> Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY), the enterprise AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Pipedream, a leading integration platform for AI agents
Pipedream indeed!
It blows my mind that every company has decided to call itself an “AI platform” but it blows my mind even more that the stock market apparently believes them when they say it. Workday was an HR platform five years ago. It still an HR platform today.
"managing people, money and agents" yes, that makes total sense, agents are managed exactly the same ways that you manage people or money, I don't see anyth- WHAT AM I READING?!??
"Agents" is a term that usually refers to people working in a customer support role at a company. Anyone using "agent" without qualification to describe autonomous AI is engaging in a perversion of the English language and should be ashamed of themselves.
They can, but whether they have is something to be determined by observation, not simply assertion.
It's unfortunately commonplace for people using words inconsistently with established usage, or coming up with novel usages that create ambiguity with respect to existing terms, to use "language evolves" as a blanket excuse.
But saying "language evolves" merely describes the process by which the current state of the language emerged, and doesn't actually substantiate any specific claim about what that current state actually is.
The point here is that this novel usage of the term "agent" is in conflict with what actually is the current standard meaning of the term, and actually does inhibit communication with people who aren't immersed in tech jargon.
I've encountered this myself when discussing AI tooling with the team managing a customer service call center, where "agent" is a pervasive term that already refers to human staff.
As an employee who has to interact with workday, I can assure you that it sucks so badly since you are not the person that Workday is sold to. It is sold to c-suite and head of HR. In that context, you as an employee using workday are the product not the user, and usability to you just does not matter.
That's disingenuous and uninformed, sorry. You're trying to refute my claim but kind of just proving my point.
The current price is indeed an indication of what the market believes will happen to the company's performance. It doesn't matter if their estimates will eventually be proven right or wrong. Looking at forward P/E will serve precisely to express what the market's "crystal ball" is saying! That's what we want to know. What do people think this company is worth?
Conversely, the current price and their past earnings are not related, so dividing one by the other is mostly just noise.
I suppose all comes down to who runs the leading (or any) investment companies. Money people are not known to be technically literate enough for not being fooled by magic (any sufficiently advanced technology).
They are facinated by llms that they are pouring down money to AI related companies. Can you blame them? Can’t deny, I am also fascinated by llms.
> They are facinated by llms that they are pouring down money to AI related companies. Can you blame them? Can’t deny, I am also fascinated by llms.
I don’t think they’re fascinated by LLMs in the way the average Hacker News user is. They are fascinated by the pipedream (intended) of LLMs enabling them to lay off masses of workers and having AI do the work instead. It fascinates them the same way offshoring has fascinated them for years.
As someone with no experience with either of those two services, I read that description and had no idea what Workday does. So I thought, maybe their homepage will explain it better.
> Manage HR, finance, and all your AI agents. All in one place.
> Elevate the potential of your people and boost productivity across your organization with human-AI collaboration.
> Turn AI into ROI faster and deliver transformational outcomes driven by trust, agility, and data readiness you can rely on.
> 11,000+ organizations worldwide trust Workday.
Huh?
Sure, whatever, I'm not even surprised about them trying to cram AI buzzwords into every sentence, I'm used to that by now. But what's the deal with enterprise products having marketing which only makes sense to people who already use the product? Not a single sentence on their homepage explains what their product does.
Ok, let's assume I've heard about Workday and know it's a tool for HR. I want to evaluate it, so, naturally, I click the "HR solutions" link on their homepage, and get to yet another page full of buzzwords that does nothing to help me understand the service they offer.
There's some marketing advice that customers care about solving their problem and not how your solution works. I think this often gets misapplied to turn simple and comprehensible products into vague blobby messes. The customers don't care how your scooters work, but they know what scooters are. They don't know what "get your daily errands done hassle free" means.
Plus if you describe yourself in very high level terms, then your addressable market is bigger and you can get more money from investors.
My company uses Workday. It is integrated with our EntraID SSO. If you leave a tab open for a few minutes, it will close your session automatically, which means logging you out of Microsoft 365 altogether. Simply bizarre. Maybe more AI will help them.
One of the hardest problems with making a configurable Enterprise Software thing with a strong brand is figuring out how not to make every misconfiguration a reflection on the brand; there’s no Workday specific reason your configuration had to federate logout in this way.
In the same vein, I always thought it was a mistake that Workday branded the recruiting portal so strongly; everyone is furious that they can’t share an account across applications but it really makes sense. They’re supplying the Workday customer with their recruiting data / PII using Workday, not furnishing that data to Workday directly, so sharing across customers would require a whole legal and data tenancy refactoring.
(disclosure: I worked at Workday for a long time ages ago and people were certainly not living with their heads in the sand. I don’t think I particularly agree with the direction the company is going but it is always interesting to reflect on some of these threads and the challenges with running that kind of business)
This is probably done to invalidate your session token, which is required in some industries (see banks, logging you out after 5 minutes of inactivity).
The other day my friend ranted to me how he hates their company system for applying for PTO. Since he said he only uses it to apply for PTO, I was wondering if it really deserves that much wrath.
For me it's just incomplete. We used to have Successfactors and although the UI was less fancy, I have the feeling it was more complete and thorough.
After so many years with Workday I still cannot sync my calendar to outlook365, so I need to manually put the entries. A problem solved a million years ago in successfactors.
My head explodes when I read aabout the scamsters that are equifax and their so called "strategic partnership" with workday on payroll data.
We all should be aware that equifax — via their "strategic partner" with workday — has your ENTIRE work history with *each and every* payroll check AMOUNT ever sent to you by any W2 employer, the employer info, your address etc. It sells this info to god knows who. Its a shocking amount of info. Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753
I recall a year or so ago, I had frozen this info from being dissemenated to employers or sold to companies from https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/ link but it seems to ask me to re-register again with your SSN and DOB. WTF. That registration would still not stop them from collecting this info.
There is no way I can even partially delete any part of this data, like I dunno the dates on which I recieved each of my paychecks. Why the fuck is that in the report?
The pay amounts also include any RSUs granted and NSOs sold.
It took many back and forths with my employer’s HR department and executives to get them to tell ADP to stop sending this info to Equifax (work number)
> Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY), the enterprise AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Pipedream, a leading integration platform for AI agents
Pipedream indeed!
It blows my mind that every company has decided to call itself an “AI platform” but it blows my mind even more that the stock market apparently believes them when they say it. Workday was an HR platform five years ago. It still an HR platform today.
That Workday description reads like the resumes one writes when desperate and the job search has expanded into totally unrelated professions.
"managing people, money and agents" yes, that makes total sense, agents are managed exactly the same ways that you manage people or money, I don't see anyth- WHAT AM I READING?!??
"Agents" is a term that usually refers to people working in a customer support role at a company. Anyone using "agent" without qualification to describe autonomous AI is engaging in a perversion of the English language and should be ashamed of themselves.
You don’t think that words can shift meaning over time?
They can, but whether they have is something to be determined by observation, not simply assertion.
It's unfortunately commonplace for people using words inconsistently with established usage, or coming up with novel usages that create ambiguity with respect to existing terms, to use "language evolves" as a blanket excuse.
But saying "language evolves" merely describes the process by which the current state of the language emerged, and doesn't actually substantiate any specific claim about what that current state actually is.
The point here is that this novel usage of the term "agent" is in conflict with what actually is the current standard meaning of the term, and actually does inhibit communication with people who aren't immersed in tech jargon.
I've encountered this myself when discussing AI tooling with the team managing a customer service call center, where "agent" is a pervasive term that already refers to human staff.
Ironically Workday is the worst product to use as a job seeker to upload your resume.
As an employee who has to interact with workday, I can assure you that it sucks so badly since you are not the person that Workday is sold to. It is sold to c-suite and head of HR. In that context, you as an employee using workday are the product not the user, and usability to you just does not matter.
As an employee, too.
I was gonna try to contradict you by looking up Workday’s multiple and showing that it is valued like an HR company, but holy smokes…
Their multiple is 105 lol
their forward multiple is the only one that matters
Well if we are using crystal balls then the future stock price is the only thing that matters.
That's disingenuous and uninformed, sorry. You're trying to refute my claim but kind of just proving my point.
The current price is indeed an indication of what the market believes will happen to the company's performance. It doesn't matter if their estimates will eventually be proven right or wrong. Looking at forward P/E will serve precisely to express what the market's "crystal ball" is saying! That's what we want to know. What do people think this company is worth?
Conversely, the current price and their past earnings are not related, so dividing one by the other is mostly just noise.
Ah, well that brings the number back to reality.
I suppose all comes down to who runs the leading (or any) investment companies. Money people are not known to be technically literate enough for not being fooled by magic (any sufficiently advanced technology).
They are facinated by llms that they are pouring down money to AI related companies. Can you blame them? Can’t deny, I am also fascinated by llms.
> They are facinated by llms that they are pouring down money to AI related companies. Can you blame them? Can’t deny, I am also fascinated by llms.
I don’t think they’re fascinated by LLMs in the way the average Hacker News user is. They are fascinated by the pipedream (intended) of LLMs enabling them to lay off masses of workers and having AI do the work instead. It fascinates them the same way offshoring has fascinated them for years.
> They are fascinated by the pipedream (intended) of LLMs enabling them to lay off masses of workers and having AI do the work instead
I am not fascinated by that part, I am honestly scared for my future.
As someone with no experience with either of those two services, I read that description and had no idea what Workday does. So I thought, maybe their homepage will explain it better.
> Manage HR, finance, and all your AI agents. All in one place.
> Elevate the potential of your people and boost productivity across your organization with human-AI collaboration.
> Turn AI into ROI faster and deliver transformational outcomes driven by trust, agility, and data readiness you can rely on.
> 11,000+ organizations worldwide trust Workday.
Huh?
Sure, whatever, I'm not even surprised about them trying to cram AI buzzwords into every sentence, I'm used to that by now. But what's the deal with enterprise products having marketing which only makes sense to people who already use the product? Not a single sentence on their homepage explains what their product does.
Ok, let's assume I've heard about Workday and know it's a tool for HR. I want to evaluate it, so, naturally, I click the "HR solutions" link on their homepage, and get to yet another page full of buzzwords that does nothing to help me understand the service they offer.
There's some marketing advice that customers care about solving their problem and not how your solution works. I think this often gets misapplied to turn simple and comprehensible products into vague blobby messes. The customers don't care how your scooters work, but they know what scooters are. They don't know what "get your daily errands done hassle free" means.
Plus if you describe yourself in very high level terms, then your addressable market is bigger and you can get more money from investors.
I came here to say this. I was chuckling thinking that this is how I should write my LinkedIn intro.
Also, anyone who loves coming across Workday and friends (enemies) when applying for jobs?
If their product wasnt an absolute dumpster fire, id give em a pass.
My company uses Workday. It is integrated with our EntraID SSO. If you leave a tab open for a few minutes, it will close your session automatically, which means logging you out of Microsoft 365 altogether. Simply bizarre. Maybe more AI will help them.
One of the hardest problems with making a configurable Enterprise Software thing with a strong brand is figuring out how not to make every misconfiguration a reflection on the brand; there’s no Workday specific reason your configuration had to federate logout in this way.
In the same vein, I always thought it was a mistake that Workday branded the recruiting portal so strongly; everyone is furious that they can’t share an account across applications but it really makes sense. They’re supplying the Workday customer with their recruiting data / PII using Workday, not furnishing that data to Workday directly, so sharing across customers would require a whole legal and data tenancy refactoring.
(disclosure: I worked at Workday for a long time ages ago and people were certainly not living with their heads in the sand. I don’t think I particularly agree with the direction the company is going but it is always interesting to reflect on some of these threads and the challenges with running that kind of business)
This is probably done to invalidate your session token, which is required in some industries (see banks, logging you out after 5 minutes of inactivity).
Workday is a disaster, at least the version we have.
I have to assume the backoffice is phenomenal because nobody on the employee side ever has good things to say about it.
You don’t wanna wait 60 seconds, 3 times to submit PTO?
The other day my friend ranted to me how he hates their company system for applying for PTO. Since he said he only uses it to apply for PTO, I was wondering if it really deserves that much wrath.
I think I now understand.
We use it and I never had any issues applying for PTO...
It is a bit like Jira in that it’s flexible for different company use cases, but most people (especially engineers) dislike working with it
For me it's just incomplete. We used to have Successfactors and although the UI was less fancy, I have the feeling it was more complete and thorough.
After so many years with Workday I still cannot sync my calendar to outlook365, so I need to manually put the entries. A problem solved a million years ago in successfactors.
Try https://www.klavis.ai, which is a open source MCP integration platform. (I am one of the co-founders)
Agents are coming. What's an agent? Who knows. But know they're coming.
My head explodes when I read aabout the scamsters that are equifax and their so called "strategic partnership" with workday on payroll data.
We all should be aware that equifax — via their "strategic partner" with workday — has your ENTIRE work history with *each and every* payroll check AMOUNT ever sent to you by any W2 employer, the employer info, your address etc. It sells this info to god knows who. Its a shocking amount of info. Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753
I recall a year or so ago, I had frozen this info from being dissemenated to employers or sold to companies from https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/ link but it seems to ask me to re-register again with your SSN and DOB. WTF. That registration would still not stop them from collecting this info.
There is no way I can even partially delete any part of this data, like I dunno the dates on which I recieved each of my paychecks. Why the fuck is that in the report?
The pay amounts also include any RSUs granted and NSOs sold.
It took many back and forths with my employer’s HR department and executives to get them to tell ADP to stop sending this info to Equifax (work number)
> Pipedream is a platform for building AI agents
It is? Last I used it, it was a serverless event-driven pipeline platform
well, see, you can send an event to an LLM and it can send an event back so it's an AI company now. I am an AI company, now, too.
Last I used it, it was a plumbing game.
I’m pretty sure that’s just the obligatory reskin to ride the ai wave
Great news for this site's most prolific spammer!
i don't get it can you elaborate?
Probably referring to the founder of pipedream
The founder...
runs a crossposting bot here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
spammed package maintainers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31588316
> Workday to acquire Pipedream
Me when I start crushing on the lady who works on the second floor of my office
Got confused first reading the title of this post (thought someone joking about a pipedream)
This is interesting acquisition, a integration platform to boost their AI offering.
Was confusing Pipedrive and Pipedream for a moment. Suprised how many Zapier-alternatives apparently exist and have business.
I really hope they remain open source, but overall this seems like a bad sign
Mmm I really think my work day has enough pipe dreams already
what are other alternatives to pipedream?
Nango is an open-source alternative: https://nango.dev
Especially if you use pipedream for integrations in your agent or product.
(I’m one of the founders)
Try out https://composio.dev/ (disclosure - I work here)
Is it the first one priced reasonably and transparently, or am I missing something here?
I love when the jokes write themselves, pipedream indeed lol