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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2026-09-04
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 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. Select
    Self-Service Agent
     as the agent to register and configure.
    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 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.
  2. (Optional) On the
    Guide
     skill, click
    Create Fallback Message
    . As you configure the custom fallback message, consider:
    Option Description
    Fallback Message
    Enter the message that you want to display for users when the Self-Service Agent encounters an issue.
    Link Text
    If you want to include a link with the fallback message, specify the link text here.
    Link URL
    If you want to include a link with the fallback message, specify the link URL here.
    Although you configure the message on the
    Guide
     skill, the message applies to all skills across the entire agent.
    The message displays for users when all 4 of these scenarios are true:
    • The tool the user was last interacting with fails.
    • The agent was unable to find a relevant policy document (or the Policy Search skill is inactive).
    • The agent was unable to find a link to a Workday task that could help the user.
    • The agent was unable to route the user to create a case.
  3. Click
    Save
    .
  4. (Optional) Turn on or off individual tools in the Self-Service Agent.
    On the
    Agent Management Hub
    , navigate to
    Agent Registry
    Self-Service Agent
    Skills
    Available Skills
     and click
    Configure
    in the
    Tools
     column.
    When you turn off a tool:
    • The tool is hidden from the Self-Service Agent, and the agent will complete prompts without using the tool. Changes can take up to 5 mins to take effect for new conversations. A user already mid-conversation with the agent might not experience the change until they start a new conversation.
    • Your skill-level billing, and default enabled states remain the same. Disabling a tool doesn’t change your subscription cost.
    • You can’t assign tools to specific security groups. Tools inherit the security groups you’ve configured for the skill.
  • Workday displays the Workday Chat icon in the global navigation for you and your employees and removes the Workday Assistant chat bubble to reduce duplication.
  • 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 that functionality within the Self-Service Agent.