AI is changing everything.
For Jerry Ting, Vice President and Head of Agentic AI and Evisort at Workday, the transformation is about more than speed or automation - it's about giving machines agency. "We really are becoming an AI-first company," he said.
Ting joined Workday after it acquired his startup Evisort in 2024, and he's now driving the company's next phase of AI innovation. Speaking exclusively to TechDay during a visit to Australia, he seemed remarkably energetic for someone still battling jet lag.
"Australia's been awesome so far," he said. "I got to feed kangaroos and pet a koala before diving into meetings."
Evisort began back in 2016, when Ting was still in law school, reading contracts manually.
"Every time a company buys or sells or hires, a contract gets created," he explained. "There's so much valuable data in those documents - not just for negotiation but for managing the business afterwards."
He and his co-founders built AI that could draft, read and analyse contracts, extracting data that businesses could use for decision-making. Workday became one of their biggest customers, using Evisort's system across procurement, M&A and finance. The collaboration quickly deepened.
"Workday has a great business for people and for money, and now for agents and AI," Ting said. "Evisort actually fits into all three."
Today, he's leading the charge on what he calls "agentic AI" - intelligent systems capable of reasoning, not just responding.
"For the CFO, getting accurate data is critical," he said. "A lot of that data comes from what's inside documents - contracts, invoices, purchase orders. If the data is wrong, you can't run the business correctly."
Ting believes agents will soon change the way finance leaders work. "Today a lot of that work is done in spreadsheets," he said. "But imagine asking, 'What happens if tariffs change?' and instantly seeing the downstream impact. That's what an agentic experience looks like."
The technology underpinning this vision is already being developed through Workday's Illuminate for Financials. "It's going to fundamentally change what the CFO has in control for his or her business," Ting said.
But with the power of AI comes a need for control. "We care about compliance and security," he said. "It's great if the AI can do all these awesome things, but if it's not secure, or there's misuse of data, then that's not okay."
To that end, Workday has created an "Agent System of Record", ensuring that every AI agent's activities are transparent and accountable. "You can turn the agent on or off, or see exactly what it's doing," Ting said. "That way, it's not going off and doing something unexpected."
CIOs, he added, are understandably cautious. "They're worried about what I call 'agent sprawl' - people building agents on the side of their desks without oversight," he said. "Registering agents in a system of record creates a great security framework that unifies everything."
Ting also wants Workday to stay open to collaboration. The company is now integrating with major partners such as Salesforce and Snowflake, allowing workflows to move seamlessly between systems. "These agents need to talk to each other and share context," he explained. "If you kick off a workflow inside Salesforce and it flows into Workday, then back out again, everything has to connect."
He said that openness is crucial in an era of accelerating innovation. "If you don't ride the wave, the wave is going to go by itself," he said. "The innovation will happen outside of you."
That mindset has also guided Workday's recent acquisitions, including Flowwise - a low-code platform for building AI agents - and Sana, another AI startup. "It's not just about the technology," Ting said. "It's also about the people joining Workday with an innovator's mindset."
He credits Workday's new AI leadership team with driving this cultural shift. "Our CEO Carl was a venture capitalist, so he understands startups," he said. "Our president, Garrett, came from Google, and our CTO, Peter Bailis, was both a founder and a Stanford professor in computer science. I work for Peter, and we're lucky to have him - he's seen research, startups and scale."
For Ting, the company's size is an advantage, not a constraint. "Inside a big company, we're bringing an innovator's mindset to the product," he said.
He also revealed details of Flex Credits, a new consumption model designed to make AI adoption more practical. "We want to charge customers as they use the technology," he explained. "It lowers the barrier to experimentation and lets customers test agents before committing."
In finance, Ting sees AI transforming both "pre-close" and "post-close" activities - everything from analysing contracts and invoices to verifying audit data. "If your revenue went up 5%, AI can show exactly which contracts drove that change," he said. "Think about that traceability. It used to mean someone sitting in a room hunting for documents."
He urged finance leaders to prepare now for an agent-first future. "Get your house in order," he said. "If your general ledger isn't in one place, the agents have nothing to read and react to. Get your data organised and standardised so the agents can actually help."
Ting also reflected on Workday's evolution since Evisort joined the fold.
"We're building our own agents, opening up our ecosystem, and giving customers the tools to build theirs," he said. "Each part makes Workday better - but together, we're really going all in."