Chuck's Take on DevCon 2026

Two days at Workday DevCon with one clear signal: the platform is open, the agents are ready, and the real work now is making it matter for your business.

Workday's UI used to be the only way in. That's over.

I lead our Innovate team here at Skillcentrix, and I spent two days at Workday DevCon. Here’s my take.

The whole event came down to one shift: Workday going headless.

For years, the only way to change Workday was through the UI. That era is over. Session after session pointed back to the same idea: the developer tools and the data are now open, agent-ready, and built on the standards the rest of the AI world already runs on.

Gabe Monroy set the tone in his section of the opening keynote, unveiling Workday Developer Agent and Workday's technology vision for the future. Workday is plugging into the broader agentic ecosystem, which means the new Developer Agent runs inside VS Code, Google Antigravity, or whatever IDE your team already lives in. That one decision changes the skills required for development. A developer can use it. So can an HR leader. You describe what you want in plain English and get a working prototype back. The only thing missing was Gabe literally dropping the mic.

My prediction: this gets branded “Workday Code” - because that is exactly what it is.

That’s the headline. Here’s what I think matters underneath it.

Governance is built in, not bolted on. The flashy demos were the agents. The real foundation is the Agent System of Record. Agents finally get their own identity and a real audit trail through the new Agent System User, something the old integration accounts never had. Pair that with the Trust and Safety verification Workday showed with thousands of compliance prompts running automatically, and you have an answer to the question every executive asks first: Can I trust this thing?

The tech is ready, and now adoption is the real fight. My biggest takeaway came from the hallway conversations, not the stage. Everyone is asking the same questions: How do we measure the value? Who owns what? 

Workday data is leaving the silo. With Data Cloud you can pull Workday data straight from Snowflake. For any company already invested in Databricks or another data platform, that removes a wall that used to take a custom integration to get around. Your Workday data goes to where your analytics already live.

Add it all up and one thing stands out. Building the agent is no longer the hard part. Proving value is.

At Skillcentrix, and on our Innovate team specifically, that is the work. Governing the agents. Building the Extend apps customers can use now. Putting real ROI behind the rollout so the investment shows up in business outcomes leadership actually cares about.

If you were at DevCon, I want to hear your take. If you weren’t, and you’re trying to figure out what any of this means for your tenant, let’s talk.