u/Rigest

Over the years we've been to so many Risings and ended up with 50+ pictures of slides, some scrambled notes and way too much info. Half of it which get's lost when you start your job again on Monday.

With that in mind we built the Rising Recap agent. You do a small intake to talk about your scope and main challenges. The agent then finds the most relevant sessions for you and your team. If you're on the ground in Vegas you can take pictures of slides, notes, badges and even record voice memos. The agent will help organize all of it. If you're not on the ground, it will find the summaries from all relevant sessions for you.

Afterwards the agent will create three things for you:

1. A Field Guide - containing the summaries of the most relevant sessions so that you and your HRIS team can learn from it
2. A leadership powerpoint - providing a high level recap, what it means for your challenges and what you need going forward
3. An action list + project plan - easily create an action list and gant chart with your team to create a post Rising plan

It's an experiment of us, but we believe it can really help the Community get more out of Rising. It's completely free for Workday customers. You can try it out here.

I spent last week at Workday DevCon and took a lot of notes. For anyone who could not make it, here is what actually stood out, the good and the "let's be honest" parts. Sharing in case it saves you some catch-up time

Last year agents were a keynote promise. This year the developer platform itself has been rebuilt around them. The message across almost every session was the same: building on Workday is shifting from "configure and code" to "describe what you want and supervise an agent that builds it." We got to use it all during the hackathon, so it's no longer smoke and mirrors.

Agents and AI (the dominant track)

- Developer Agent was the headline. It writes, scaffolds, and iterates on Extend apps from natural language. The interesting sessions were not the demo, they were the "advanced patterns" ones about how to actually steer it and where it still needs a human.

- MCP showed up everywhere. The "my agents will talk to your agents over MCP" framing is real now. Workday is positioning agents to talk to other vendors' agents, not just internal ones. We documented the Workday MCP with over 600 mcp tools available across FIN, HCM and Student

- Agent Passport seems like a verified way to audit your agent on things like prompt injection from a third party.

Orchestrate and integrations

- Orchestrate Copilot to accelerate building flows.

- Launching orchestrations directly from business process status was a small feature with big practical value.

- General theme: Orchestrate is maturing into the default integration layer, and the EIB / Studio era is clearly being wound down.

Prism, Data Cloud, and analytics

- Zero Copy and Apache Iceberg for bi-directional data access was everywhere. The "knowledge layer for AI" framing makes sense: agents are only as good as the data they can reach.

- Live Data Query for real-time analytics is worth a look if you are still batch-everything. Agents speak SQL really well so this will be very useful

My honest take (the non-hype part)

- The agent tooling is real and genuinely impressive. It is not vaporware this year. We tried it during the hackathon and were able to build 5 times quicker.

- But "agent builds the app" still needs people who understand the Workday data model, security model, and business processes. The agent accelerates a skilled builder, it does not replace one. A lot of customers will vibe code junk.

*We ended up writing short summaries of basically every session (why it matters, what is new, the takeaway) and put it in a free e-book, at incubane.com/library if you want the long version.