The AI behind Workday’s high-impact advocacy program

Customer advocacy has never been more important – or more complex. In an era where trust drives decisions and peer validation outweighs polished marketing, turning happy customers into active brand champions is a business imperative.

Enter artificial intelligence (AI): the technology transforming how we identify, engage, and scale customer advocacy like never before.

But as AI reshapes the way we work, it’s not about replacing human connection – it’s about amplifying it.

Because the truth is, advocacy isn't built on automation alone. It’s built on relationships, relevance, and the right story (told at the right time).

Turning customer engagement into advocacy with AI

Picture this: A customer purchases your product. Instantly, AI begins tracking their journey – understanding their preferences, interests, and how they interact with your brand. But instead of just firing off generic automated emails, AI builds a fully personalized advocacy journey tailored specifically to that individual.

It’s more than just personalization. AI can craft detailed content that aligns precisely with each customer's interests. It can invite them to events that resonate with their needs, identify which social media platforms they’re most active on, and nudge them to share their experiences authentically.

And it doesn’t stop there.

AI that learns, adapts, and engages

AI is constantly learning. It continuously tracks customer engagement, refines its understanding of their behavior, and adapts your engagement strategies in real-time. 

Imagine knowing the exact moment a customer is ready to become an advocate – and then sending them a perfectly timed email asking for a testimonial, review, or even a piece of user-generated content.

Even more powerful? AI can highlight which customers are engaging the most, identify which stories are resonating best, and help you reward your most active advocates. Whether it's personalized gifts or early access to new products, AI ensures recognition is both meaningful and timely.

It may sound like a dream, but AI is the secret weapon that makes this vision a reality. It’s where human connection meets machine intelligence.

Why customer advocacy matters at every stage

At Workday, we often say what our CEO has long believed: customers are your best sales team. That philosophy drives everything we do in our customer advocacy program.

We’re intentional about identifying our most loyal and satisfied customers and turning them into brand ambassadors – people who genuinely want to share how they’ve partnered with Workday and the impact it’s had on their organizations.

Mapping advocacy to the buyer journey

We’ve all seen the typical buyer journey: awareness, education, consideration, conversion, and community. What’s often overlooked is how customer advocacy plays a powerful role at every single stage.

Let me walk you through how we align advocacy to each part of this journey:

1. Awareness

At the top of the funnel, it’s about visibility. Think press releases, social media cards, and announcements about customer go-lives or new deals. These moments, paired with authentic customer quotes, help generate buzz and credibility.

2. Education

Here, we tap into third-party validation – analyst reviews, Gartner reports, TrustRadius rankings. When customers leave reviews that land us in a top quadrant or rating, it’s their voice doing the talking, not ours.

3. Consideration

This is where advocacy shines brightest. We lean heavily on in-depth case studies, video testimonials, real-world use cases, and value-driven infographics. It’s about showing – not telling – how our solutions deliver measurable results.

4. Conversion

When a prospect is almost ready to commit, that’s when we bring in peer-to-peer engagement. We offer one-on-one customer reference calls to address specific concerns and share direct experiences. 

Lately, we’ve taken this a step further with customer reference roundtables – a single customer speaking to a group of prospects. These sessions are incredibly impactful, offering honest, unscripted insights that help move deals across the finish line.

5. Community

Beyond the purchase, we nurture a thriving customer community. It’s a space where our customers connect, collaborate, and share their stories with one another. That sense of connection reinforces their loyalty and builds even more advocates organically.

Building a structured customer advocacy program

Let me walk you through how we’ve structured our customer advocacy program at Workday. It’s been designed with clear goals, targeted personas, and dedicated teams – each contributing to business impact in a focused way.

Defining the goal

Every successful customer advocacy program needs a clearly defined objective. At Workday, we grounded ours in two core outcomes:

1. Increasing brand awareness
2. Driving revenue growth by supporting pipeline and influencing deals

If you’re a customer marketer or leading advocacy efforts, you need to stay close to the numbers – especially sales numbers – if you want to create real impact and earn your seat at the table.

Focusing on the right personas

With those goals in mind, we identified the key personas that advocacy efforts should support. At Workday, we focus on four primary executive roles:

• CFO (Chief Financial Officer)
• CHRO (Chief Human Resources Officer)
• CSO (Chief Security Officer)
• CIO (Chief Information Officer)

By aligning advocacy content and reference efforts to these personas, we can ensure relevance and resonance throughout the buyer journey.

The four pillars of advocacy at Workday

We’ve structured our program into four pillars, each with a dedicated team responsible for driving measurable outcomes.

1. Customer references

This is one of the most critical and high-impact areas. The references team handles onboarding customer advocates and mapping them to the right prospects. This includes setting up one-on-one reference calls as well as group calls and Customer Reference Roundtables (CRRs), where a single customer shares their story with multiple prospects. 

These activities directly influence the pipeline and support revenue generation.

2. Public advocacy

This pillar is arguably the most challenging. Legal constraints and corporate communication policies often limit what customers can publicly say about their vendor partnerships. But we work closely with our advocates to participate in events, webinars, case studies, video testimonials, and more. 

These stories are powerful – and when done right, they elevate the brand in ways traditional marketing can’t.

3. Analyst relations

Our analyst advocacy team identifies and engages customers who are willing to share their experiences on platforms like Gartner, TrustRadius, G2, and others. Positive reviews and strong analyst feedback help position our products effectively in the market and build trust with new prospects.

4. Customer community

We’ve built a vibrant community called the Ask Makers Collective, where customers – especially from finance and planning – connect, share insights, and learn from each other. This community-driven advocacy helps maintain strong relationships and creates a feedback loop that informs everything from product development to go-to-market strategy.

Advocacy takes a village

A strong customer advocacy program doesn’t exist in isolation. It requires alignment across multiple teams. At Workday, we closely collaborate with:

• Customer Success Managers
• Product Marketing
• Sales
• Demand Generation
• Product teams

Turning a customer into an advocate is a team sport. It takes cross-functional coordination, shared goals, and a unified understanding of what success looks like.

How we're using AI in customer marketing

After laying out the structure of our customer advocacy program, I want to shift gears and talk about something that’s transforming how we work – AI in customer marketing.

AI plays a crucial role across the board. It enables problem solving, creates deeply personalized experiences, helps us craft compelling customer stories, and ensures those stories reach the right audience at the right time. 

At Workday, AI isn’t just a futuristic concept – it’s already powering many of our advocacy activities today.

We’ve grouped our AI use cases into three primary buckets. Let me walk you through each one and the specific tools we use.

1. Content and storytelling

This is by far our strongest use case for AI. When I talk about content and storytelling, I mean the full lifecycle of customer story creation – whether it’s a webinar, case study, video testimonial, or sales reference. AI supports us from start to finish.

From data to narrative

We start by using AI to gather and analyze customer data based on product usage, demographics, and behavior. The AI then generates compelling narratives tailored by industry, buyer persona, and business outcomes. 

At Workday, we focus heavily on both industry- and persona-driven messaging, and AI helps us build those narratives with precision.

Building briefs and scripts

Once a narrative is in place, we may identify a specific customer – let’s say, someone like Martha from Customer Marketing Alliance. We input Martha’s name and her company into the AI tool, which then scans her public content and social media, understands her interests, and generates a personalized story brief. This brief includes suggested questions I should ask during an interview, based on her role, her company, and her digital footprint.

Transforming transcripts into content

After the interview, we use AI tools to turn transcripts into formatted quotes, grouped by theme – industry, product, persona, or value message. If it’s a video interview, the AI can cut it into short, high-impact snippets, add stock or branded B-roll, and create a polished final video.

The tools we use

Here are the four main tools we rely on for this process:

• Anyword – This tool helps us write narratives, scripts, and even generate interview questions. It includes a great feature called Prompt Enabler, which helps refine prompts to improve AI outcomes. Essentially, it helps you tell the AI exactly what you want, so the AI can give you exactly what you need. It’s AI helping you use AI – very meta, but very effective.
• Edge & Decay (in-house tool) – We use this internally to support various aspects of content creation and storytelling.
• An automated reference tool – This one’s incredible. It records reference calls, transcribes them, extracts quotes, and even sends those quotes to the customer for review and approval – completely automatically. Once approved, the quotes are pushed into our internal system and flagged for campaign managers to use.
• SlapFive – A fantastic tool that simplifies video reference collection. It sends a prompt link to the customer advocate, who can record themselves answering predefined questions. Once submitted, the tool generates a clickable storyboard with embedded videos, which we use as a powerful reference asset in late-stage sales cycles.

All of this is happening now – it’s not a vision. We’re actively using these tools every day.

2. Data analytics

Once we’ve created and shared our stories, we need to measure their impact. AI helps us track which stories are performing well, what kind of outreach they’re driving (like LinkedIn engagement or lead generation), and most importantly, how they influence revenue.

For example, if we host a group reference call with 10 prospects, we feed those participants directly into our CRM. The CRM then maps each prospect to open opportunities – say, a $1M deal – and connects their engagement with the advocacy activities they’ve experienced.

At Workday, customer marketing has a revenue target. That means we’re responsible for showing how the content we create and the advocacy moments we drive directly contribute to pipeline and closed revenue. AI helps us do that with precision.

3. Predictive analytics and personalization

This is all about amplification – getting the right story to the right audience, at the right time.

We start by feeding a target audience into the system. AI then analyzes their interests, behaviors, and demographics. 

Based on that, it matches them with existing customer stories and sends out personalized content that aligns with what they’ve shown interest in.

It’s predictive analytics in action – we’re anticipating what our audience cares about, then delivering content that speaks directly to those needs. It’s a game-changer for campaign performance and engagement.

Real impact: How AI is changing the game

Let’s talk about impact – because that’s what really matters.

We’ve been using AI in our customer marketing efforts for about a year now, and the results have been significant. We’re seeing an increase in ROI, generating more leads, and contributing more directly to revenue. 

One of the biggest shifts is our ability to finally connect the dots and report on the exact impact of our efforts. Before, we were doing great work, but we didn’t always have the data to prove it. AI has changed that.

Time savings and efficiency

The impact isn't just in numbers – it’s also in time. A good example: at our annual Workday Rising event last year, we recorded 60 customer videos. Without AI, it took us six months to turn those raw recordings into polished content ready to go live.

This year, we produced 65 videos – and AI helped us complete the entire process in just two months. That’s a four-month reduction in production time. And the quality didn’t drop – we were still able to align each video with our messaging and goals. That’s the power of efficiency at scale.

Real-time personalization and stronger relationships

Thanks to AI, we’re building better relationships with our customers, too. In our customer community, we’ve introduced an AI-powered chatbot that provides 24/7 support. 

It doesn’t just answer questions – it actively maps customer issues to the right teams, whether that’s customer success or product, ensuring they get timely and relevant support.

Smarter marketing measurement

As I mentioned earlier, we now have better visibility into how our advocacy efforts are performing. AI allows us to track and measure outcomes more effectively – whether it's engagement, lead generation, or revenue influenced. We know what’s working, and we can course-correct in real time.

Faster, more strategic decisions

AI is also speeding up decision-making. With the right data in front of us, we can act quickly, reduce unnecessary costs, and focus our efforts where they matter most. 

Whether it's choosing which content to prioritize, which prospects to target, or which stories to amplify, AI gives us the confidence to make faster, smarter decisions.

AI is evolving fast, and its role in marketing is expanding just as quickly. It’s helping businesses grow more efficiently, serve customers better, and deliver real ROI. But as marketers, we also need to stay mindful of the ethical implications of AI – how it’s used, what data it relies on, and how we ensure it remains a tool for good.

I’m not an AI expert – but I can confidently say that the results we’re seeing at Workday are exciting, impactful, and just the beginning.

This article is based on a presentation given by Meenakshi at our Customer Marketing Summit, New York 2025.

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