Originally aired on Workday Gold podcast with Keith Bitikofer and Christian Delcid

We’re recording this on Friday afternoon, May 30th, 2025, and every AI podcast has to say that these days, because something could happen in the next hour that changes everything. As someone who spends half my time in the Workday space and the other half working with entrepreneurs and small businesses, I’m constantly shocked by how slowly AI adoption is happening in the real world.

The AI Adoption Gap is Real

Christian and I are both what you’d call AI superusers. We’re excited about the functionality, realistic about the risks, but what’s been top of mind for me recently is just how slow the adoption side has been. There’s new AI news almost daily, but whenever you look at the enterprise, that news is happening a lot slower.

I had a conversation this week with a marketing guy who said he uses Claude to generate some text every now and then. When I asked how he thought AI would impact everything else he’s doing, he just hadn’t really thought about it that much. If you have a painting company or an HVAC business, AI may not even be on your radar unless you’re an early adopter.

But here’s the thing, one of the guys in my monthly AI group was developing an application last year that required eight overseas developers. Three months ago, he was playing with some new tools and thought they just weren’t quite there yet. A couple weeks ago, he got back in and said, “Oh my word, all these things that were missing are now there. I’m now doing what required a whole team a year ago.”

Getting Started: The AI-First Approach

The key is giving people specific examples. I tell people to commit to using AI instead of Google search for a while. Just see the difference and start playing with that. Once you get comfortable, you can start looking at custom GPTs, Notebook LM, and deep research capabilities.

For those of us in the Workday space handling sensitive data, make sure you’re aware of your company’s gen AI policy. But beyond that, I highly encourage you to experiment. I’m AI-first now, anytime I have a task, I ask myself how I can use AI to complete it, even if it adds an extra step right now. That’s going to quickly shift in the future.

What We Wish We’d Known About Supporting Workday

Christian mentioned something that really resonates, he wishes he’d invested more time understanding business objects early on. How they’re laid out, how foundational they are to everything you do in Workday. The condition rules, calculated fields, all of it. It makes Workday unlike any other HR system out there.

I posted on LinkedIn this week that “no one knows everything about Workday and that’s okay.” Normally, I get a couple thousand views on a post, this one hit over 20,000 views with 30+ comments. It shows how intensely we, as consultants and support people, feel about this reality, that no one person knows everything about Workday, yet most leadership assumes we know it all.

Here’s what I’ve learned from supporting ERP systems since the Y2K days: those old on-prem systems were “set it and forget it.” We’d joke that there is no phase two because you’d already spent your budget. I’d support them for a while, get bored, and move on.

Workday is different. It’s constantly changing, constantly something new to learn. And with Built on Workday, I wouldn’t be surprised if every couple of months there’s a brand new partner unleashing functionality the system has never been capable of until that moment.

The Psychology of Workday Support

What I wish someone had warned me about is how much people and psychology is involved in supporting Workday well. Setting expectations is one of the hardest things, especially for users coming from other systems where features were just a flip of a switch.

You’ll get users who request something urgent, you jump through hoops to get it done in two days, then they ghost you. Clearly it wasn’t as important as they made it seem, their boss was probably all over them about something else.

And that 80-20 rule? The last 20% takes 80% of your time and energy. Christian says he’s constantly “pulling them across the finish line” to get users to test and approve changes. Then at the last minute: “Oh wait, I want to do this other thing too. Can we make this change before performance appraisals open tomorrow?”

Don’t Take This Opportunity for Granted

Christian mentioned something important: we’re all very privileged to be in this ecosystem right now. We have leverage in this red-hot market that we need to advocate for ourselves with. No one else is going to utilize that leverage for you.

When I’m coaching people, I often say, “You get to choose.” Somebody is working at Walmart pushing carts who doesn’t have the knowledge or experience to choose to step into the Workday ecosystem. If you’re in this space and listening to this, don’t take that for granted.

We get frustrated with our jobs sometimes, but remember, we are blessed to be here. And in this market, we can choose where we want to go next.