Accelerating AI From Model to Impact at Workday With Databricks Apps

Workday needed to put trusted ML insights directly in the hands of sales, customer success and finance—fast. Before, delivering a single internal app required a bespoke full‑stack build and repeated reviews, stretching timelines to nearly a year. By shifting to Databricks Apps and building where the data already lives, Workday compressed delivery to weeks, launched three production AI applications in a single year, and scaled its flagship Sales Companion to 4,500+ active users.

This session details the architecture and adoption playbook: Databricks Apps as the UI/middleware, MLflow‑powered components, retrieval‑augmented workflows for unstructured content, governed access with Unity Catalog and fast analytics via SQL Serverless—enabling conversational experiences that let business users self‑serve sentiment analysis, forecasting and KPI insights without waiting on the data science team or adding headcount.