I knew Workday DevCon 2026 in Las Vegas was going to be big and a massive opportunity for me to learn. What I didn’t fully anticipate was just how much those four days would reshape the way I think about building on Workday. This wasn’t just a conference. It was a front-row seat to the future of enterprise development, and I’m still processing everything I experienced, learned, and built.
Day 1: Meeting the People Behind the Platform
Face Time with Workday Heads – The Real Stuff
One of the most underrated parts of DevCon is the access. You’re not watching a product manager behind glass. You’re sitting across from Workday’s own module leads, architects, and tech experts, talking shop. I came prepared with a list of actual pain points we’ve been navigating in our day-to-day Extend development, and being able to raise them in person and get real, candid responses was invaluable.
This is something no webinar, documentation page, or support ticket can replicate. There’s a clarity that comes from a conversation, and the experts here are genuinely engaged. They want to hear what’s not working. That feedback loop is real.
Roadmap, Live and Direct
Getting the roadmap directly from the people who build it, not through filtered slides or marketing decks, was a highlight of day one. Understanding where Workday is heading, especially in the context of the agentic shift, helped frame everything that came next.
The threads I picked up in those hallway conversations became themes I recognised again during the keynote on day two.
Day 2: The Announcement Everyone Was Talking About
If day one was about conversations, day two was about revelations.
The Big Picture: Workday Build is Agent-Ready
AI makes building feel magical, but Workday’s systems touch people’s livelihoods. Payroll. Benefits. Compensation. The stakes are too high for ‘shove everything into a context window and hope for the best.’
“The problem we’re solving isn’t just shipping another CRUD app. It’s how you and your agents move fast where the stakes are highest, without blowing up trust.”
— Gabe Monroe, Workday CTO
The answer? A ground-up reimagining of the developer platform under three pillars: Build, Run, and Surface. Alongside that came the announcement everyone was talking about.
Developer Agent: The Flagship Announcement
Developer Agent is the headline.
It allows you to build on Workday from any IDE — Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot, Google Antigravity — using plain language prompts over MCP. It ships pre-loaded with 50+ skills covering objects, business processes, security, and pages, while applying Workday best practices automatically as it generates code.
On stage, Mariana Vanhomm built a full parking management app, including business objects, business processes, pages, mock data, and a React frontend, in minutes using a single prompt in Cursor.
Joe Lindy followed by building an internal job mobility agent in Google Antigravity with one natural language prompt, pulling live data from Workday, Data Cloud, and Google Drive. The deployment was end-to-end automated: validated, deployed to tenant, and registered in Agent System of Record.
Developer Agent Early Access
EA launches this month. Attendees can get hands-on at the Express Labs during DevCon and yes, it’s available for the hackathon.
The Infrastructure Behind the Magic
The keynote also unveiled the platform layer powering all of this:
- Agent-Ready Tools — Purpose-built MCP tools with flat self-describing schemas, agent system users, delegation, and auditing built in.
- Agent Actions — Over 1,000 pipeline connectors so agents can act on enterprise systems beyond Workday, combined with Workday Orchestrate for deterministic workflows.
- Live Data Queries & Data Cloud — SQL-like blended data access over Apache Iceberg. AWS joins as a Data Cloud partner, making Workday data natively available in AWS Bedrock.
- Agent Passport — A stamp-based compliance and vulnerability testing framework. Cisco is the launch attestation partner.
- A2A & A2UI — Surface agents on Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot, Asana, and beyond using open standards.
Community Announcements That Caught My Eye
A couple of community announcements also stood out:
- Regional Developer Days are coming to Bangalore and Sydney, making hands-on learning more accessible for developers around the world.
- Regional Hackathons will bring a condensed DevCon-style build experience closer to local communities, which is something I’m excited to see.
Day 3: Getting Hands-On with the New Tools
Day three was where theory met the keyboard. After absorbing two days of vision, roadmap discussions, and keynote announcements, it was time to actually use the tools.
Express Labs: Pilot Technologies, Right Now
The Express Labs are where Workday puts the pilot technologies directly in your hands.
I’d heard about Developer Agent on stage, but using it is a completely different experience. Prompting in plain language and watching Extend app components materialise in real time, correctly structured and with best practices applied automatically, was genuinely impressive.
The speed isn’t just impressive as a demo. When you’re building for real use cases, the reduction in cognitive load is dramatic. You’re thinking about what to build, not how to structure it or which security configuration applies.
Live Demo Sessions: Seeing is Believing
Workday experts ran live demos on the floor using the pilot technologies. Not slide walkthroughs. Actual live builds.
Watching Extend apps take shape in minutes with natural language prompts, seeing agent definitions generated automatically, and understanding how the skill markdown specification ties into everything answered questions I hadn’t even thought to ask yet.
Chalk Talks: Architecture Under the Hood
The chalk talk sessions were where I learned the most per minute.
Workday architects walked through how the pilot technologies actually work. The agent runtime, how Agent-Ready Tools differ from traditional REST APIs, the role of MCP in making everything discoverable, and how Agent Passport performs its vulnerability testing behind the scenes. No slides, just whiteboards and questions.
By midday on day three, the learning mode switched off and build mode switched on.
The Hackathon Takes Shape
The hackathon had begun. More than 60 teams were on the floor, ideas were being stress-tested in real time, and Workday experts were weaving through the crowd ready to help.
We spent the first hours consolidating everything we’d absorbed from the labs and chalk talks, locking in our approach, and making sure we were ready to move fast. Every conversation pointed in the same direction: use the pilot technologies, don’t hold back, and build something real.
DAY 4 (& Night & Day 3)
What We Built
Our team built an agent: an intelligent Workday Extend application designed to solve distinct real-time problems within one unified experience. Every part of the stack we’d explored during the week went into the build. Developer Agent, Agent-Ready Tools, Orchestrate, and Data Cloud all became part of the solution. It was the most complete expression of everything the week had taught us.
The Reality of a Hackathon
The hackathon didn’t stop at midnight. It ran straight through from midday on day three until midday on day four. Twenty-four hours of continuous building. Workday experts were available throughout the process. When we hit walls, and we definitely hit walls, we got real help, fast. That access to expertise during the build is one of the things that makes DevCon’s hackathon genuinely unique.
We didn’t take the top spot, but the experience absolutely was. Building a production-grade Workday Extend application with an agent in 24 hours, using pilot technologies fresh off the keynote stage, felt like a win by any measure that matters.
Where We Go From Here
Four days of learning. Twenty-four hours of building. One application tackling real business problems. The best part is that the application our team built is not going into a drawer. This is the foundation for something we’re genuinely excited to continue developing.
The pilot technologies announced at DevCon 2026 are going to change how Workday solutions are built. Not in five years. Much sooner than that. Getting hands-on with them before they’re generally available puts us in a position to move quickly when they arrive.
Final Thoughts: It was worth every hour
DevCon 2026 was one of the most energising professional experiences I’ve had. The combination of direct access to Workday experts and leadership, hands-on experience with pilot technologies, and the intensity of the hackathon compressed months of learning into four days.
The Workday ecosystem is at an inflection point. The developer tools are catching up to the ambition of the platform. Agent-first development is no longer a concept. It’s something you can build today, in your IDE, using plain language.
“The future of enterprise development isn’t coming. It landed in Las Vegas in June 2026, and I got to build with it.”
Looking back, what stands out most is not just seeing these technologies announced but having the opportunity to build with them. It provided a much clearer view of where Workday development is heading and how quickly these innovations will start influencing real customer projects.
A huge thank you to Bas Eggelaar and the organisation for the opportunity to attend and represent SuccessDay at DevCon. The investment in this week will pay dividends in everything we build next.
Last but absolutely not least, a heartfelt thank you to Brad, Rohit, Sandippan, and Sarthak from CloudRock and Honey Deep joining from Ebay. You brought the energy, the ideas, and the resilience required for 24 hours of non-stop building. My first DevCon couldn’t have been in better company.
Arun Kumar Dhanapal
Senior Technical Extend / Integration Lead
