Workday Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY) announced the introduction of Adaptive Decision Intelligence, a new artificial intelligence capability within its Adaptive Planning platform. The company made the announcement at the Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo in National Harbor, Maryland.

The new tool allows finance and operations teams to ask questions in natural language, model scenarios, and commit decisions directly into planning systems. According to the company, the capability is designed to reduce the time needed for financial analysis from days to minutes.

"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 of Workday Adaptive Planning. "Adaptive Decision Intelligence is designed to close that gap, turning hours of manual data work into minutes of guided exploration."

The tool combines data from Adaptive Planning with operational information from across businesses, including customer relationship management systems, human resources data, and data warehouses. Users can ask questions such as revenue performance inquiries and receive explanations connecting business drivers to outcomes.

The system provides scenario recommendations, allows side-by-side comparisons, and runs Monte Carlo simulations to show potential outcomes. When leadership approves a scenario, the tool commits it back to the governed plan with assumptions, data sources, and approval chains intact.

Adaptive Decision Intelligence maintains the same security and access controls as existing Workday systems and provides audit trails showing data sources, assumptions, and approvals for each scenario.

The capability is currently available to customers in an early adopter program and is expected to be more broadly available later this year, according to the press release.