Baek Byung-yeul is a journalist at The Korea Times focused on cultural content, including films and cultural events in South Korea. You can contact him at baekby@koreatimes.co.kr to share your insights.
Workday expands into Korean market with AI-based HR platform
Joung Eung-sub, country manager of Workday Korea, speaks during a press conference at the Lotte Hotel World in Seoul, Thursday. Courtesy of Workday Korea
By Baek Byung-yeul
Workday, a U.S.-based human resources and finance management software maker, said it will provide AI-powered HR management solutions to help Korean companies streamline their operations, the chief of its Korean unit said Thursday.
“Through AI, we will lead the transformation of human resources and financial management and help companies streamline their operations to develop the business of work in the future,” Joung Eung-sub, country manager of Workday Korea, said during a press conference in Seoul.
The country manager noted that despite having a strong digital infrastructure, Korea relies on traditional organizational management methods and historical data.
“Korea has a strong digital infrastructure and readiness, ranking sixth in the International Institute for Management Development's (IMD) World Digital Competitiveness Ranking 2023, but workforce productivity issues persist due to traditional management methods and cultural barriers,” the Korean unit chief said. “Employees are key to business success, but traditional HR methods are limited because they are based on historical data.”
Workday said its platform utilizes AI to simplify the user experience and increase employee engagement to drive improvements in productivity.
“In line with Workday's human-centered design philosophy of placing people first, we aim to empower users so that AI doesn't replace decision-making, but rather enhances and supports them,” he said.
With the AI-powered digital transformation of companies in full swing, Workday Skills Cloud is positioning itself as a differentiator for companies to build a skills-based organizational strategy.
“Reskilling, upskilling, cross-skilling and having the right talent in the right place at the right time is critical for modern businesses, and transforming that into a skills-based strategy is even more important. That's why Workday is delivering the Skills Cloud,” Joung said.
In Korea, Workday's customers include Korean Air, Viva Republica, Musinsa, Kolmar Holdings, Dongwha Group and many others.
Shane Luke, vice president of AI and machine learning at Workday, shared the structure of Workday's platform offering, and said, “One nice advantage Workday has is that the data we have comes from our Workday applications and we have tight control over the quality of that data.”
He added, "We also have a lot of quantity of data. It's high quality, that we have 65 million users on the platform more than 800 million transactions performed on per year. The main thing I want to mention is that although this is the total, it does not mean that we aggregate all this data to train models we do keep customer segmentation as part of the platform."