2025R2 Workday Adaptive Planning Release - Five Biggest Updates

ONE – Ask Workday

One of the standout features that has been rolled-out as part of the 2025 R2 Workday Adaptive Planning release is the new ‘Ask Workday’ assistant. This is an AI-powered chat bot that’s embedded within Workday Adaptive Planning that allows you to ask it questions about Workday Adaptive Planning and your data.

Similar to Co-Pilot or Chat-GPT, you can ask it questions in natural language, and it provides answers based on the context of where you are in the system, such as on reports, or dashboards or sheets.

Unlike Chat-GPT or other AI-assistance, the Ask Workday bot is trained specifically on documentation from Workday Adaptive Planning and the Workday Adaptive Planning community, so you can ask it specific questions about Workday Adaptive Planning features that other AI tools might not be aware of.

How to Enable the Ask Workday Assistant:

1. Navigate to Administration -> Permission Sets.
2. Select permission set you want to enable it for.
3. Tick ‘Access Ask Workday for Workday Adaptive Planning.
4. Save permission set.
5. Refresh Workday Adaptive Planning instance.

How to Use Ask Workday:

Ask Workday can be toggled anywhere in Workday Adaptive Planning by clicking on the ‘Ask Workday’ button at the top right hand side of the page. In its current rolled-out form, the primary use case of the assistant is asking questions about Workday Adaptive Planning and retrieving information from Workday Community. For example:

• How can I add a note to a report?
• How can I update a permission set?
• Where do I go to create a new plan version?

While the current version focuses on answering product and help-related queries, early adopters have previewed enhanced functionality where Ask Workday can analyse and interact with your organisation’s own Workday Adaptive Planning data. While this doesn’t appear to be widely available in most tenants yet, we hope this more powerful version of Ask Workday will be rolled-out soon.

TWO – Translated Currency for Actuals Load

Previously, all data in Workday Adaptive Planning had to be loaded in the base-level local currency, with system-maintained exchange rates translating values up the level hierarchy.

With the new Translated Currency for Actuals Load feature, users can now import translated currency values directly at the base level, bypassing the Workday Adaptive Planning native translation during reporting.

This is particularly useful for organisations consolidating financials across regions, as it allows greater alignment between Workday Adaptive Planning and external systems such as ERP or data warehouses.

How to Enable Translated Currencies:

1. Navigate to Modelling -> Versions.
2. Select the relevant base actuals version.
3. Select ‘Enable Translated Currencies’.
4. Select one currency to load actual translated values into.
5. Save version.

How to Load Translated Currencies:

When you enable translated currencies, a new ‘Translated Currency’ sub-actuals version will be available to import into. Translated currencies can be loaded into this version via either Import or Data Integration to be referenced on the reporting layer. You can follow the normal import or integration process for this.

Important:

• Translated currency for actuals load is used purely for reporting purposes, which applies to Dashboards, Web Reports and OfficeConnect Reports. Base local currency will still need to be loaded from a modelling and plan perspective.
• You can only select one currency to load translated currencies into per actuals version. This would normally be the Top Corporate Currency.
• To enable translated currencies, all references to actuals versions need to be removed from allocation and elimination rules.

THREE – Predictive Forecaster Updates

The predictive forecaster is a relatively new feature that was introduced in a release last year. Since its launch, Workday Adaptive Planning has been working to make improvements to it and introduce new features. With the 2025 R2 release, Workday’s introduced three key improvements to the Predictive forecaster.

1. ARIMA Algorithm:

The predictive forecaster now introduces a new machine learning algorithm called ARIMA. This is an Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average time series algorithm best suited for stationary data with little seasonality. The algorithm consists of three core components.

• Autoregression: looks at the relationship between the current value and its past values. For example, if you’re trying to predict sales for next month, it will check how sales in the previous months affect the next month’s sales. It uses a number of past time points to make this prediction.
• Integration: helps remove trends by differencing data. For example, if sales are steadily increasing, differencing removes the growth trend to just leave fluctuations. This makes the data more stationary which makes it easier to predict.
• Moving Average: focuses on the relationship between the current value and past forecast errors (difference between actuals and predicted values). It tries to correct any mistakes made in earlier predictions by smoothing out noise in the data.

The ARIMA algorithm can be selected in the Algorithm section under ‘Advanced Settings’ when creating a new predictive forecast.

2. Feature Impact Chart:

When you create a predictive forecast, if you tick the ‘Forecast Explanation’ option you receive further explanations of how the predictive values were derived. A new chart that is created as part of this forecast explanation is the ‘Feature Impact’ chart. For forecasts using the ARIMA algorithm, this feature impact chart will show how each of the autoregressive, integrated and moving average components of the algorithm are influencing the output.

To access this chart:

1. Generate a new predictive forecast, ensuring ‘forecast explanation’ is ticked.
2. Once the new forecast is run, click ‘View History’.
3. Select ‘Confidence metrics’.
4. Select a base intersection of data.
5. View the feature impact chart (if the algorithm used is applicable to that intersection).

3. Auto-Fill Forecasts:

When you previously created a predictive forecast, all forecast fields would need to be manually populated. Now Adaptive will automatically populate some fields with default selections, such as:

• Forecast Version, Actuals Version, Plan Version, Accuracy Metric, and Seasonality Detection.
• Once you select a Sheet, fields like Periods, Levels, and Dimensions are also auto-filled.

This enhancement can help planners build predictive forecasts faster with fewer manual inputs.

FOUR – Collaboration Enhancements

With the 2025 R2 release, Workday Adaptive Planning has introduced new ways to collaborate with users. The two major collaboration features are a new integration with external communication app Slack, as well as the ability to tag users in comments on dashboard widgets.

Slack Integration:

Workday Adaptive Planning now supports native integration with Slack to enable users to access their Workday Adaptive Planning notifications directly in the Slack application. To enable this integration:

1. Navigate to Administration -> Notification Preferences.
2. Select ‘Notification Preferences’ -> Connect Slack.
3. Follow the prompts to log-in to your organisation’s slack domain and allow permissions on the Slack application.
4. Once integrated, user’s can manage their own Slack notifications by navigating to ‘Notifications’ -> ‘Manage Notifications’ and connecting their Slack to their Workday Adaptive Planning instance.

Workday Adaptive Planning notifications will now appear in a dedicated ‘Workday Adaptive Planning’ application within Slack. Any tagged Workday Adaptive Planning comments will include a link that will take you directly to the comment within Workday Adaptive Planning.

It’s important to note that Slack integration only supports:

• Workday Adaptive Planning standalone instances not connected to Workday tenants.
• Workday Adaptive Planning Multi-Instances. You must configure each instance individually for notifications.

Tag Users in Workday Adaptive Planning Dashboards:

Users can now tag Workday Adaptive Planning users directly on widgets within a dashboard. This enables real-time, in-context collaboration without switching between tools.

A new ‘Create Thread’ option appears on dashboard widgets, where you can @tag Workday Adaptive Planning users and create a thread of comments. When a user is tagged in a comment, a notification is sent to that user (via email or Slack if enabled) with a direct link to navigate directly from the notification to the relevant comment in Workday Adaptive Planning.

FIVE – Linked Account Overrides

Feature Release Date Update (AEDT):

• Version specific (through your named support contact) available from 28th October 2025
• Default for All instances targeting re-enablement by the End of December 2025.

Linked accounts for overrides is a much-anticipated feature which was announced back in 2023 and was initially released to all tenants in this 2025 R2 update.

Currently linked accounts can be used to link data from underlying planning models into your P&L or Balance Sheet. However, a key drawback of linked accounts is that it locks the data and does not allow users to manually override the data on the P&L or Balance Sheet. With this Link Overrides feature, you will have the ability to override the links for specific versions, allowing you to manually input or import data against these accounts.

Unfortunately, Workday Adaptive Planning has since rolled-back this feature with intention to re-release it at a future service update. Additional information about this feature will be made available once the feature is re-released.

Conclusion

The 2025R2 release is another strong step forward from Workday Adaptive Planning. Features like Ask Workday and Collaboration enhancements make Workday Adaptive Planning feel more modern and connected, while improvements to Predictive Forecasting and currency flexibility shows how Workday Adaptive Planning continues to focus on usability and intelligence.

While we’ll unfortunately have to wait a little longer for Linked Account Overrides, this release gives us plenty to be excited about – especially the growing role of AI and machine learning in planning.

Want to view the Workday Adaptive Planning NR2 2025 Webinar Recording?

Scan the QR code to join our Workday Adaptive Planning Linkedin User Group. You’ll access the recording, be able to network with the group members, and be in the know for the latest information. Alternatively please use this link.

Want to know more?

Explore how these features, and more, can improve your planning process; visit our Workday Adaptive Planning page or contact us for a tailored demo.