Dow plans to deploy Workday agents, but has paused activation in its Workday tenant partly because Flex Credits raise questions about who governs usage and pays for overages. At Workday Rising in Las Vegas this week, Sarah Jo (SJ) Rowley, Dow’s HR Digital Product & AI Leader, said the manufacturer already uses agentic capabilities for service delivery in many countries, including front-end HR queries. Dow is on Workday’s Universal Master Service Agreement and uses AI, but has not yet activated agents in its tenant.

Flex Credits shift payment from per-user seat licenses to charges based on work performed by AI. Rowley said IT pays for Dow’s SaaS providers and supplies the support model, while HR uses the capabilities, leaving the company to decide where consumption governance belongs. Under the earlier purchasing approach, an HR team seeking technology had to obtain sourcing approval for a SKU. With Flex Credits, access is available without that purchasing stage gate, but departments can exceed their budgets; Rowley said the company needs a plan for governing those overruns and deciding who is responsible.

Rowley also worries that delegating tasks to agents could erode the skills of employees who previously performed them. If adoption is high and many agents are activated, she asked whether the resulting change creates an affordability challenge. She said Flex Credits make monitoring usage and planning for users going over budget a different responsibility than simply turning on a SKU, and expects many organizations to exceed their allocations.

Rowley said she understands that SaaS companies are investing heavily in agentic innovation and seeking to recover those costs, but said the pricing model changes governance. She said AI governance must address affordability, responsibility and accountability alongside responsible use and data privacy, because Dow remains liable for actions taken by an agent on its behalf. She also raised concern that, without federal AI guardrails in the US, rules could differ by state or city; she cited New York City and said differing rules across individual jurisdictions would be hard to navigate. Rowley said she is not an AI skeptic and praised how much AI had improved in the last six months.

Dow went live on Workday in 2019 and has adapted its processes as cloud features change. Rowley said Dow tries to use many contract capabilities, while ongoing process optimization remains a priority because not every work step is digitized and the business still provides substantial support. She said Workday could eventually guide employees through performance reviews by consolidating tracked check-ins and mapping contributions to goals. That could reduce time spent on an unpopular task and provide more reliable, quantifiable information. For managers, she described a possible alert about unusual attrition among tenured staff in a business segment, instead of requiring them to run and repeatedly filter an attrition report. Rowley called such embedded AI a potential game changer.

Dow plans to deploy Workday agents, but has paused activation in its Workday tenant partly because Flex Credits raise questions about who governs usage and pays for overages. At Workday Rising in Las Vegas this week, Sarah Jo (SJ) Rowley, Dow’s HR Digital Product & AI Leader, said the manufacturer already uses agentic capabilities for service delivery in many countries, including front-end HR queries. Dow is on Workday’s Universal Master Service Agreement and uses AI, but has not yet activated agents in its tenant.

Flex Credits shift payment from per-user seat licenses to charges based on work performed by AI. Rowley said IT pays for Dow’s SaaS providers and supplies the support model, while HR uses the capabilities, leaving the company to decide where consumption governance belongs. Under the earlier purchasing approach, an HR team seeking technology had to obtain sourcing approval for a SKU. With Flex Credits, access is available without that purchasing stage gate, but departments can exceed their budgets; Rowley said the company needs a plan for governing those overruns and deciding who is responsible.

Rowley also worries that delegating tasks to agents could erode the skills of employees who previously performed them. If adoption is high and many agents are activated, she asked whether the resulting change creates an affordability challenge. She said Flex Credits make monitoring usage and planning for users going over budget a different responsibility than simply turning on a SKU, and expects many organizations to exceed their allocations.

Rowley said she understands that SaaS companies are investing heavily in agentic innovation and seeking to recover those costs, but said the pricing model changes governance. She said AI governance must address affordability, responsibility and accountability alongside responsible use and data privacy, because Dow remains liable for actions taken by an agent on its behalf. She also raised concern that, without federal AI guardrails in the US, rules could differ by state or city; she cited New York City and said differing rules across individual jurisdictions would be hard to navigate. Rowley said she is not an AI skeptic and praised how much AI had improved in the last six months.

Dow went live on Workday in 2019 and has adapted its processes as cloud features change. Rowley said Dow tries to use many contract capabilities, while ongoing process optimization remains a priority because not every work step is digitized and the business still provides substantial support. She said Workday could eventually guide employees through performance reviews by consolidating tracked check-ins and mapping contributions to goals. That could reduce time spent on an unpopular task and provide more reliable, quantifiable information. For managers, she described a possible alert about unusual attrition among tenured staff in a business segment, instead of requiring them to run and repeatedly filter an attrition report. Rowley called such embedded AI a potential game changer.