Point of view
Enterprise work is being rewoven.
AI agents are becoming participants in enterprise operations, platforms are becoming agent runtimes, and the hard problems have shifted from models to operating-model design, trustworthy context, production accountability, and economics. Heddleworks carries enterprises across that shift — starting where work is most human, most regulated, and most measurable: the workforce.
The moment
2026 IT spend growth. +2.7% — managed services. The money is moving past labor-priced services.
Enterprises that have redesigned any workflow end-to-end for AI. The redesign gap is the work.
We have not found a firm offering agent-level SLAs on accuracy, drift, and cost-per-resolution. That is the layer we operate.
Sources: Gartner, ISG, McKinsey — 2026. Third finding: Heddleworks market dossier, August 2026.
The platforms have moved
Workday’s platform is now agent-ready. An Agent System of Record for governing agents went GA in early 2026. An Agent Gateway, announced at DevCon 2025, carries MCP and agent-to-agent protocols into the platform. Agent Passport, launched mid-2026 with Cisco as its first attestation partner, brings standards-based verification to live agents. Agents build, run, and are governed inside the platform’s rails.
The direction is clear: platforms are becoming agent runtimes, and the work that determines success has moved up a level — to redesigning the work, engineering trustworthy context, and operating the result. That is the work we do.
Sources: Workday platform announcements, 2025–2026; Heddleworks market dossier, August 2026.
Where we stand
Work should be redesigned task by task before any agent is built. Context is an engineering discipline. Production accountability means instrumented SLAs on accuracy, drift, and cost per resolution. The economics must be priced on outcomes.
REIMAGINEBUILDOPERATE
The research behind this
We research before we recommend. Our August 2026 market dossier — 200 sources, evidence-labeled — is how we see the agentic era. Ask us for the short version.