Today, Workday has publicly announced its acquisition of Evisort, a contract management platform powered by artificial intelligence. The financial details of the transaction remain undisclosed.
Terrance Wampler, the group general manager at Workday, expressed that the acquisition of Evisort will equip Workday with a variety of document processing tools driven by AI, enhancing their existing finance and human resources software.
Wampler believes that the integration of Evisort will allow Workday to fulfill its vision of assisting customers in capitalizing on their most crucial data. With the aid of AI-driven document intelligence, businesses will be able to swiftly and effectively discover and implement insights.
Evisort, headquartered in San Francisco, was established by a group of researchers from Harvard Law and MIT, namely Amine Anoun, Jake Sussman, and Jerry Ting, back in 2016. The startup currently provides AI-driven modules that aid customers in analyzing various documents, such as revenue contracts, asset agreements, and supplier invoices, for any omissions or errors, and provides suggestions for document language.
Moreover, Evisort assists in identifying key factors in documents and evaluates document language against historical data. It also automatically notifies customers about important dates related to their files, such as contract renewals.
The sector of AI document tools is highly competitive, with Fortune Business Insights predicting its worth to reach $19.32 billion by 2032. Despite facing a security setback, Evisort managed to expand its client base, boasting names like Microsoft, Motley Fool, NetApp, and Vonage.
Before its acquisition, Evisort successfully raised $155.6 million in capital and debt from investors, including General Atlantic, TCV, Vertex Ventures, and Microsoft’s M12, according to Crunchbase.
Evisort’s CEO, Ting, assured that Workday customers will soon be introduced to Evisort’s features, such as chatbots built to reference a company’s knowledge bases, like HR and finance policies.
Ting expressed his excitement to integrate Evisort’s document intelligence technology with Workday’s unified finance and HR platform. He believes it will enable customers to effectively leverage crucial business data within a single system of truth.
Workday anticipates closing the acquisition, its second this year following HR platform HiredScore, in the third quarter of its fiscal year 2025, subject to customary closing conditions.
The acquisition of Evisort is a part of Workday’s growing collection of AI-focused acquisitions, which began with HR analytics firm Identified in 2014. Furthermore, in 2018, the company acquired SkipFlag, an AI knowledge base that creates itself from an enterprise’s internal chats.
In broader terms, Workday has been ramping up its investments in AI over the past few years. In 2023, the company announced it would expand its Workday Ventures VC fund by $250 million to partly support AI, machine learning, and workflow automation ventures. It has also incorporated AI capabilities into its various HR products, including “agents” designed to automate repetitive back-office tasks.
At its Workday Rising conference today, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach described AI as a “tectonic shift” with “immense potential” for the enterprise sector. However, he noted that many businesses were finding it challenging to implement AI in a manner that yields significant results.
