Adaptive Decision Intelligence Lets Teams Ask Questions in Natural Language, Explore Scenarios, and Commit Decisions to the Governed Plan – in Minutes, Not Days
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md., May 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo™ -- Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY), the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT, today introduced Adaptive Decision Intelligence, a new AI capability in Workday Adaptive Planning. Finance teams spend days pulling data from disconnected systems to provide the answers leadership needs now. Adaptive Decision Intelligence provides a single experience where finance and operations teams can ask questions in natural language, model scenarios in minutes, and commit decisions directly into the governed plan – without spreadsheets, data wrangling, or waiting on the FP&A team to rebuild a model.
"Many AI planning tools today still leave analysts stitching together scenarios in spreadsheets every time a new business question comes up," said Ben Pierce, general manager, Workday Adaptive Planning. "Adaptive Decision Intelligence is designed to close that gap, turning hours of manual data work into minutes of guided exploration so planning teams can move from a question to a governed decision in the plan before the meeting ends."
Adaptive Decision Intelligence uses the data teams already have in Adaptive Planning, combined with operational data from across the business, to answer questions that previously required days of manual work across systems. Here's how a planning team might use Adaptive Decision Intelligence in practice:
- Combine plans, actuals, and operational data such as CRM pipeline, customer revenue, or project costs to see the full picture behind a performance question. When a region misses its target, a finance leader can bring together Adaptive Planning actuals and plan with sales pipeline and headcount data for that region to see whether the issue is coverage, conversion, or productivity.
- Ask direct questions in natural language and get clear explanations that connect drivers to outcomes. A question like "Why did Q3 revenue in EMEA fall short of plan?" can return a breakdown showing how territory coverage, win rates, deal size, and ramping sellers contributed to the gap, with a click‑through view by product line.
- Get recommendations for how to close a gap, compare scenarios side by side, and run Monte Carlo simulations to show a range of likely outcomes for each option. In one view, Adaptive Decision Intelligence can show the impact of options such as adding sales headcount, shifting quota‑bearing roles from lower‑performing regions, or improving win rates by a few points, including the effect of each choice on Q4 revenue and margins.
- Select the best scenario and save it as the plan going forward, so future forecasts and reports in Adaptive Planning are based on that decision. When leadership approves a scenario, Adaptive Decision Intelligence commits it back to the governed plan with assumptions, data sources, and approval chain intact.
Moving Beyond Shadow Spreadsheets
Today, planning and analysis is a fragmented process. On one side, there is the governed planning environment that supports budgets, forecasts, and reporting, where structure, controls, and audit trails are essential. On the other, there is ad hoc work and urgent requests that often live in one‑off spreadsheets built to answer urgent questions, test new ideas, or combine data that hasn't been modeled yet. That split means the work that shapes big decisions often happens outside the systems that run the business, in files that are hard to govern, hard to share, and hard to turn into an actual plan.
Adaptive Decision Intelligence brings that side work into the same secure system as the main plan. Teams will be able to bring together data from Adaptive Planning and systems across the enterprise – including CRM, HR, and data warehouses – to ask questions, test ideas, and adjust drivers in a live planning environment, without the risk of breaking the plan or fragmenting work across spreadsheets. It follows the same security and access rules teams already use and keeps a record of the data and assumptions behind each scenario.
In most organizations, the kind of ad hoc, multi-step exploratory analysis that produces real answers gets deferred because every new question means days of manual work. A CFO asks a question on Tuesday and gets an answer on Friday, at which point the decision window has often already closed. Adaptive Decision Intelligence changes that. Teams can investigate questions, any time, and put a complete, confident recommendation in front of leadership with enough time to change the outcome.
Explore Freely with Full Auditability
Every answer is grounded in the same definitions and data customers already trust in Adaptive Planning, so calculations and permissions are enforced consistently across both exploratory work and governed plans.
That consistency makes it easier to control who can see and change assumptions, to track how a model evolved over time, and to ensure that approved decisions show up consistently in planning, reporting, and downstream processes. Every scenario carries an audit trail that shows which data sources were used, which assumptions were applied, and who approved the final version that was committed back into the plan.
Availability
Adaptive Decision Intelligence is now available to customers enrolled in its early adopter program and is expected to be more broadly available later this year.
For More Information
- Read more about Workday's vision for the future of finance on the Workday blog.
- Visit the Workday Booth at the Gartner® Finance Symposium/Xpo™, Booth #301.
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About Workday
Workday operates at the heart of the enterprise – HR, finance, and IT – where the margin for error is effectively zero. By tightly coupling AI with the context, guardrails, and trusted processes that run the business, Workday goes beyond AI that assists with work to agents that are capable of driving measurable outcomes. More than 11,500 organizations worldwide, including more than 65% of the Fortune 500, trust Workday to deliver. For more information about Workday, visit workday.com.
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Forward-Looking Statements
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SOURCE Workday Inc.
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