Dive Brief:
- A federal judge will allow Workday Inc. to supply a list of employers who enabled its platform’s artificial intelligence features to a third-party administrator, according to court documents published Tuesday. The administrator would then use the list to determine the eligibility of individuals seeking to opt into a discrimination suit against the company.
- Plaintiffs in the case, Mobley v. Workday, Inc., proposed a process by which opt-in respondents would have selected employers to which they applied from a list of all employers that used Workday’s services over a specified timeframe, according to an Aug. 20 filing. Workday objected to this proposal, claiming that it would be “unfairly prejudicial” to its customers and could have “significant implications for Workday and its competitive positioning in the marketplace.”
- Judge Rita Lin acknowledged that disclosure of Workday’s general customer list could be potentially prejudicial. Lin set a deadline of Sept. 10 for Workday to provide an employer list to an administrator. A case management conference for Mobley is scheduled for Oct. 1.
Dive Insight:
The collective action against Workday alleges that the company’s AI-based application recommendation system discriminated against workers ages 40 and older. Lin had ordered Workday last month to produce a list of customers that enabled AI features despite the company’s attempt to distinguish its products from one another and thereby limit the size of the potential class of affected workers.
According to that decision, Workday specifically argued that applicants who were scored, sorted, ranked or screened using its HiredScore AI product should be excluded from the collective. The company previously clarified that HiredScore contains two AI features, Spotlight and Fetch, which are separate from its Candidate Skills Match AI product that is embedded in Workday’s own recruiting platform.
In Tuesday’s update, however, both Spotlight and Fetch were included alongside Candidate Skills Match as among the AI features that Workday would include when formulating its list of employers to the third-party administrator.
The lawsuit appears not to have deterred Workday’s AI ambitions. Days prior to the court’s Aug. 25 update, the company announced that it had agreed to acquire Paradox, an agentic AI platform primarily targeted at front-line industries. Weeks prior to that acquisition, Workday acquired Flowise, an open-source AI agent builder.
Separately, Workday confirmed this month that a social engineering attack breached its customer support system, granting attackers access to Workday support tickets that included customer data. The company said the attack targeted a third-party vendor and that intruders did not access data stored on Workday’s own servers, Cybersecurity Dive reported.
