The trust advantage: Driving efficiency without losing the human touch

Workers who feel like AI is a shadowy force monitoring them, making opaque decisions, or assuming their roles, are more disengaged and disenchanted. Here, Workday unpacks how trust is what turns AI from a source of employee anxiety into a buffer against burnout.

Artificial intelligence has long promised to provide businesses with more time, but that efficiency is only one part of the puzzle. If workers remain sceptical about such technologies, and when corrections are required to AI-generated work, AI doesn’t strengthen a business; it erodes the trust on which it depends.

According to Jo-Anne Ruhl, the vice president and managing director in ANZ for cloud platform Workday, AI “only works at scale if people trust it”. Trust, the provider believes, is the bridge between operational efficiency and the preservation of human connection.

Thinking beyond productivity

Workday’s Beyond Productivity: Measuring the Real Value of AI report shines light on the reality that AI-inspired productivity gains alone are not translating into better outcomes for businesses across the board: it identified, among other things, that over one-third of the time saved through AI use is being offset by rework, and that highly-engaged employees are losing up to one-and-a-half weeks annually fixing AI outputs.

The result is what Ruhl described, at the recently-held Elevate 2026 event, as an AI tax: “spending more time auditing the machine, than doing the work we love”. While new technologies are making individual tasks faster, outcomes are not improving at the same rate.

The implication is straightforward: speed along is not resulting in additional value being created. Moreover, without confidence in the systems producing that speed, efficiency becomes fragile. It is through this that a trust gap emerges. To this end, the Beyond Productivity report notes that business leaders who reinvest AI gains into their people outperform those that primarily designate them towards technology, and are able to garner “stronger outcomes and more sustainable value”.

“Leaders can introduce powerful automation without eroding the sense of agency, inclusion, and connection that keeps people engaged,” Ruhl says, provided AI is deployed openly and ethically. “It's about using technology to create breathing room for human connection, not to isolate people behind screens.”

Trust as critical infrastructure

Trust has become a critical differentiator in enterprise AI, Ruhl says, because AI that moves fast but is ungovernable “simply doesn’t scale”. Speed and scale, she says, “are now just table stakes”, with trust being the difference-maker. Larger Australian businesses now need AI that operates inside of their existing controls, not around them.

This philosophy underpins Sana, Workday’s AI foundation, which the platform calls “superintelligence for work”. Rather than functioning as a standalone chatbot or isolated assistant, Sana is embedded across Workday's applications, automating role-specific processes while leaving human judgement firmly in place.

In practice, Ruhl explains, “this means AI takes on the repetitive, cross-system drudgery, freeing up managers and employees to focus on the conversations, coaching, and mentoring that define healthy workplace relationships”.

To support that approach, Sana operates within Workday's existing security, permissions, and audit framework. Its Agent System of Record tracks AI identities, permissions, and activity history, ensuring every action is attributable. “Our Agent System of Record tracks agent identities, permissions, and activity history so every single AI action is fully attributable and auditable,” Ruhl says. “You can't have enterprise adoption without absolute confidence and accountability.”

Keeping humans in the loop

For Australian businesses, the question is no longer whether AI should participate in decision-making, but the extent to which it has influence. For Ruhl, the line in the sand is clear: “AI should inform decisions, never silently replace them”. This is especially so for decisions involving ethics, culture, relationships, and longer-term strategy, which must remain fundamentally human responsibilities.

“The ideal balance is letting AI do the heavy lifting on information and options, while leaving people to make the final calls where values, nuance, and relationships matter most,” she says. Accordingly, Workday has designed its AI to gather data across systems, surface contextual insights, and execute routine workflows so that leaders can see more, faster, without ever losing control.

In the face of a proliferation of new technologies in a crowded landscape, businesses across the country are at an inflection point, via which they have the opportunity to reinvent the working day. This requires, Ruhl says, a frictionless, integrated AI experience that allows workforces to reimagine what’s possible. Businesses that “win in this next era”, she says, “won’t be the ones with the most AI tools, but the ones that turn AI into a governed, outcomes-driven system of work”.

It is here that Workday’s “superintelligence for work” comes to the fore; AI capable of connecting hundreds of enterprise applications to orchestrate end-to-end workflows, rather than creating yet another collection of disconnected assistants and data silos. “The leaders of tomorrow will insist that every agent runs inside a unified enterprise framework so every action is explainable,” Ruhl says.

Trust across generations

Building trust also requires recognising that employees experience AI differently. Younger workers, particularly those in Generation Z, report greater concerns about loneliness and declining interpersonal interaction in increasingly digital workplaces. For organisations seeking to build confidence in AI, transparency and participation become especially important. Businesses must, Ruhl says, start by giving those workers AI that they can understand, shape, and hold accountable, “rather than a black box that alienates them”.

Workday approaches this in two ways: the Agent System of Record provides visible governance and accountability, while Sana's no-code agent builder allows employees to design their own workflows across everyday applications. Giving employees authorship over how AI appears in their working lives, Ruhl argues, reinforces both autonomy and trust.

Ultimately, the businesses that derive lasting value from AI will not be those that automate the greatest number of tasks; those that recognise trust as the enabling condition for every efficiency gain are the ones which will separate themselves from the competition. When employees understand how AI works, retain agency over its use, and remain central to the decisions that matter most, technology becomes much more than just a productivity tool. It becomes critical infrastructure for stronger businesses: where operational efficiency enhances, rather than diminishes, the human connections that sustain work itself.

Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance, HR, planning, and analytics, helping Australian businesses streamline operations, ensure compliance, and gain real-time insights to drive growth. To read its Beyond Productivity: Measuring the Real Value of AI report, click here. To learn more about Workday, click here.

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