Agentic AI will soon benefit health organizations, Workday summit speakers say

Workday conducted a Toronto summit in April that advised healthcare executives about upcoming developments in AI, human resources and enterprise resource planning systems. CTO Kalan Comba kicked off the event, noting that Workday is now an $8.4 billion company that supports 70 million active workers around the world. “We understand workers,” he observed.

Moreover, with the massive amounts of data that are being processed and observed, and with feedback from users, the company also understands what is happening with AI now and what’s coming down the pipeline.

“Our systems are processing a trillion transactions per year,” said Comba. “It’s a very good data set, especial for AI.”

Comba then summed up much of what the conference participants would be discussing: “The future is about [AI] agents,” he said.

He observed that the number of baby boomers who will be retiring in the next five years is staggering. The gaps in the workforce will also become enormous.

However, it’s likely that AI will be used to plug those gaps. “What is agentic AI?” asked Comba. “It learns, adapts and makes decisions,” he explained. Far from taking notes and summarizing conversations, as some AI does today, agentic AI will take its own initiative and conduct work for us.

In fact, soon, there will be two workforces, said Comba, one that’s human and another that’s digital.

He envisions a future where agentic AI can perform some of the work for in many key areas, including recruiting, legal, payroll, engineering and sales. “Agents will create a new future,” said Comba.

Others in the healthcare sector – and the companies helping them deploy the new systems – agree with Comba. “AI that writes your emails and helps you brainstorm. That’s the AI of today,”commented Arslan Idrees, healthcare partner at Deloitte, in Toronto. “The next AI will be like an intern who wants your job. But he does it better and never takes a coffee break!”

Viswanathan Nagarajan, director, health transformation at Deloitte, observed that with the rise of smart agents, some people will fear for their jobs. But he asserted that agents would help them – in an era of overworked and stressed managers and clinicians, agents will support their well-being and mental health.

Once they see this, employees will welcome the new generation of AI agents.

Brendan Kwolek, chief information and digital officer at Halton Health, agrees. He noted that Halton Health is currently deploying a large, enterprise resource planning system that will include leading-edge AI.

He sees AI as a boon. As just one example of how an AI agent could be helpful, he explained: “Healthcare is 24/7, but a lot of the support [personnel] work Monday to Friday, 8 to 5. If you have a question about HR – like your overtime – and it’s at night or on the weekend, you’re out of luck.

“But agentic AI could help here,” he said, as it can be programmed with the ability to seek and find the right answers, night and day.

Moreover, on their own, agents could solve problems in scheduling, determining how to optimize and prevent over-staffing or under-staffing. Amazingly, he pointed out, this work could be done without human intervention. “There’s a big role for AI in all this to do the heavy lifting,” he said.

For his part, Deeraj Paul, chief digital officer at Bayshore HealthCare, described some of the organization’s activities in leading-edge AI. They’re creating their own Large Language Model that will enhance the quality of care in long-term care.

One of the problems the model will solve is to make clinical language and reports understandable to clients and their families.

“If my mom is being visited by a nurse, I may not understand the jargon in a report. I just want to know that my mom had a good day and was alright,” said Paul.

Healthcare executives also emphasized that AI will be able to help them with the complexity of healthcare, especially on the human resources front.

Katie LeMoyne, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Extendicare, observed that the organization has 256 different bargaining agreements with employee groups. The variations in things such as vacation pay alone can become mind-boggling.

“We used to have to do this with no automation,” said Katie.

She expects AI will be of immense help with questions such as which employees have quit or stopped coming to work, but are still receiving benefits – something that was previously very difficult to sort out.

It will also help analyze employee turnover, a major issue in healthcare. “It will let us figure out, why does this long-term home have a high turnover rate?” Once the problems are identified, management can then apply fixes.

Alistair Forsyth, VP of digital health and CIO at VHA HealthCare, commented that his organization implemented Workday about a year ago. It is now the basis for bringing in AI, he said, because to do artificial intelligence, you need quick and easy access to your data.

“You can’t do AI without data,” said Forsyth. “If you have all the data in one system, it’s easier to develop agents or assistive systems.”

Already, VHA has accessed the consolidated data to improve its operations by reducing absenteeism. He described one project in which access to data helped improve the quality of care: By analyzing income levels among PSWs with children, VHA HealthCare could better predict absenteeism – chiefly by predicting when low-income workers would need to stay at home with their kids.

“We harnessed the data to produce effective interventions,” said Forsyth. “There are things you can do to reduce absenteeism, bringing in supports like improved incomes, childcare and other benefits.”

That’s just an initial step, noted Forsyth. He expects to see many more enhancements using analytics and AI in the future.