Workday Rising EMEA 2025: Your essential highlights from Barcelona
Workday Rising EMEA 2025 brought leaders together in Barcelona to explore groundbreaking advances in AI, new regional infrastructure investments, and expanded support for organisations navigating rapid change. These updates reflect Workday’s growing commitment to customers across EMEA and the future of intelligent enterprise transformation.
The Kainos team was onsite breaking down the announcements that matter most for organisations in the region. Use this page to recap the key developments, understand their impact, and continue the conversations started at Rising.
Customer stories from the Kainos Stage – EMEA
Missed our EMEA stage sessions at Workday Rising 2025? Explore all the insights on demand. Hear directly from leading organisations as they share how they’re transforming HR, finance, and operations through automation, AI, and Kainos solutions built on Workday.
All sessions are available through the Workday Rising Attendee Portal. Log in with your attendee credentials, or register for free to access the full library.
Unifying Employee Document Management at ING
Global financial services organisation ING operates across 40+ countries with more than 60,000 employees, creating significant complexity in managing HR documents securely and efficiently.
In this session, leaders from ING and Kainos share how they partnered to modernise document management using a Workday-first strategy. By adopting Kainos’ Employee Document Management (Kainos EDM), ING simplified its global taxonomy, strengthened security and compliance, and automated 70–80% of HR documents across multiple countries. With rapid implementation and scalable rollout, ING is now reducing manual work, improving employee experience, and laying the foundation for continued global expansion of EDM.
Sky’s the Limit: How Skyscanner navigates global growth with automation
As Skyscanner scaled rapidly across 19 entities and 10 countries, automation became critical to manage change, compliance, and efficiency without expanding headcount.
In this session, learn how Skyscanner partnered with Kainos to strengthen data security with SmartShield, streamline audits with SmartAudit, and accelerate testing with SmartTest. Amanda and Matthew share practical lessons from their Workday automation journey, highlighting how enterprise-ready tools can help organisations scale faster, safer, and smarter.
Amplifying streaming innovation at Spotify
Global streaming leader Spotify shared how its lean team uses five mission-critical Workday Extend apps to drive agility and scale innovation. Rajeev Sharma (Workday) and Ramesh Muthusamy (Spotify) explained how the organisation identifies high-ROI opportunities, embeds strong governance, automates QA, and productises apps to support rapid growth. The result: a streamlined, scalable Extend ecosystem that accelerates delivery and strengthens operational resilience across a fast-moving tech environment.
Watch now via the Attendee Portal.
Workday doubles down on AI innovation
Workday announced significant advancements in AI-driven capabilities and tools aimed at helping organisations streamline processes, reduce complexity, and make smarter decisions.
Pay Transparency Analyzer now available to all customers
Workday’s Pay Transparency Analyzer, powered by Kainos, enables companies to meet EU Pay Transparency Directive requirements and advance equitable pay practices with confidence.
Why it matters: If new EU regulations affect your business, this tool helps you comply and act on pay-equity insights.
Workday GO expands across EMEA
Workday GO, designed to bring enterprise-grade HR, payroll, and AI capabilities to midsize organisations continues to expand across key European markets.
Enhancements include:
• Workday GO Global Payroll to simplify global hiring and paying talent.
• A new Workday GO Partner Network offering a unified ecosystem for payroll, benefits, and deployment.
• Deployment Agent, an AI-powered assistant that accelerates go-lives by up to 25%.
Why it matters: Midsize and fast-growing organisations can deploy enterprise-grade HR and payroll faster and with less complexity.
Developer and open platform updates
Workday expanded access to its global developer network, helping customers and partners innovate and build new capabilities more quickly.
Workday announces agreement to acquire Pipedream
Workday plans to acquire Pipedream, an integration platform for AI agents with over 3,000 pre-built connectors.
Why it matters: This signals a shift from AI that surfaces insights to AI that can trigger actions across systems transforming how HR and finance processes are automated end-to-end.
Building future-ready infrastructure for EMEA
Workday unveiled several major infrastructure investments aimed at enabling compliant, scalable, and resilient operations across the region.
Workday EU Sovereign Cloud
Workday’s EU Sovereign Cloud will allow customers to run their HR and finance applications entirely within EU borders delivering full data residency, security, and compliance.
Why it matters: Organisations with strict residency or regulatory needs can adopt Workday AI and services while keeping data within the EU.
Expanded partnership with Google Cloud
Workday solutions are now available on Google Cloud in multiple EMEA markets, and via the Google Cloud Marketplace, expanding access and deployment options.
Strengthening data and analytics
Google BigQuery’s addition to Workday Data Cloud enables secure, zero-copy integrations - giving customers advanced analytics capability using trusted Workday data.
Workday’s growing regional presence across EMEA
Workday continues to strengthen its footprint, talent, and customer community across Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Recent milestones include:
• €175M AI Centre of Excellence in Dublin
• New regional office in Dubai
• Over 4,250 employees in 19 countries
• 2,300+ customers headquartered in EMEA
Why it matters: More local presence means faster support, regional expertise, and better alignment with local regulations and market needs.