likely to be affected

This early insight helps teams focus efforts on processes that matter most—such as P2P, O2C, R2R, Payroll, or Inventory.

How Opkey helps: Opkey’s AI-powered impact analysis is a game changer when it comes to risk management. Opkey automatically analyzes Oracle update impact reports and identifies which business processes, test cases, and integrations will be affected. This allows teams to target high-risk areas instantly.

2. Focused Test Coverage Where It Matters

Risk-based testing ensures QA aligns test coverage with business priorities.

Examples:

More testing for high-impact financial transactions
Deep validation for approval workflows
Additional checks for compliance-sensitive configurations

How Opkey helps: Opkey’s risk-based testing engine maps every business process and auto-recommends the right test coverage based on risk level and process criticality. This eliminates guesswork and saves hours of manual analysis.

3. Faster Detection of Defects and Process Breakdowns

QA highlights issues before they hit production, including:

Integration failures after updates
Broken customizations
UI or workflow changes affecting user tasks

With automation, these issues are caught early and consistently.

How Opkey helps: Opkey’s AI-powered Enterprise Apps Lifecycle Optimization platform rapidly validates end-to-end processes across Oracle Fusion modules, helping detect defects within hours—not days—after an update is released.

4. Strengthened Compliance and Audit Preparedness

ERP systems must comply with tax rules, financial regulations, and internal audit requirements.

QA contributes by:

Ensuring accuracy of financial posting rules (SLA)
Validating tax configurations after updates
Maintaining traceability across test cases and outcomes

How Opkey helps: Opkey provides complete test evidence, audit logs, and traceability reports—helping organizations stay fully compliant during audits and regulatory reviews.

5. Preventing Business Disruptions

Quality Assurance ensures business continuity by verifying:

Core processes run as expected after updates
Performance remains stable under load
Users can execute daily tasks without interruption

This minimizes the risk of downtime, financial misstatements, or failed transactions.

How Opkey helps: Opkey’s regression testing ensures that all business-critical workflows are validated automatically during every quarterly update, reducing the risk of production failures.

6. Continuous Improvement Driven by Testing Insights

Each QA cycle provides valuable data:

Defect trends
Risk hotspots
Frequently impacted integrations
Module-level performance issues
These insights refine future risk assessment cycles.

How Opkey helps: Opkey’s dashboards and analytics identify recurring failure patterns and risk-heavy areas, helping teams continuously improve their testing strategy.

Final Words

Quality Assurance transforms risk management from a reactive activity into a proactive, strategic function. With Opkey’s Enterprise App Lifecycle Optimization platform, organizations achieve test automation maturity—ensuring stability, compliance, and reliability across every release.

ERP Configuration vs. Customization

John Stein — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 07:55:13 +0000

Enterprises across the globe are thinking of migrating to composable ERP solutions (a term coined by Garner). As per research conducted by Boomi along with Coleman Parks, 94% of organizations worldwide are embracing a composable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) strategy to overcome the limitations of legacy monolithic applications.

With this, a very pertinent question arises: What should you opt for while adopting a composable ERP strategy: ERP Configuration or Customization.

In this blog, we will highlight the differences between ERP configuration and customization; and propose a path forward for enterprises that want to have nimble and flexible ERP systems.

Read Opkey’s most anticipated research report of 2025, State of Cloud & ERP Operations Report.

Let’s first begin with composable ERP systems.

What is composable ERP?

Composable ERP is an outcome-focused strategy that moves away from monolithic systems, recognizing that no single product can adequately serve all organizational needs. It provides the architectural flexibility to mix and match best-of-breed solutions and technologies in a modular fashion. This approach empowers organizations to design and deploy highly efficient workflows tailored precisely to achieve desired business results.

Adopting a composable ERP model provides several strategic benefits, such as the capability to precisely shape the application ecosystem according to distinct organizational demands. This modular approach facilitates independent evolution and iteration, which ultimately contributes to maximizing the return on investment and extending the operational lifespan of the existing ERP infrastructure.

What is ERP Configuration?

ERP configuration is the process of tailoring an ERP system to meet the specific operational, functional, and regulatory requirements of a business — without altering its core source code. It involves adjusting the system’s pre-built settings and components so that the ERP behaves in a way that aligns with an organization’s unique business model, workflows, and data management needs.

During ERP system configuration, implementers modify system parameters such as time zones, currencies, languages, approval hierarchies, financial calendars, and user roles to match business operations. It can also include defining industry-specific workflows, setting up reporting templates, or mapping cost centers and profit centers to reflect the company’s structure.

For example:

In Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, users can configure charts of accounts structures, ledger sets, and business units to support multi-country operations.

In SAP S/4HANA, configuration may involve defining material types, purchasing groups, or plant locations in the IMG (Implementation Management Guide).

In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, users can configure workflows for purchase requisition approvals or define posting profiles for financial transactions.

ERP Customization and Composable ERP

A composable ERP is designed with modular, interoperable components that can be configured and reconfigured to respond quickly to business changes.

For instance:

A manufacturing company might configure supply chain, inventory, and finance modules from different vendors through APIs to create a unified digital ecosystem.

A retail business could configure its order management and customer experience modules differently for online and in-store operations while maintaining centralized financial control.

What is ERP Customization?

It is the process of extending an ERP system’s core functionality by writing new code, scripts, or modules to meet very specific business requirements. ERP customization involves adding new business logic, altering system behavior, developing new interfaces, or integrating third-party applications to create a more comprehensive solution. These changes are made directly within the ERP’s source code or through supported extension frameworks, making the ERP more closely aligned with the organization’s unique business model and processes.

For example:

Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP: Creating a custom invoice approval workflow that includes additional business rules not available in the standard configuration or building an integration with a third-party tax engine like Avalara for automated tax calculation.

SAP S/4HANA: Developing a custom Fiori app for specialized manufacturing order tracking or adding Z-programs to handle unique costing calculations.

Microsoft Dynamics 365: Writing a custom plugin to automate commission calculation for sales teams or integrating Dynamics with an external logistics platform through custom APIs.

NetSuite: Creating a SuiteScript to automate purchase order generation when inventory levels drop below a threshold or connecting the system with an external eCommerce portal.

ERP Customization and Composable ERP

Instead of directly modifying core code, modern ERP ecosystems encourage low-code/no-code extensions and API-driven customizations. This modular approach allows businesses to innovate and extend ERP capabilities without risking system stability or upgrade compatibility.

ERP Configuration vs. Customization

ERP Configuration ERP Customization

It involves adjusting pre-built settings, parameters, and workflows within the ERP system to align with business processes — without modifying the source code. It is faster, cost-effective, and upgrade-safe. It requires writing new code or modifying existing code to add or change functionalities that the standard ERP does not support. It offers deeper flexibility but is more time-consuming, costly, and may affect future upgrades.

How Opkey can help

Opkey is the industry’s first Agentic AI-powered Enterprise App lifecycle optimization platform that simplifies both ERP configuration and customization. Opkey automatically identifies impacted test cases after each configuration or customization change, enabling faster validation and risk-free updates.

Success in ERP deployment, operation, and optimization now requires a smarter solution. This is where Agentic AI comes in. Read our whitepaper: The Future of ERP Is Agentic

Opkey 25.R5 Release: Redefining Enterprise Testing with Agentic AI and Smarter Automation

John Stein — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 07:19:51 +0000

Opkey has once again raised the bar for enterprise testing with its 25.R5 release, bringing together intelligent automation, next-gen integrations, and powerful new insights that transform how enterprises deploy, validate, and optimize their cloud applications.

This latest release introduces a wave of powerful new features focused on seamless integration, advanced automation, and enhanced security across enterprise platforms. From improved cross-platform test management to smarter analytics and more robust compliance tools, Opkey 25.R5 empowers organizations to drive automation with greater precision, efficiency, and transparency- setting a new benchmark for intelligent enterprise testing.

Let’s explore the key highlights of this release.

Smarter Testing Through Enhanced Integrations and Collaboration

Our first highlight is the new Octane integration, which further strengthens Opkey’s ability to seamlessly connect with leading CI/CD and test management platforms for end-to-end traceability.

Previously, Opkey offered native integrations with QTest, Jira, and Azure DevOps. With Octane now added to the list, teams can enjoy the same seamless experience—building conditional flows, managing passed and failed test scripts, and automatically raising tickets within their CI/CD ecosystem.

External Tool Integration

This means end users no longer need to switch to Opkey just to review test execution results. They can continue working within the platforms they already rely on, while Opkey works behind the scenes to unify testing and accelerate delivery.

Key outcomes: This enhancement reinforces our commitment to delivering deep, frictionless integrations that support the evolving needs of modern DevOps and platform-driven enterprises.

Introducing Opkey BI Agent: AI Meets Analytics

This Opkey release introduces a powerful upgrade to reporting. With natural language prompting, users can now generate rich BI reports and custom dashboards instantly, whether it’s testing usage insights, execution trends, or any other key metric.

Overall Ticket Status

Teams can now surface nuanced insights that previously required significant effort to build manually. Metrics such as “How often does this script fail?” or “Show me the status of open tickets” can be produced on demand through simple conversational prompts, accessible directly from the Opkey interface.

Key outcomes: This enhanced capability feeds directly into Opkey’s automatic traceability framework, giving customers a complete, real-time, and actionable view of their testing landscape. With deeper visibility and faster reporting, teams can make smarter, data-driven decisions with ease.

Workday Training Agent Enhancements: Companion App
Opkey’s Workday Training Agent leverages test executions to automatically generate job aids with PII-masked screenshots and clear, generic instructions that can be auto-updated after every run, thus streamlining the process of creating and maintaining training guides.

With a browser-extension–powered interface, the Companion app supports in-app navigation, editing, and desktop component recording training guides. Since building and updating job aids is typically manual and time-consuming, Opkey now eliminates the heavy lifting by automating job aid generation while still allowing users to make quick, effortless edits.

Key outcomes: Opkey’s training agent now automates job guide creation from test execution significantly lowering effort with a much higher return.

Workday Security Audit Enhancements: Segregation of Duties (SoD)
Opkey’s latest 25.R5 release introduces powerful enhancements to Workday Security Audits, with a major focus on strengthening Segregation of Duties (SoD). These updates are designed to help organizations proactively prevent risk by ensuring no single user holds conflicting roles or permissions within their Workday tenant.

Opkey now allows customers to set thresholds for administrative roles to maintain optimal security hygiene. For example, if your organization determines that only five HR Admins are needed but seven users currently hold that role, Opkey will highlight the breach—prompting timely action to adjust permissions and restore compliance.

External Tool Integration

This enhancement marks an important step beyond traditional testing, expanding Opkey’s capabilities into continuous audit, tenant health, and security maintenance. Additional features to identify Segregation of Duties conflicts will be introduced in our next few releases.

Key outcomes: With Opkey 25.R5, Workday customers gain a smarter, more proactive way to keep their tenants secure, compliant, and clean—all while reducing manual oversight and risk exposure.

Driving the Future of Agentic AI Testing

With Release 25.R5, Opkey reinforces its position as the agentic AI-native platform built to optimize every stage of enterprise lifecycle. From intelligent analytics and cross-platform automation to advanced snapshot management and workload optimization, this release empowers organizations to move faster, scale smarter, and achieve continuous quality with confidence.

How Opkey’s Training Agent will have you Falling in Love with Workday

John Stein — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 11:50:23 +0000

Even the best tech means naught if people don’t know how to use it.

In the same vein, software adoption is only as good as the training behind it.

Unfortunately, the traditional approach to enterprise training just hasn’t kept pace with the speed of change. Long slide decks, static help docs, and costly workshops don’t fit a world where your HR or Finance teams might be working across web and desktop workflows that change every few weeks. Enterprises are realizing that sustainable transformation depends not only on the systems they deploy, but on how seamlessly their users can keep learning as those systems evolve.

Learn more about Opkey’s Training Agent for Workday. Schedule a Demo

Why enterprise training needs a reboot

Think about your last system update. Chances are that new processes roll out faster than the guides explain them. Employees paused to ask, “Wait, has the ‘request PTO’ button moved?” or “Where’s that approval flow now?”. That pause costs productivity and creates resistance to change. The result is a digital transformation initiative that looks sleek on paper but stalls when the rubber hits the road.

What organizations need now is training that updates as fast as their systems do. That’s where the new generation of enablement tools comes in: systems that embed up-to-date guidance right inside the application experience, adapting in lock-step with the technology it supports.

The rise of unified enablement

Over the past few years, forward-thinking enterprises have shifted from static e-learning to dynamic, in-app guidance. The next step in that evolution is unifying training with testing. Why? Because every new workflow or configuration that gets tested also needs a matching how-to guide for the people who’ll actually use it. Instead of treating testing and training as separate, disconnected functions, combining the two dramatically reduces lag.

Enter: Opkey.

Opkey’s Training Agent

With its October 2025 release, Opkey’s Training Agent takes enterprise enablement to a new level. Historically, training materials lagged behind real system behavior—especially in platforms like Workday, where regular updates and complex workflows make manual documentation nearly impossible to maintain. Opkey flips that challenge on its head by making training generation fully automated and aligned with testing from the start. Training Agent works tremendously well on its own, but it’s made even more powerful when combined with system testing.

The new Training Agent delivers a wave of Workday capability centered on accessibility, automation, and compliance.

What’s new and exciting

Desktop Recorder in the Companion App

The latest companion app for Opkey now allows users to record processes directly within desktop applications—not just web browsers. That means even non-technical Workday users can document workflows in real time, and the system automatically generates step-by-step guides from those recordings. Suddenly, creating accurate, visual process documentation no longer requires hours of manual effort or consultant time.

Guide customization and in-app editing

Training comes alive when it’s tailored. The updated Training Agent lets teams edit and enrich guides directly in the Companion App. They can insert tips, alerts, and context-specific notes.

Proactive compliance and governance automation

In large Workday environments, controlling who has access to what is critical for security and audit-readiness. This release introduces automated threshold monitoring and breach detection for access groups, so admins can define thresholds once, and Opkey will flag any potential compliance issues automatically.

From manual to intelligent enablement

Before these enhancements, training often meant playing catch-up. Documentation teams struggled to rewrite guides after every patch, and by the time updates were live, users were already discovering gaps on their own. With Opkey, that story changes completely.

Every time your automated tests run, they generate new, accurate training guides for the same workflows. That closes the loop between development and enablement, turning system change into a self-sustaining cycle of testing, validation, and guidance.

Where old training lived in PowerPoints and PDFs, Opkey makes it dynamic and continuous. Whether you’re onboarding after a merger, introducing a new Workday module, or simply preparing for your next release, the Training Agent ensures that every user stays ready, confident, and compliant.

Why it matters for Workday customers

For Workday teams, release management is an ongoing sprint. Opkey’s unified platform turns that challenge into an advantage. With each Workday release, the self-healing engine automatically updates both test cases and training guides at scale. That means you stay compliant, minimize risk, and eliminate the manual burden that usually eats up time and budget.

The result is a complete platform designed for Workday patch success—automated, compliant, up-to-date, and easy for every user to navigate.

The bottom line

Training Agent lowers the pressure of having to adapt to changes. With Training Agent, users have a helping hand right inside their apps that knows what has changed and how they can stay on task.

No more lag between configuration and communication. No more guessing which version is current. No more reactive patch firefighting. Just confident, informed employees who can master every release in real time, as soon as it drops.

Real-World Trends: The Next Wave of Agentic AI in HCM

John Stein — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 10:08:04 +0000

In human resources departments, the past few years have been a race to the cloud, with teams migrating to centralized human capital management (HCM) solutions faster than ever. Yet for many, the move to modernize has happened in name only. They’ve shifted platforms without realizing the full agility, efficiency, or user confidence those systems promise.

HR leaders have turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to close that gap. Tools like generative assistants, predictive analytics, and workflow automations have helped recruiters screen candidates faster, supported HR in writing job descriptions and policy updates, and enabled finance and payroll teams to forecast workforce costs with greater accuracy. These advances have driven the first wave of cloud HCM transformation, making work faster, smarter, and more connected.

But for most organizations, these tools still operate on the periphery of the employee experience. They assist, but they don’t act. That’s beginning to change with the rise of agentic AI — systems designed not just to respond, but to decide, adapt, and execute across complex enterprise workflows. It marks a shift from assistant to autonomous co-worker, with the potential to turn cloud HCM from a system upgrade into a new way of managing work itself.

Still, Gartner predicts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects may be canceled by 2027 due to unclear value and risk. Success in integrating this digital workforce will depend not on mere innovation, but on governance, measurable outcomes, and confidence in how these systems make decisions.

This post builds on insights from our Agentic AI in HCM Trends Report to explore what that next stage looks like — and what leaders can do now to turn potential into performance.

From Assistants to AI Agents in HCM Workflows

In HR, as in other business functions, AI applications have generally developed in line with ISG’s three “eras” — from prediction to creation to orchestration. What began with systems that could forecast outcomes, such as attrition or hiring trends, soon evolved into tools that could generate content and automate simple workflows. These earlier waves of predictive and generative AI helped HR teams analyze workforce data, personalize employee communications, and automate routine tasks like scheduling or approval, but they largely operated as digital assistants rather than active participants in work.

With agentic AI, the era of orchestration is beginning to unfold. These systems can decide, adapt, and act within defined guardrails, coordinating across people, data, and applications to achieve desired outcomes. Workday describes this as AI that can “monitor systems, interpret real-time conditions, and initiate tasks across connected applications,” a model that moves HR closer to the idea of a truly intelligent, self-optimizing enterprise.

Look at any of the leading HCM platforms, and you’ll see this evolution playing out:

Oracle Cloud HCM’s Journeys enable HR teams to guide users through complex processes like onboarding, benefits enrollment, or policy updates with step-by-step prompts that adapt to each role.
SAP’s Joule agents assist with HR workflows such as compensation planning, talent development, and performance management — automatically surfacing candidate data, summarizing employee feedback, and initiating actions like creating job requisitions or scheduling check-ins.
Workday’s Agent System of Record lets organizations deploy and manage fleets of AI agents that assist across HR functions. These role-based agents can automatically update employee records, verifying access permissions, and even suggest learning opportunities based on role or performance data, all within the same secure environment that governs human users.

This model is spreading far beyond these flagship platforms. In talent acquisition, analysts predict that AI agents will handle early-stage screening for roughly 30% of recruitment teams by 2028. And in HR and IT service delivery, agentic systems already resolve end-to-end employee requests without routing tickets to humans.

Each of these examples follows a common theme: AI moving from telling people what to do to doing it with them. In HR, that shift opens a new frontier, where intelligent systems no longer sit at the edges of cloud HCM but become active digital co-workers.

Agentic AI in HCM: What the Analysts Are Saying

As rapidly as the use cases for Agentic AI in HCM are multiplying, the path to maturity is uneven. Analysts agree that most enterprises are still in the early stages, experimenting with contained applications rather than deploying agents at scale.

Broadly speaking, Gartner predicts that agentic AI will autonomously resolve up to 80% of routine service tasks by 2029. That’s only a few years away, yet Forrester offers a note of caution:

“We are still in the early stages of agentic AI’s market impact; companies must test, learn, and iterate because these powerful systems can be misaligned, creating actions that are at best undesirable and at worst harmful to your customers and critical applications.”

McKinsey’s “One year of agentic AI” assessment echoes that sentiment, emphasizing that success depends less on the sophistication of the technology and more on how organizations adapt to it. Many companies still treat AI as an overlay on existing processes rather than rethinking how work itself is structured. As McKinsey notes, the biggest performance gains come when workflows are redesigned for collaboration between humans and agents — where each contributes to what they do best, while the system continually improves based on shared feedback loops.

This distinction matters for HR because it means progress will depend as much on governance and trust as on innovation. Most HCM systems today remain in an “operator” stage of maturity, capable of taking action but still reliant on human oversight. Advancing to the “actor” stage, and eventually to true autonomy, will require clear frameworks for transparency, accountability, and continuous learning.

Lessons From Deploying AI Agents in HCM

If maturity depends on trust and governance, early adopters are already showing what that looks like in practice. Across industries, pilot deployments of agentic AI reveal consistent patterns and practical lessons for HR and IT leaders.

1. Trust Comes First

Organizations that succeed with agentic AI start by making systems explainable and setting clear boundaries for autonomy. Workday’s own research shows that while nearly 75% of employees view AI agents as “important teammates,” only about 30% feel comfortable being managed by them. However, in deployments where agents’ roles and limits were clearly defined, trust rose from 36% among early experimenters to 95% among mature users.

Put another way, agentic AI earns adoption only when employees understand why an agent acted — and how that action fits into established business rules and human oversight.

2. Training Drives Impact

The biggest performance gains come when AI agents don’t just automate tasks but actively teach and support people. An EY survey found that while 84% of employees are eager to work with agentic AI, most feel undertrained. Yet adoption and productivity rise sharply in organizations that provide structured enablement and clear guidance.

When agents are designed to share knowledge and adapt alongside users — guiding them through new processes and reinforcing best practices — training becomes ongoing. That learning loop builds organizational resilience, ensuring every update or workflow change strengthens readiness rather than disrupting it.

3. Measurement Evolves

Scaling agentic AI demands a new way to measure success. As McKinsey notes in its one-year assessment, when companies deploy hundreds of agents, tracking only outcomes makes it nearly impossible to find the source of errors.

Instead, ongoing monitoring and evaluation must be built into workflows so teams can verify performance and refine logic in real time. IBM’s research reinforces the point: only 42% of process-oriented organizations have developed KPIs for agentic systems. Leaders measure entirely new forms of adaptability and impact, such as “reasoning coherence scores” or “decision accuracy rates,” to understand the true value of agentic deployments.

4. Workflow-First Design Delivers Results

In McKinsey’s observation, the greatest barrier to realizing agentic AI’s value is not technical, but structural. Many companies deploy agents into existing workflows and see only marginal gains. The real breakthroughs come when organizations redesign processes from the ground up to accommodate human-AI collaboration, with agents embedded as integral actors rather than add-ons. In these re-engineered workflows, agents expose bottlenecks, surface insights, and continuously improve how work gets done.

Notice the theme? Across these early deployments, agentic AI succeeds when it’s built for accountability, learning, and continuous improvement.

Continuous Readiness in the Workday World

Many HR leaders, uncertain about the reliability of agentic AI, will wonder what this looks like in practice. Opkey’s new Training Agent for Workday offers a glimpse into this new reality. Just released this month, the Training Agent demonstrates how agentic principles of autonomy, transparency, and continuous learning can move from theory into day-to-day operations.

Workday customers operate in one of the most dynamic enterprise environments. Quarterly updates, regulatory changes, and process refinements are constant. Traditionally, keeping up has required extensive manual retraining and documentation efforts that become outdated almost as soon as they’re deployed. The Training Agent changes that model, applying agentic principles to the everyday challenges of enablement and governance.

Autonomous enablement: The agent automatically generates and refreshes training guides from validated test cases, ensuring every process update is accompanied by current, accurate instructions.
Unified coverage: It spans both web and desktop workflows through Workday’s Companion App, so training content evolves alongside the entire system, not in silos. And because the Companion App runs directly within the Workday environment, users access guidance without leaving their normal workspace or disrupting daily tasks.
Embedded compliance: Administrators can define access thresholds, and the agent continuously monitors for breaches during impact analysis.
Personalized guidance: Contextual, role-based help appears directly in Workday to reduce support tickets and shorten the adoption curve.

This is what agentic AI looks like when it leaves the lab — a system that learns, adapts, and scales with the organization. More than an automation tool, it’s a blueprint for what maturity in AI-driven HCM really means: continuous readiness, trusted governance, and measurable impact at every release.

Building Trust for AI Agents in HCM

Agentic AI maturity ultimately depends on trust, and that starts with building stronger collaboration between humans and their growing base of digital co-workers. The organizations that lead this next wave of HCM AI agents will be those that embed accountability and transparency into every interaction, so people trust the agents working beside them.

Confidence grows when systems can clearly explain their reasoning, adapt to feedback, and facilitate better teamwork. In the coming year, platforms like Workday — and innovators like Opkey — will further enhance collaboration, embedding orchestration directly into agentic workflows to connect learning, compliance, and change management in real-time.