At its town hall yesterday, Workday outlined a clear strategic shift for VNDLY, its vendor management system that helps organizations manage external or contingent workforces (contractors, freelancers, etc.).
VNDLY is being revamped from a traditional vendor management system into an AI-enabled “control plane.” Admittedly, I was unfamiliar with this term, but a ‘control plane’ serves as the brain of an enterprise system or systems. It sits above tools a system may have for HR, payroll, ATS, etc, to interpret that data, apply policies, and orchestrate actions through AI and automation. Kind of like a conductor for your HR tech orchestra.
Led by Mariana Santiago, John Adkins, Hannah Atkins, and Stephen Middleton, the session highlighted Workday’s VNDLY as a key piece of the company’s wider agentic AI ecosystem. The launch of the Agent System of Record (ASOR) is an exciting move toward bringing together how organizations manage both human and AI-driven work across different business functions.
Three agents—Contingent Sourcing (HiredScore), Document Intelligence (Evisort), and an AI-Powered Assistant—illustrated this convergence of automation and decision support. This all reflects the larger HR tech movement where HR platforms are shifting from process execution to intelligent orchestration, combining data, governance, and real-time reasoning.
From a market standpoint, Workday’s direction aligns with a defining HR technology trend: the rise of total workforce management, where full-time, contingent, and now digital (AI) workers are managed within one ecosystem. Workday’s integration of agentic AI within its core HCM platform is an effort to differentiate by bridging the gap between HR, procurement, and finance more effectively than legacy vendor management systems (VMS) ever could.
Bottom line: Workday is reimagining the VMS category into an intelligent, AI-enabled workforce platform that unites human, contingent, and digital labor. By bridging HR, Procurement, and Finance through open APIs and agentic AI, VNDLY is defining how enterprises will manage talent ecosystems in the AI era.