--- title: "Why Workday is building a semantic layer" url: "https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-building-semantic-layer/" description: "Workday's governance model worked beautifully for humans - until AI arrived and exposed a critical gap: machines can't interpret business logic the way people can." keywords: "atlan, data governance, regovern 2025, regovern watch center" --- > Atlan is hosting Context Conference, bringing together the leaders and builders at the frontier of giving AI the context it needs to understand their business. It runs online on October 28, 2026, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET. Atlan co-founder Prukalpa Sankar opens and closes the day. Leaders from AstraZeneca, BNY and Verizon share why they invest in context and what they get from it. Registrants get early access to The AI Context Gap, a new study from MIT Technology Review Insights. Register: https://atlan.com/context-conference/ **Why Workday is Building a Semantic Layer** is a highlight from Re:Govern 2025 (online, Nov 4-5, 2025) in the Atlan Re:Govern watch center, featuring Joe DosSantos of Workday. Workday's governance model worked beautifully for humans - until AI arrived and exposed a critical gap: machines can't interpret business logic the way people can. Watch it at [https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-building-semantic-layer/](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-building-semantic-layer/); the player asks for an email to keep watching after the first two minutes. All sessions: [Re:Govern watch center](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/). ## Speaker **Joe DosSantos**, Vice President, Enterprise Data & Analytics, Workday. From EMC and TD Bank to Qlik, Joe has built data foundations at scale. At Workday, he leads AI readiness - creating semantic layers that transform the world's largest and cleanest HR-and-finance dataset into precise, trustworthy, organization-specific AI insights. **Company:** Workday is the enterprise AI platform for managing people, money, and agents - powering 11,000+ organizations including half the Fortune 500. ## What's inside Workday built a world-class system where humans spoke the same language through 1,000 glossary terms and 6 million cataloged assets. Then AI changed everything: traditional BI workflows rely on human intuition to interpret questions, but AI struggles with the structured data humans find easy, requiring a reimagined semantic layer that teaches machines the meaning behind the data. Key takeaways: - AI excels at unstructured data but struggles with structured databases that humans navigate easily - Human-readable governance isn't enough - AI needs machine-readable semantic layers to understand business logic - Without crystal-clear context, AI hallucinates answers instead of asking for clarification - The future of governance is teaching AI to say "I don't know" and guide users toward better prompts - Tools like Atlan's MCP server turn shared business language into context AI can actually use ## Chapters From the page's video metadata: 1. When AI meets structured data - Why AI struggles with structured data humans find intuitive. 2. From human-readable to machine-readable governance - Evolving the semantic layer so AI can understand business logic. 3. Preventing AI hallucinations with context - How missing context causes AI to guess - and how to stop it. 4. Teaching AI to say 'I don't know' - Why the future of governance lies in confident uncertainty and guided prompting. 5. Atlan's MCP Server: Turning business language into machine context - How Atlan operationalizes shared meaning through machine-consumable context. ## More from Re:Govern 2025 - [CME Group: Context at Speed](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/cme-group-context-at-speed/) (session recording) - [Mastercard: Context by Design](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/mastercard-context-by-design/) (session recording) - [Workday: Context as Culture](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-context-as-culture/) (session recording) - [Workday's Learnings From its First Talk to Data experiment](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-talk-to-data-learnings/) (highlight) - [How Workday Connects Context Across Business Tools](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/how-workday-connects-context/) (highlight) - [How Mastercard Designs Context at Scale](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/how-mastercard-designs-context/) (highlight) - [Mastercard's Federated Architecture for Agentic Commerce](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/mastercard-federated-architecture/) (highlight) - [How Protocols and Tools are Evolving for Agentic Governance](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/protocols-agentic-governance/) (highlight) - [How Data Roles are Evolving: From Modelers to Context Engineers](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/data-modelers-to-context-engineers/) (highlight) - [The Evolution of Trust: Building the Foundations for Future-Readiness](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/evolution-of-trust/) (session recording) - [How Mercury Insurance is creating PII-free workspaces for AI use cases](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/pii-free-workspaces/) (highlight) - [GitLab's Strategies for Building Reliable Conversational Analytics](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/gitlab-conversational-analytics-strategies/) (highlight) - [AI-Ready Tech Pioneers Share their Single Most Effective AI Readiness Strategies](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/ai-readiness-strategies-pioneers/) (highlight) - [GitLab's Learnings from its First Experiment with Conversational AI](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/gitlab-conversational-ai-learnings/) (highlight) - [Vimeo's Approach to Data Governance in the Era of Conversational Analytics](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/Vimeo-approach-to-data-governance/) (highlight) - [Inside General Motors Metadata Lakehouse](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/gm-metadata-lakehouse/) (highlight) - [Workday's Semantic Layer Strategy](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-semantic-layer-strategy/) (highlight) - [Modern Data & AI Governance Blueprint](https://atlan.com/blueprint) (resource) Talk to Atlan: [Book a Demo](https://atlan.com/forms/talk-to-sales-contact/).