Last week I talked with Alan Shearer, cofounder of SparkMind AI Agency, about his path into entrepreneurship. This week we picked up where we left off and went deep on the one topic we barely scratched: AI in the Workday ecosystem.
The conversations Alan and I were having 18 months ago felt like flying cars. Automating discovery sessions. Configuring tenants. Self-healing test scripts. Today it is all shipping. The question is no longer whether AI will reshape your Workday work. The question is what you are going to do about it.
Start with curiosity, not fear
The mindset shift is the real starting line. Alan said the jump from curiosity to experimentation is the most important move any of us will make this year. Fear closes your mind. Curiosity opens it. If you walk into AI looking for ways it could take your job, you will find them. If you walk in looking for ways it can make you a better contributor, you will find those too.
Organizations are all over the map. I know of a Workday customer who does not use Docusign, record meetings, or transcribe conversations. That is not wrong; it just means they are not ready to adopt much of what Alan and I talked about. Another client has rolled out Claude to the entire team and actively encourages experimentation. Most of you are somewhere in between. Where you are matters less than whether you are moving.
The AI Lab approach
SparkMind’s land and expand model was one of my favorite takeaways. Instead of selling a giant transformation up front, they help clients spin up an AI Lab with monthly subscriptions to multiple LLMs, and put a cross-functional team inside. The team runs real use cases, gives quick thumbs up or thumbs down calls, and excitement builds organically. The cost stays low because you are on monthly subscriptions you can cancel anytime.
This is the opposite of the old consulting playbook. You do not have to pick a single tool, commit to a two-year roadmap, and hope. You can experiment this quarter.
Break your job down by task
Keith pointed to a resource from Rick and the team at Incubane: a spreadsheet of 147 tasks a typical HR Services team handles, each rated on a spectrum from fully human to fully automatable. This is the exercise every back-office team will eventually do. Not can AI replace my job, but which of my tasks require judgment and which are repeatable. That is the honest question. (Incubane offered this as a free resource in an April LinkedIn post. Definitely check this out!)
Alan also walked through a practical process anyone can run on themselves. Open your LLM of choice, Notebook LM, a Claude Project, or a ChatGPT Project, and build what he calls a second brain by dumping in your resume, job details, tools you use, certifications, and the services you deliver. Then run a prompt that produces a risk matrix showing your top three AI-susceptible skills, along with low, medium, and high risk ratings. It is a starting point for your own AI plan, and the free tiers are plenty to get moving.
Real wins are already shipping
A SparkMind client in professional services was spending 50 hours a month moving time entries from one system into Workday Financials, with plenty of copy and paste in the middle. With AI automation, that dropped to about five hours of oversight. That is a fast ROI you can point to when asking for more investment.
On my side, I have a Teams agent tied to our data warehouse that answers questions about ticket hours across consultants, clients, and time periods. I no longer open our ticketing system to run reports; I just ask the agent. I also have a recurring email that arrives every Tuesday at 9 am with the exact fields and formatting I need for client reviews. I built that in a conversation, not a report writer.
Flex credits change the design calculus
One thing consultants need to sit with. Flex Credits mean integrations now have a running cost, not just a build cost. The old model was build once, run forever, free. The new model is tokenized. Every API call, every integration event, every document counts. If you are advising clients, part of your job now is designing for cost efficiency, not just functionality.
Where to start
If you take nothing else from this episode, take this. Be curious, start small, and play with AI in your personal life first. Plan a trip with Notebook LM. Use ChatGPT to estimate materials for a weekend project. Find a local group that meets monthly to swap experiments. The people who lean in with curiosity are the ones who will help their organizations get to the next level.
Listen to the full conversation with Alan for his practical prompt that anyone can use, his thoughts on Sana and the Flex Credit model, and the specific tools he recommends keeping an eye on.
Click here to access Alan’s AI Displacement Risk Promp
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.