--- title: "Workday's Semantic Layer Strategy" url: "https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-semantic-layer-strategy/" description: "Workday could replace their 900 Tableau dashboards with 900 agents - but building a custom semantic layer for each one would be a nightmare." 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/ **Workday's Semantic Layer Strategy** 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 could replace their 900 Tableau dashboards with 900 agents - but building a custom semantic layer for each one would be a nightmare. Watch it at [https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-semantic-layer-strategy/](https://atlan.com/regovern-watch-center/workday-semantic-layer-strategy/); 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 faced a choice: crank out hundreds of purpose-built agents, each with its own interpretation of business terms, or build one shared semantic layer that defines meaning once for everyone. The answer was clear: just like teams shouldn't argue about what "revenue" or "churn" means, AI shouldn't interpret these terms differently across tools. Key takeaways: - Building custom semantic layers for each AI agent creates the same mess as having 900 different dashboards - Business definitions like "churn," "renewal," and "attrition" need formal, standardized meanings AI can use - Semantic layers shouldn't live inside BI or governance tools - they sit at the crossroads where all tools access them - Contextual meaning needs to be understood consistently by everyone calling it from different platforms - This unified approach frees teams to focus on what AI does best: understanding unstructured data and answering "why" ## Chapters From the page's video metadata: 1. From dashboard chaos to AI confusion - How inconsistent semantic layers recreate the same fragmentation seen in traditional BI. 2. Standardizing business meaning for AI - Why terms like 'churn' and 'renewal' need formal, machine-usable definitions. 3. Semantic layers as cross-platform context hubs - Placing the semantic layer between tools, not inside them. 4. Making context universally consistent - Ensuring all AI agents and users interpret meaning the same way. 5. Freeing AI to do what it does best - Letting AI focus on unstructured understanding while governance handles meaning. ## 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) - [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) - [Modern Data & AI Governance Blueprint](https://atlan.com/blueprint) (resource) Talk to Atlan: [Book a Demo](https://atlan.com/forms/talk-to-sales-contact/).