Already on Workday? Add AirAssist for HR Policy AI in Slack, Teams, and Everywhere Else

If you are reading this, you are almost certainly a Workday customer already. Workday is one of the most respected enterprise HCM platforms in the world, and Workday Assistant - extended in 2025-2026 by Workday Illuminate and Sana for Workday - does a lot of things well. Pay slips, time-off balances, worker info edits, reference letter requests, tax forms, Workday Knowledge article lookups. For in-product HCM tasks, it is exactly where it should be.

This page is not about replacing any of that. AirAssist is the handbook-grounded HR policy AI that layers on top of your existing Workday setup and extends the conversational surface into Slack, Microsoft Teams, your intranet, and anywhere else your team already works - including surfaces Workday Assistant does not natively reach.

The real question for Workday customers is not "which AI is better." It is: when an employee asks "can I carry my vacation days into next year?" or "what is our policy on working from another state for three weeks?" in Slack at 9:12am, what answer comes back, is it grounded in your actual handbook (not just Workday Knowledge articles), does HR have a clean audit trail of it, and did the employee have to leave Slack to get it?

That is the gap AirAssist was built for. Workday stays where it is - the system of record for HCM data. AirAssist sits on top of your handbook as the policy-answer layer, available in every channel your team already uses.

Workday Assistant lives primarily inside the Workday ecosystem - the Workday web app, Workday mobile, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365 Copilot - and every one of those surfaces depends on Workday HCM being the authoritative system underneath.

AirAssist is HRIS-agnostic by design. It integrates with Workday (and every other major HRIS) to personalize answers with employee profile, location, role, and department - but it is not anchored to any one HCM. That distinction matters more than it sounds:

• First-class Slack deployment - AirAssist runs as a native Slack bot. Employees ask policy questions in the channels and DMs they already use all day.
• First-class Microsoft Teams deployment - same experience inside Teams, for organizations standardized on M365.
• Intranet / SharePoint / web widget - embed AirAssist wherever your policies already live.
• Future-proof - if your organization ever migrates off Workday to Rippling, UKG, BambooHR, or anything else, AirAssist comes with you. Workday Assistant does not.
• Not tied to Workday Knowledge maintenance - AirAssist reads your actual handbook, addenda, and custom Q&A directly. You do not need to duplicate policy content into Workday Knowledge articles to get good answers.

For most AirMason customers on Workday, AirAssist and Workday Assistant end up doing different jobs on different surfaces. Workday handles "what is my comp this quarter" in the Workday app; AirAssist handles "how does parental leave work for my California-based role?" in Slack - grounded in the handbook, with a citation and an HR-reviewable audit trail.

Workday Assistant answers policy questions by surfacing content from Workday Knowledge - articles your HR team authors and maintains inside Workday. It works if your team has invested heavily in Workday Knowledge, keeps those articles current, and rewrites policy content into that format. But it is bounded to Workday.

AirAssist takes a different approach. You can load up to 200 source documents of any type, from anywhere - and they do not have to be handbooks. Some examples of what AirMason customers actually load:

• The employee handbook itself, plus state and federal addenda
• Benefits carrier PDFs straight from Anthem, Blue Cross, Guardian, your 401(k) provider
• Training manuals, onboarding docs, team playbooks, role-specific SOPs
• Legal policies (anti-harassment, whistleblower, IP), compliance memos, safety protocols
• Culture guides, values documents, DEI materials
• Custom Q&A for company-specific edge cases

Supported formats include PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Google Docs, and HTML. You do not have to rewrite any of that into a separate knowledge-base format - just upload and AirAssist reads it in place. As policies change, you replace the source document; AirAssist's answers update automatically.

This matters because HR policy knowledge does not live in one file. It is scattered across the handbook, benefits provider PDFs, compliance memos, training materials, and institutional knowledge that lives in people's heads. Workday Knowledge requires you to centralize all of that inside Workday. AirAssist lets the content stay where it already lives and grounds answers across all 200 sources at once.

For HRIS context, AirAssist pulls employee profile data (location, role, department, tenure, manager) from Workday or any other major HRIS you use - but its knowledge base is not limited to what lives inside the HCM. Workday Assistant, by design, is anchored to the Workday data model.

If you do not currently have a polished handbook, a free AirMason handbook audit can surface gaps before you deploy any AI assistant on top of your policy content.

HR and legal teams need to know what an AI told an employee, who asked, and whether the answer was correct. This becomes critical the moment an employee references a chatbot response during a leave dispute, a wage question, or any conversation with real legal exposure.

AirAssist records a full audit trail of every answer - the question, the response, the source policy section, and any HR edits or overrides. HR admins can review conversation history, adjust future answers for the same question, download reports, and prove compliance with documentation if needed. Every answer is editable before or after it is shared, and AirAssist learns from those edits for next time.

Workday logs system actions extensively across the HCM - that is a core strength of the platform. However, a dedicated per-answer editorial audit trail and HR override flow for Workday Assistant responses is not a documented primary feature in the same way. For Workday-heavy organizations that have invested in Workday Knowledge governance, this may be sufficient; for HR teams that specifically want an audit-ready policy AI, AirAssist was designed around that requirement from day one.

Workday Assistant is bundled with your Workday HCM subscription at no separate fee - a genuine benefit you are already paying for. AirAssist is not a replacement for any of that. It is an incremental layer specifically for handbook-grounded policy Q&A in the channels your team already uses.

AirAssist pricing is $4.20 per employee per year on top of your existing Workday subscription. For a 500-person organization that is $2,100 per year to add a Slack-and-Teams-native, handbook-grounded policy AI with a full audit trail - roughly the cost of a single legal review engagement and dramatically less than the hours your HR team currently spends answering the same repeat policy questions over and over.

Many AirMason customers on Workday run both side by side: Workday stays the system of record for HCM data and in-product HCM tasks, and AirAssist sits on top of the handbook answering policy questions wherever employees already work. If your organization ever migrates off Workday, AirAssist comes with you - no rebuild, no retraining the AI on a new HCM's knowledge base.

See how AirAssist works or book a demo to walk through a side-by-side Q&A against your current handbook, directly from Slack or Teams.