Big reveals from our Innovation Keynote: From AI that answers to AI that acts

You've heard plenty about what AI could do for work. But when you're managing an increasingly complex workforce, responding to constant change, and trying to make every hour count, the question isn't what AI might do someday. 

It's what AI can help you accomplish today. 

We believe the next era of AI should be defined by more than intelligent answers. It should help people take action, adapt to change, and make progress on the work that matters most. 

Our vision for the next era of Dayforce is an agentic HCM platform designed to use relevant business and workforce context to help you take action and adapt as needs change. From AI agents that help move work forward to new capabilities for managing an evolving workforce and planning for the future, we're advancing a more intelligent and responsive way to work. 

And we're building on something that has always mattered: trust. 

With a single data model and architecture, the Dayforce platform provides a foundation for agentic experiences grounded in organizational permissions and controls. 

Because innovation shouldn't mean choosing between moving faster and operating with confidence. It should help you do both. 

What did Dayforce announce at its Innovation Keynote? 

At our Innovation Keynote, we unveiled new products, services, and experiences designed to help organizations put agentic AI to work across the workforce: 
 

• Agentic HCM Platform: Bringing AI across Dayforce to help people find answers, complete work, and create what comes next. 
• Ask Dayforce: Putting conversation at the center so people can start with a question, task, or idea and move work forward across Dayforce. 
• Dayforce AI Agents and Bots: Helping people tackle multi-step work and automate recurring or event-driven tasks within defined permissions and approvals. 
• Dayforce Build and Marketplace: Making it easier to create, discover, and use Dayforce-native apps and bots tailored to business needs. 
• A more open, connected Dayforce: Bringing Dayforce data and actions into the tools and channels where people already work, including Microsoft and Anthropic’s Claude. 
• Dayforce Deploy: Using AI to connect requirements, configuration, and testing for a faster, more predictable path to value. 
• Dayforce Talent: Bringing agentic AI across recruiting, learning, and performance to help organizations hire, develop, and mobilize the skills they need. 
• Dayforce Command Center and Contingent Workforce Management: Helping organizations coordinate work across frontline teams and an evolving mix of worker populations. 
• Dayforce Strategic Workforce Planning: Helping leaders plan for work across people and AI agents by modeling skills, capacity, structure, and costs before taking action. 

The agentic HCM platform: From intelligent answers to meaningful action 

Technology helps organizations understand what's happening across their workforce. But understanding a problem and doing something about it are two very different things. 

The opportunity for AI isn't simply to provide more information. It's to help close the gap between knowing what needs to happen and getting it done. 

That's the thinking behind our vision for the Dayforce Agentic HCM Platform. 

We're evolving Dayforce from a system that helps organizations manage their workforce into an increasingly intelligent, adaptive system that helps turn insights into action. 

An agentic HCM platform brings AI into workforce workflows so people can move beyond receiving information toward taking appropriate action, while operating within organizational permissions, policies, approvals, and controls. 

At the heart of that evolution are several important innovations. 

Dayforce AI Agents: Helping move work forward 

AI becomes more valuable when it can help people go beyond finding answers to completing meaningful work. 

That's the promise behind Dayforce AI Agents. 

Designed to use relevant context to work through multistep tasks and help support appropriate actions, these specialized capabilities represent an important evolution in how people interact with our platform.  

Agents can help reduce manual effort across workflows, giving employees and leaders more time to focus on decisions, relationships, and business priorities. 

Rather than an HR professional spending valuable time moving between recurring requests and administrative tasks, the goal is to help them make progress more efficiently, while remaining informed and in control. 

And as AI supports more work, trust becomes even more important. 

We're building on the governance foundation of the Dayforce platform, which uses roles, permissions, and approval controls to help govern what information users can access and what actions they can take. 

This is designed to help organizations explore the possibilities of agentic AI while maintaining a focus on security, compliance management, and appropriate oversight. 

Because AI should help people accomplish more, without asking them to give up control. 

Dayforce Build: Making innovation more accessible 

Every organization works differently. Your processes, policies, and priorities reflect the way your business operates. But adapting technology to those needs can require specialized skills, significant resources, and time that busy teams don't always have. 

We introduced Dayforce Build to help change that. 

With a conversational interface, Dayforce Build helps organizations develop Dayforce-native solutions tailored to their specific business needs, with less reliance on specialized technical expertise. 

Our goal is to make it easier for the people who understand a business challenge to help shape the technology that addresses it. 

Consider when your HR operations team sees an opportunity to improve a recurring process. Instead of treating every new requirement as a complex technology project, imagine being able to describe what's needed and help create an experience that better supports the way the team works. 

Dayforce Build represents our commitment to making innovation more accessible, adaptable, and practical. 

And because it builds on the Dayforce platform, the vision extends beyond flexibility alone. It's about helping organizations innovate within a trusted environment, rather than introducing unnecessary complexity. 

The people closest to the work often know best how to improve it. Technology should help them act on that knowledge. 

Dayforce in Anthropic’s Claude: Helping you finish work where you work 

AI becomes more useful when people can get answers and take action without constantly moving between systems. 

That’s why we announced plans to bring Dayforce capabilities to Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, through a new Dayforce connector built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). 

Joint customers are expected to be able to ask questions about relevant HR, pay, time, talent, and planning data and take supported actions — such as approving requests, filling open shifts, and submitting time off — using natural language in Claude. 

The experience is designed to operate within the permissions, access controls, and approval processes already defined in the Dayforce platform, with supported changes to workforce data subject to applicable validation and explicit human confirmation. 

It’s another step toward bringing workforce intelligence and action into the flow of work — helping people move from answers to action while keeping the Dayforce platform as the trusted foundation underneath. 

Dayforce Command Center for frontline operations: Helping managers focus on what matters 

Frontline managers know all too well that the workday rarely goes exactly as planned. Priorities shift. Unexpected challenges arise. Employees need support. And business demands don't slow down while managers search for information or work through administrative tasks. 

That's why we're advancing Dayforce Command Center as part of our agentic HCM evolution. 

The focus is on helping frontline leaders work with greater clarity, respond to changing needs, and take action where it matters most. 

When a manager is starting a busy shift, they need to understand what's happening across their team, recognize where attention is needed, and make decisions that keep work moving. 

An intelligent, action-oriented experience has the potential to make those moments simpler, helping managers spend less time navigating technology and more time leading people. 

It's an important part of our vision for AI: Innovation shouldn't be reserved for people behind desks. It should help everyone, including the people keeping frontline operations running every day. 

Because great frontline leadership starts with having more time and clarity to support the people who make the business work. 

Dayforce Contingent Workforce Management: Supporting a workforce that keeps evolving 

The workforce isn't what it used to be. Today’s businesses increasingly depend on a mix of full-time employees and contingent workers to meet changing demands, access specialized expertise, and remain agile. 

That flexibility can be valuable. But it also creates new challenges for leaders trying to understand their workforce, manage different worker populations, and make informed decisions with fragmented visibility. 

Without a clear view of those different worker populations, planning can become more complicated, and everyday workforce decisions can require additional coordination. 

That's why we introduced Dayforce Contingent Workforce Management. 

This new launch reflects our commitment to helping organizations coordinate their broader workforce across different worker populations and changing business needs. 

For HR and operational leaders, the goal is greater visibility and confidence in how they manage workforce needs. For the business, it's about being better prepared to respond to change without adding unnecessary administrative complexity. 

And for the people doing the work, it's about creating an environment where workforce decisions are more informed and intentional. 

Because as the workforce becomes more flexible, the way organizations manage it needs to become more intelligent. 

Dayforce Strategic Workforce Planning: Turning what's next into what happens next 

Every business has a plan. The challenge is making sure its workforce can help bring that plan to life. 

Today, that means looking beyond how many people an organization needs. Leaders also need to consider how AI will change the work itself, which skills will matter most, and how people and AI can work together to support business goals. 

For HR and Finance leaders, that's a new kind of workforce planning challenge. They need to balance headcount, labor costs, skills, and business priorities while preparing for growth, restructuring, and the impact of AI. And they need to make those decisions in an environment where the future is anything but predictable. 

That's why we're advancing Dayforce Strategic Workforce Planning, with a more agentic approach designed to help organizations plan for their workforce across both people and AI. 

[Dayforce Strategic Workforce Planning screenshot] 

With Dayforce Strategic Workforce Planning, we're rethinking how organizations plan for the future by starting with the work to be done, the skills each position requires, and where AI agents can augment human capacity. Powered by our Ask Dayforce assistant, leaders can model organizational changes through conversation, add or change positions, and update workforce scenarios to see the impact on skills and capability needs, organizational structure, workforce capacity, people costs, and AI investment before making decisions.  

Because these insights are grounded in a single, skills-based model within the Dayforce Agentic HCM Platform, HR, Finance, and business leaders can move beyond static spreadsheets to make more informed workforce decisions and turn strategy into action. 

At the center of this evolution is the new SWP Agent, which will let leaders ask workforce questions, explore scenarios, and gain insights using natural language. Rather than relying solely on static plans, leaders can examine different possibilities and better understand how changes could affect roles, skills, headcount, and costs. 

It's a more forward-looking approach to workforce strategy — one where planning can help organizations respond to change rather than simply react to it. 

And it's another example of how we see AI technology supporting human judgment. 

The right tools can help bring information and possibilities into focus. But it's people who bring the experience, context, and leadership needed to make the right decisions. 

Because a great workforce strategy isn't just about predicting what's next. It's about being ready to act when the future arrives. 

AI-Powered Talent Experiences: Helping people find their potential 

Building a strong workforce means more than finding the right people. Organizations also need to understand the skills they have, identify what they need next, and help people grow as business needs evolve. 

We're reimagining Dayforce Talent with AI-powered innovation across recruiting, learning, and performance management to help organizations connect people to opportunities, close skills gaps, and make more informed talent decisions. 

Agentic recruiting built for hiring at scale 

We're rebuilding Dayforce Recruiting with AI at its core to help teams find, engage, and hire talent faster. 

The reimagined experience will include capabilities for building talent pools, flexible hiring workflows, and a connected experience for staffing partners. AI agents will help automate routine work across sourcing, screening, scheduling, and candidate engagement so recruiters can focus on higher-value interactions. 

Following the close of Dayforce's planned acquisition of Ribbon AI, Ribbon's technology is expected to be integrated natively into Dayforce Talent, adding agentic sourcing and talent rediscovery, conversational first-round voice and video AI interviews, and rich candidate insights. 

AI-powered learning to close skills gaps faster 

Dayforce Learning will use AI to help organizations turn skills needs into development opportunities. 

AI learning paths will enable organizations to describe a role, skills gap, or audience and quickly receive a curated learning path. Learning agents will help employees and managers find relevant training and take action through conversational experiences. 

AI-powered performance management to build talent agility 

Dayforce Performance Management will bring goals, ongoing conversations, and feedback together in a guided experience. 

AI-powered insights will give managers greater visibility into the skills across their teams, where development could close gaps, and where new talent may be needed — helping organizations make more informed decisions about whether to hire for skills or develop them from within. 

Together, these experiences connect talent decisions to skills, workforce data, and workflows across Dayforce, helping organizations make faster, more confident decisions across the talent lifecycle. 

Because a future-ready workforce isn't just about filling today's roles. It's about helping people develop, move, and contribute as the business evolves. 

One platform. More possibilities. Less complexity. 

The future of work won't be defined by how much AI an organization adopts, but by how meaningfully it helps people and businesses move forward. 

That's why our innovation strategy starts with the foundation. 

Dayforce is a single agentic HCM platform for HR, pay, workforce management, talent, and analytics, built on a single data model and architecture. This foundation helps us bring intelligence into the flow of work, rather than treating AI as another layer of technology that organizations need to manage. 

And as we advance our agentic HCM platform, expand how organizations manage their workforce, and reimagine strategic workforce planning, we're staying focused on three outcomes. 

Unlock people potential. Help employees, managers, and leaders work more effectively, make informed decisions, and focus their energy where it matters most. 

Operate with confidence. Help organizations navigate complexity with their trusted data, responsible AI, and governance controls that can help support their security and compliance management efforts. 

Help drive business value. Help teams reduce repetitive work, improve efficiency, and spend more time on activities that contribute to meaningful business outcomes. 

We're excited about what these innovations could mean for our customers and their people. Because the real measure of innovation isn't the sophistication of the technology behind it. It’s how technology helps people and businesses make meaningful progress.  

Our vision is simple: Less complexity. More possibility. And more time for everyone to do the work they're meant to do. 

Learn more about our latest innovations for our Agentic HCM platform.  

_{Certain features and functionality described in this material are planned and are not currently available. Product plans, priorities, and anticipated availability are subject to change and do not constitute a commitment to deliver any feature or functionality. Availability may vary by region, product edition, configuration, and applicable terms.}