Workday Rising 2024 - customers reveal early lessons from gen AI in action

I've already given vendors a demerit for downplaying their best customer stories this fall - in favor of "AI-agents-are-coming!" superlatives. In my event halftime review video with Brian Sommer, that was my top bullet:

1. Vendors are overhyping AI agents
- this hype reduces clarity on AI feature rollout, customer adoption and ROI
- but it also obscures the truly cool things customers are doing now, with mature tech/apps

However, I give vendors like Workday credit: they were able to address burning questions, via my second takeaway:

2. Enterprise AI architecture matters for better output/results
- think smaller, customer-specific models, RAG, foundation models, industry LLMs, "grounding" with customer data

Vendors don't need to pitch AI so bombastically. Customers are ready to kick some serious tires, but they want to learn more. Workday has now taken this further, via two (free) AI education courses. At Rising 2024, I worked those courses ...