Imagine a world where talent, technology, and data align effortlessly. This was the central theme at Workday Horizon South Africa, as the event took attendees on a journey through milestones that show how organisations can soar with one unified platform to manage people, finance, and AI.
Kicking off the event, Kiv Moodley, the country managing director at Workday South Africa, immediately set the tone, highlighting Workday's history of groundbreaking development.
“Over 20 years, we have been really innovative. We started off dominantly doing human capital management and quickly moved into finance as well. Now we have the largest and cleanest data set in the world when it comes to managing people, finance, and AI agents.”
“With disparate data, it’s hard to make decisions in real time for most organisations today. The fact that we have one single application to manage people, manage finance, and again now AI agents, gives a view of how easily accessible this technology is, with one app to manage your entire career.”
He then encouraged organisations to focus on three critical areas as they plan for 2025: data-driven decisions, skills development, and business agility.
He highlighted the importance of skills development, explaining the need for businesses to identify and nurture the right talent within their teams for growth, understand where to find future skills, and build a clear roadmap for this development.
Finally, he touched on the critical war for talent. “We often hear our talent is leaving the country, but do we even know the talent we have if we haven’t done a proper skills audit within the organisations.”
“At Workday, we have a Skills Cloud, which helps us do exactly that – gain visibility into the skills organisations already have. We believe that if you grow your people, then you grow your business and automatically grow your economy.”
Bringing his initial address to an end, Kiv noted a crucial differentiator for Workday. “If you’ve ever engaged with the Workday team in the past couple of years, the one thing that always stands out in terms of feedback I receive from the market is how different we are. I do believe our technology is a differentiator, but so too are our people.”
The event continued with a powerful keynote by Clare Hickie, CTO for Workday EMEA, who addressed the global talent shortage and the rising value of AI. “It's an employee market out there, and even top performers continue to be on the move, and finding external talent can become costly.”
Clare noted Workday's response to this challenge. “What we've delivered on is how organisations are adopting a skills-based approach to talent. With Workday Skills Cloud, we have skills built into the core of Workday human capital management, and with AI, we help to manage skills data so organisations have those integrated skills right throughout the platform.”
“For almost anything and everything it comes back to people because without the people, we're not going to be able to run these organisations.”
Adapt and survive
Renowned speaker Mushambi Mutuma then energised the room with his talk on The Adaptability Code, stressing that adaptability is the way to succeed in the digital age.
“How adaptable you are is going to be the number one predictor for your future success. No matter where technology goes, where AI goes, or what happens tomorrow, if you are adaptable, you will survive.”
Later sessions showcased practical applications of Workday’s platform. And, Jannie Malan, the manager for solution consulting at Workday, then addressed the shifts in the employment landscape.
“Going forward, any manager or anyone in the HR space is likely going to be managing both human employees and agentic employees. I don’t know if they’re going to unionise, but you never know.”
“Ideally, Workday then becomes that single platform to manage all of your worker types. AI has really arrived just in time to counter all of these challenges that we have.”
The Workday Horizon event was further enriched by testimonials from prominent organisations, where HR leaders credited the Workday tool as a transformative enabler for efficiency.
Avanthi Maharaj, head of HR for Africa at Google, praised Workday for solving real-life logistical challenges such as travel approvals. “What we did at Google a few years back – if you had to travel, you needed to get confirmation of employment data, and certain things needed to be fielded to your hub.”
“With Workday, we can now get that so seamlessly. You stick in your passport details, put in the host country, the signatures of the manager are automatic, and you get an invitation letter in your inbox in 5 minutes. It's got to work for the challenge and the moment that you're in. It creates fewer steps to worry about.”
Ursula Fear, the senior talent program manager at Salesforce, described how Workday is even integrated into Slack, simplifying tasks like applying for leave. However, with ease of use comes a deeper challenge she has noted.
“A big part of our challenge is education. It’s not the platform or the system, but educating the rest of the world on the importance of transformation.”
“One of the jobs I’m doing is putting our B-BBEE strategy together and teaching the rest of the globe about our past and about the importance of data and employee data for the future. We are certainly getting there and seeing continuous progress in the learning and in the local data that we need to extract and build on.”
Mure Wesige, the people and culture director at Coca-Cola, emphasised the system’s role as a catalyst for career development. He noted that its full potential is unlocked when employees meaningfully engage with it – enabling organisations to maintain a dynamic, up-to-date database that serves as a single source of truth for each employee. This, in turn, allows companies to identify common developmental opportunities and design targeted capability-building programmes with precision.
