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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2026-07-10
Set Up Self-Service Agent

Set Up Self-Service Agent

You might need to take additional steps to enable this feature based on your organization's subscription service agreement. Your organization is either on the Main Service Agreement (MSA) or the Universal Main Service Agreement (UMSA). To determine your organization's subscription service agreement:
  1. Select your profile avatar on Workday Community.
  2. Select
    Profile
    .
  3. On your profile page, select your organization's name, which is beneath your name and next to your job title.
  4. View your
    Subscription Service Agreement
     value.
If the value is:
UMSA is required for non-production and production tenants for Workday-Built agents. UMSA is not required for non-production tenants for self-built agents.
For information about how using agents impacts your Flex Credits, see: Workday Flex Credits Community page.
We recommend that you opt in to the
People Experience
Help
 service on the
Innovation Services And Data Selection Opt-In
 report before you sign the UMSA or change your data hosting region. This prevents a 14 day waiting period limitation for Self-Service Agent to ingest your policy documents.
You can register, configure, and activate the Self-Service Agent using the
Agent Management Hub
.
The Self-Service Agent is a conversational AI agent that retrieves and summarizes broad self-service data and takes action on common interactions. Those actions, called skills, are common tasks that employees perform, such as submitting support requests and viewing absence information. You can specify which Self-Service Agent skills are available and to which security groups, enabling you to provide the appropriate level of actions to the right employees.
While you can override the default skill configurations, you must keep the
Guide
 skill as always active because this is the core skill the agent is required to run on.
  1. Access the
    Agent Management Hub
     report.
  2. Select the
    Unregistered Workday Agent
     tab.
  3. For the
    Self-Service Agent
    , click
    Register
    .
  4. Select the
    Confirm
     check box, and then click
    OK
     to complete the registration.
    Workday moves the
    Self-Service Agent
     to the
    Agent Registry
     tab.
  5. Select the
    Agent Registry
     tab and then click on the
    Self-Service Agent
     name to configure the agent.
  6. From the agent's profile view, click
    Configure Agent
    .
  7. From the
    Status
     column, make each relevant skill available by enabling the toggle slider.
  8. For each available
    Skill
    , populate the
    Available To
     prompt with the security groups that you want to provide access to for that specific skill.
    Example: For the
    ESS - Human Capital Management - Base
     skill, you might want to keep the default
    Employee As Self
     security group selected to provide all employees access to this skill while for the
    MSS - Human Capital Management - Base
     skill, you might select the
    Manager
    and
    Management Chain
     security groups to only provide managers in a management chain access to the skill.
    Workday evaluates both user access to the agent and the user access to the APIs the agent is executing as tools at runtime. Access the
    View Security for Agent Skill
     report to view which security policies must be configured for a given security group for a tool to function.
  9. Click
    Activate
    .
  • Workday displays the Workday Chat icon in the global navigation for you and your employees.
  • Employees that have access to the security groups you specified for each skill and the domain or business process security policy associated with the tools that make up each skill can use the Self-Service Agent.
  • Workday hides the Workday Assistant chat bubble to reduce duplication.