At Workday Rising in Las Vegas, HR leaders from Chipotle, Tapestry, Inc. and Whistle Express described how they are preparing AI projects for business use, while noting that clear returns on investment remain difficult to establish. The panelists said long-term value depends on engaging people across an organization, reducing friction and setting appropriate outcomes; they identified culture and process design as central to implementation.

Chipotle HRIT Director Tariq Khan said the restaurant chain has more than 130,000 employees and hires 5,000 people each week, making recruitment friction a major operational challenge. Using Workday AI services, Chipotle offers Ava, a Recruiting Agent available 24/7. Job seekers scan a QR code at a restaurant to ask Ava about roles and applications. The company said its job application volume rose from 50% to 85%, restaurant role time-to-hire fell by as much as 75%, and the process saves about $1 million annually in managers’ administrative time. Khan said Chipotle redesigned recruitment from the initial QR scan through the job offer to reduce manual steps, allowing store crews to spend more time serving customers.

Tapestry’s SVP of Global People Operations and Employee Experience, Jen Houck, said the company brought global HR operations onto a shared Workday platform to connect its brands. Before adopting it, Tapestry identified globally consistent processes and cleaner data as prerequisites for further innovation. Its HR roadmap prioritizes recruitment, as store managers in North America and Europe now recruit staff, and HR service delivery across the employee journey. Houck said the company is beginning work on AI-supported employee services. Eighteen months ago, when Tapestry began discussing HR agents, knowledge management itself seemed difficult to manage; Houck said the team can now explore agentic AI and sees a future in which HR staff spend less time on repetitive tasks and more on important points in the employee life cycle.

Whistle Express CHRO Jill Mason said the car wash operator combined two HR environments on Workday after an acquisition and implemented the platform in under five months. She said operational discipline provides a foundation for AI readiness. The acquired organization had multiple technology stacks, so executives redesigned the company’s processes to make them simpler and repeatable. Whistle Express expects to begin implementing Workday’s Recruiting Agent soon and is assessing where platform services could improve efficiency. Mason said 1.5 full-time equivalent employees handle payroll for more than 4,000 people, with much of the work still manual despite employees being paid accurately and on time. The company is considering whether a Payroll Agent could send targeted alerts to the right managers at the right time without affecting pay.

At Workday Rising in Las Vegas, HR leaders from Chipotle, Tapestry, Inc. and Whistle Express described how they are preparing AI projects for business use, while noting that clear returns on investment remain difficult to establish. The panelists said long-term value depends on engaging people across an organization, reducing friction and setting appropriate outcomes; they identified culture and process design as central to implementation.

Chipotle HRIT Director Tariq Khan said the restaurant chain has more than 130,000 employees and hires 5,000 people each week, making recruitment friction a major operational challenge. Using Workday AI services, Chipotle offers Ava, a Recruiting Agent available 24/7. Job seekers scan a QR code at a restaurant to ask Ava about roles and applications. The company said its job application volume rose from 50% to 85%, restaurant role time-to-hire fell by as much as 75%, and the process saves about $1 million annually in managers’ administrative time. Khan said Chipotle redesigned recruitment from the initial QR scan through the job offer to reduce manual steps, allowing store crews to spend more time serving customers.

Tapestry’s SVP of Global People Operations and Employee Experience, Jen Houck, said the company brought global HR operations onto a shared Workday platform to connect its brands. Before adopting it, Tapestry identified globally consistent processes and cleaner data as prerequisites for further innovation. Its HR roadmap prioritizes recruitment, as store managers in North America and Europe now recruit staff, and HR service delivery across the employee journey. Houck said the company is beginning work on AI-supported employee services. Eighteen months ago, when Tapestry began discussing HR agents, knowledge management itself seemed difficult to manage; Houck said the team can now explore agentic AI and sees a future in which HR staff spend less time on repetitive tasks and more on important points in the employee life cycle.

Whistle Express CHRO Jill Mason said the car wash operator combined two HR environments on Workday after an acquisition and implemented the platform in under five months. She said operational discipline provides a foundation for AI readiness. The acquired organization had multiple technology stacks, so executives redesigned the company’s processes to make them simpler and repeatable. Whistle Express expects to begin implementing Workday’s Recruiting Agent soon and is assessing where platform services could improve efficiency. Mason said 1.5 full-time equivalent employees handle payroll for more than 4,000 people, with much of the work still manual despite employees being paid accurately and on time. The company is considering whether a Payroll Agent could send targeted alerts to the right managers at the right time without affecting pay.