Graham Abell

Having AI be able to kind of infer, kind of make decisions, but apply that in a deterministic way.

And so, you know, moving as much of the kind of toil away from people working in the company, taking action on their behalf, but always having human loop, kind of the key decisions being made by humans.

We were contributors to the EU AI.

We want to make sure it

It does provide protection and that kind of balance with the ability to innovate and drive for business outcomes.

I don't see AI replacing full jobs, it's replacing parts of jobs and I think therefore the opportunity is how do we help those people do much more valuable work with that time that's freed up.

Thanks for having me, Mark.

It's great to be here.

I started like you know coming out of college went to Trinity did computer science there I think we were chatting earlier kind of left at a point where there wasn't many jobs for grads and so did a cycle of kind of interviewing trying to get a job with no experience and not being able to get that job so ended up moving to Edinburgh and taking a contract job in test automation essentially and spent the first number of years of my career when I moved back kind of working in that space kind of moving up to being the kind of tech lead for those types of teams and then ultimately into leadership which led me into

leadership of development and product teams and expanding that as I moved into Workday and taking on larger and larger parts of the business.

It's probably more of actually looking back on the dev side leading kind of development teams product we're starting a separate function that we kind of paired with and then as I said over like I've been there nearly 10 years now taking on kind of larger roles taking on more of the

Yeah absolutely I think it's good for being able to be able to ask the questions and know when you're not fully told the truth or when we're in those fire drills when something goes wrong being able to kind of try and rationalise where it's probably happening what's the likely causes because like any system it's massively complex there's all these interdependencies and being able to kind of visualise kind of how the system's working and you know identify where we've probably got challenges it helps us manage the team when we're you know in those crisis moments or

particularly now as we're looking into AI, kind of knowing what we should be building and how we should be building it and making sure the architecture is correct to scale.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

I was surprised when I joined.

I didn't really, like, you know, I'd heard of Workday, didn't really understand the kind of size they had and we've grown a lot since then.

So,

Right now, we're just over 2,200 people in Dublin.

And another kind of interesting or differentiating factor is we're about 85% products and technology.

So kind of R&D function, which for kind of US headquartered companies, quite an unusual blend in Dublin.