Workday is the latest enterprise SaaS company to embrace headless computing

Earlier this year, Salesforce announced Headless 360, its way of providing back-end access to the data on the platform without requiring a front-end. The company reiterated this position at Dreamforce last month. I wrote about it here and here.

But Salesforce is not alone in recognizing that the value of SaaS does not lie in the interface, but in the data being collected on the platform. Agents don't necessarily need an interface the way we do, and headless separates the two.

This week, at Workday Rising, the company announced a headless strategy of its own. It sees what Salesforce, ServiceNow and all the other major enterprise SaaS players see, that agentic access and human access are different and they require a different way of interacting.

The company's new platform that includes a headless option is called Trusted Agent Platform, and the idea is to give access to Workday HR and financial information in the way that makes the most sense for a given scenario, whether that's through the front end, via headless access on the back-end, or using Workday tools or external ones.

Of course, companies could be wary of giving agents, humans and other systems blanket access to sensitive HR and financial information. Workday says its existing permissions, approvals and audit trails will apply regardless of who or what is accessing it, and that includes headless.

“Headless can’t mean lawless,” said Workday CTO Gabe Monroy in a statement. “The rules for HR and finance already live in Workday, so customers don’t have to rebuild them for every agent they create.”

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This story first ran in FastForward #83: My adventures in AI, my Friday newsletter for enterprise tech leaders.

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