--- title: "Workday: Context as Culture" url: "https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-context-as-culture/" description: "Joe DosSantos, VP at Workday, explains how Workday is building an active semantic layer that teaches AI the language of business." keywords: "atlan, data governance, regovern 2025, regovern watch center, workday context as culture" --- > 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/ **Workday: Context as Culture** is a session recording from Re:Govern 2025 (online, Nov 4–5, 2025) in the Atlan Re:Govern watch center. Joe DosSantos, VP at Workday, explains how Workday is building an active semantic layer that teaches AI the language of business. Watch it at [https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-context-as-culture/](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-context-as-culture/); 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's governance system worked beautifully for people until generative AI exposed a critical flaw: systems designed for human intuition produce untrustworthy, hallucinated answers when machines use them. Joe shares how Workday is transforming governance from passive documentation into an active semantic layer that becomes the core intelligence powering trustworthy AI. Key takeaways: - Human-centric governance systems fail when AI needs to interpret business logic without human intuition - Active semantic layers teach AI the language of business, turning governance into intelligence rather than documentation - Generative AI exposes gaps in traditional governance that humans could work around but machines cannot - The semantic layer becomes the most critical asset in AI-driven enterprises, not just a BI tool - Trust in AI outputs requires governance that's designed for both human and machine consumption from the start ## Chapters From the page's video metadata: 1. Why human-centric governance fails for AI 2. From documentation to an active semantic layer 3. Closing the gaps GenAI exposes 4. Semantic layer as core enterprise asset 5. Designing governance for humans and machines ## 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) - [Why Workday is Building a Semantic Layer](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-building-semantic-layer/) (highlight) - [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/).