For years, Workday has been the HR system enterprises loved to hate—powerful but pigeonholed, reliable yet rigid. Now, a new 2025 ISG Provider Lens® Workday Ecosystem report suggests that reputation is changing fast.
According to research firm Information Services Group (ISG), U.S. enterprises are transforming Workday from a back-office HR system into a central nervous system for enterprise agility, spanning finance, operations, and workforce innovation.
“U.S. enterprises are investing in Workday as a flexible foundation for financial visibility, workforce transformation and innovation,” said Stacey Cadigan, partner at ISG Human Capital Management and Enterprise Transformation.
In short, Workday is no longer just about people. It’s about powering how money, data, and decisions move across modern enterprises.
From HR Suite to Financial Powerhouse
The most striking trend? CFOs are now driving Workday adoption.
ISG found that companies are replacing legacy financial systems with Workday Financial Management to gain real-time insight into planning, forecasting, and performance.
That shift doesn’t just streamline accounting—it’s giving finance leaders a seat at the digital transformation table. Workday’s growing role in strategic decision-making means finance is now tightly integrated with workforce data, improving how organizations model costs, productivity, and performance.
This also puts Workday toe-to-toe with enterprise heavyweights like Oracle Cloud ERP and SAP S/4HANA, signaling that the once HR-only platform is now competing in the broader enterprise software arena.
The AI Moment: From Experiments to Agentic Execution
Workday’s AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities are moving from pilot programs to production. The ISG report highlights a wave of agentic AI tools designed to handle complex, multi-step tasks—think candidate sourcing, scheduling, and operational forecasting—without manual input.
Organizations are now using AI to automate workflows, streamline recruiting, and forecast performance, freeing HR and operations teams from the grind of repetitive work.
But AI’s rise brings new challenges: clean, structured data. ISG notes a growing demand for consulting and integration services to ensure data integrity—essential for reliable AI-driven outcomes.
Skills, Not Jobs: The Workforce Reimagined
As the market moves from job-based hierarchies to skills-based talent ecosystems, Workday’s Skills Cloud is emerging as a quiet disruptor.
Enterprises are using it to map workforce capabilities, predict future needs, and build internal talent marketplaces—transforming how they manage mobility and retention. This isn’t just a tech feature; it’s a strategic pivot toward agility in an economy defined by skills gaps and rapid change.
Workday’s consumer-grade experience—personalized dashboards, flexible journeys, and modern UX—helps make that shift more palatable to employees accustomed to app-like workplace tools.
Open Ecosystem, Open Possibilities
ISG’s report describes Workday’s evolution from “a closed, monolithic application” into an open, extensible ecosystem.
Tools like Workday Extend and the Workday Marketplace now allow companies to build, customize, and integrate third-party services without leaving the platform.
That flexibility has given rise to a diverse service provider network, enabling companies to tailor Workday for industry-specific needs—from healthcare staffing to global payroll orchestration.
“Workday has built a powerful ecosystem that can adapt to a wide range of enterprise needs,” said Ashwin Gaidhani, ISG analyst and lead author of the report.
The Market Leaders: Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, and Others
ISG evaluated 30 Workday ecosystem providers across four service quadrants—Transformation, Deployment and Integration, Performance and Optimization, and Innovation.
Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, Cognizant, Huron, KPMG, Strada, TopBloc, and Invisors emerged as Leaders in all four quadrants, while IBM, Hexaware, Kainos, and Mercer earned multiple top rankings.
Invisor took home the 2025 ISG CX Star Performer award for the highest customer satisfaction, signaling that smaller, agile firms can compete effectively against global consultancies in customer experience.
Why It Matters
Workday’s evolution mirrors a broader trend in enterprise tech: platform convergence. Where once HR, finance, and operations ran in silos, the new model connects people data with business data—making Workday less of a tool and more of an enterprise operating system.
It’s a shift with major implications for CIOs, CFOs, and CHROs, as well as the ecosystem of partners building around the platform. Expect to see more AI-driven innovation, deeper skills intelligence, and ongoing competition with legacy ERP giants over who owns the enterprise core.
For enterprises betting on digital agility, Workday may be the quiet engine driving the next era of transformation.
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Business Wire, a Berkshire Hathaway company, is the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure. Public relations, investor relations, public policy and marketing professionals rely on Business Wire for secure and accurate distribution of market-moving news and multimedia. Founded in 1961, Business Wire is a trusted source for news organizations, journalists, investment professionals and regulatory authorities, delivering news directly into editorial systems and leading online news sources via its multi-patented NX network. Business Wire’s global newsrooms are available to meet the needs of communications professionals and news media worldwide.
