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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 to enable users to complete self-service actions in Workday.
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 always keep the Guide skill active.
  1. Access the
    Agent Management Hub
     report.
  2. Select the
    Unregistered Workday Agent
     section.
  3. On the
    Self-Service Agent
     row, click
    Register
    .
  4. Select the
    Confirm
     check box, and then click
    OK
    .
    You can now access the Self-Service Agent on the
    Agent Registry
     section.
  5. On the
    Agent Registry
     section, select
    Self-Service Agent
    .
  6. Click
    Configure Agent
    .
  7. On the
    Status
     column, select each relevant skill you want to enable.
  8. In the
    Available To
     column for each skill, select the security groups that you want to access that skill.
    Example: For the ESS - Human Capital Management - Base skill, select the Employee As Self security group selected to provide all employees with access to this skill. For the MSS - Human Capital Management - Base skill, you might select the Manager and Management Chain security groups to provide only managers in a management chain with access to the skill.
    Workday evaluates both user access to the agent and 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
    Save
    .
  • Workday displays the Workday Chat icon in the global navigation for you and your employees.
  • Employees who 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.