Four for Four: Workday Named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning for the Fourth Year in a Row

The AI-First Advantage

At Workday, we’ve deeply invested in AI, but not just for automation’s sake. Our approach is fundamentally human-centered and AI-augmented. We’re removing the massive, repetitive grind of data access, modeling, and consolidation, freeing up FP&A teams to focus on their most critical task: steering the business. The modern experience we deliver is intuitive and brings intelligence directly into planning, empowering every user to communicate and collaborate directly in context with the data.

Workday’s advantage is rooted in our unified, AI-first platform with human-in-the-loop governance. This combination ensures that while machine learning accelerates forecasting, scenario planning, and data preparation, human expertise remains the final authority. 

By combining the speed and accuracy of intelligent automation with the critical judgment of your team, we deliver faster, better-aligned decisions and superior business outcomes. This is essential for navigating today’s constant market volatility, where organizations must be able to respond fast to uncertainty.

Introducing Planning Agent: A New Era 

Planning Agent represents a new era for enterprise planning. It is Workday’s AI-powered solution built to fundamentally transform how work gets done across the entire planning lifecycle. It moves beyond simple automation to act as an expert planning partner for analysts, planners, modelers, and administrators, bringing an intuitive, zero-friction experience to the complex, cross-functional process of enterprise planning. 

The agent streamlines and eliminates manual, time-consuming tasks like data wrangling, data consolidation, and complex analysis. This unlocks time for FP&A teams to shift their focus to genuine strategic leadership and higher-value decision support.

Our first role-based skill is designed for analysts by enabling a conversational interface that dramatically reduces time-to-insight while improving analysis quality to drive stronger outcomes. Instead of manual data extraction and complex dashboard navigation, users can ask natural language questions to instantly surface trends, anomalies, and variance drivers—empowering self-service analytics that reduce bottlenecks and accelerate decision-making.

The initial Planning Agent features bring conversational intelligence to your planning data, including:

• Ask Workday: Enables users to interact with their data and planning models using natural language, making data access immediate and insight generation instantaneous for every decision-maker, even those outside of finance.

• Data exploration: Transforms how FP&A teams interact with Adaptive Planning data by enabling conversational analytics that dramatically reduces time-to-insight while improving analysis quality.

• Variance analysis: Automatically identify material variances, provide root-cause traceability, and generate clear explanatory insights. This accelerates analysis and provides continuous confidence in performance drivers.

The Future of Enterprise Planning Is Now

We think our continued recognition as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software for the fourth straight year affirms our commitment to our customers and our vision for the connected, AI-driven enterprise. Workday’s approach unifies finance, HR, and operations data, empowering organizations to move beyond slow, siloed planning and make high-speed, strategic decisions to fuel their organizations’ growth in the face of constant market volatility. 

From being recognized as a Leader for our completeness of vision and ability to execute in the Magic Quadrant to being named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Financial Planning software for three straight years, the message is clear: Workday is delivering the modern, intelligent planning experience the market demands. We’re proud to partner with our customers as we continue to push the boundaries of enterprise planning with our human-centered, AI-augmented platform to unlock faster, better, smarter decision-making at scale.