One of the best ways to understand where Workday is headed is to get hands-on with the tools.
That was one of my big takeaways from my conversation with Andrew Cesario, founder of a2i, after Workday DevCon 2026.
Andrew has a long history in the enterprise systems world. He spent almost 20 years in PeopleSoft, joined Workday in 2015 as an integration consultant, later worked at Alchemy and Huron, and is now building A2I with a focus on advisory, applications, innovation, and AI-first execution.
At DevCon, Andrew did not just attend sessions.
He participated in the hackathon.
And his team won.
The hackathon was a 24-hour challenge to build a solution using newly released Workday tools. Andrew’s team initially considered building a tool to help convert Studio integrations to Orchestrations, but after seeing what Workday had already built, they pivoted.
That pivot mattered.
Instead of building something useful for a small group of integration developers, they built something with broader business value: an employee career coach inside Workday.
The app brought together performance, skills, learning, feedback, and other employee data that already existed in Workday but lived in different places. Instead of asking an employee to dig through multiple reports or pages, the app created a conversational experience where the employee could ask questions like:
What should I do next in my career?
What skills should I work on?
Who might be a good mentor?
What growth opportunities are available to me?
The app could also suggest actions the employee could take directly inside Workday.
That is a great example of what I mean when I talk about making Workday smarter.
The data is already there.
The question is whether we can bring it together in a way that creates better decisions, better conversations, and better user experiences.
One of the key technical unlocks was Workday Data Cloud and Live Data Query. Andrew’s team used Live Data Query to replace and join 16 reports. That allowed the app to provide more complete and timely answers than would have been practical through traditional reporting alone.
That does not mean reporting goes away.
Andrew made a great point in the conversation: we do not always replace things. Sometimes we append and improve.
Reports will still matter. But AI and tools like Data Cloud may help users get insights from those reports without manually opening, comparing, and interpreting all of them themselves.
We also talked about Developer Agent and what it means for Workday development.
Andrew’s team used Developer Agent during the hackathon. It helped them move faster, but it did not eliminate the need for strong developers. They still needed people who understood the architecture, knew how to guide the tool, and could fix issues when things broke.
That is an important distinction.
AI may reduce the time it takes to build certain things. It may help create documentation, functional specs, integration design documents, testing support, and even troubleshooting steps.
But it does not remove the need for judgment.
In fact, judgment may become even more valuable.
As AI handles more of the repetitive work, the value of consultants, developers, and Workday support teams will shift. It will be less about manually creating every artifact and more about understanding the business problem, designing the right solution, validating the output, and thinking through data, security, governance, and ROI.
That has career implications.
Andrew’s advice for people newer to the Workday ecosystem was simple: take opportunities, stay curious, get hands-on, and understand the business. Technical skills still matter. But as AI handles more syntax and repetitive build tasks, understanding the business may become one of the biggest differentiators.
We ended with one more piece of advice that I appreciated:
Work hard. Play hard. Rest well.
That last part matters.
This ecosystem is moving fast. AI is moving fast. Workday is moving fast.
The people and teams who continue learning, experimenting, and adapting will have an advantage. But we also need to build sustainable rhythms if we want to keep doing good work over the long run.
In this episode of Workday Gold, Andrew and I talk through DevCon, the winning hackathon project, Developer Agent, Data Cloud, AI’s impact on project delivery, and what all of this means for Workday professionals.
Listen to the full episode for the complete conversation.
Listen here!
Keith Bitikofer is a Workday coach and consultant who helps professionals navigate their careers in the Workday ecosystem. Listen to the Workday Gold podcast for more insights on career transitions and leadership development here
Want to learn more from the Workday ecosystem? Connect with Keith Bitikofer on LinkedIn for ongoing insights about Workday support and team management.