Preparing for Workday’s 2026 R1 feature update

Workday experts around the world are eagerly anticipating R1 – the company’s upcoming feature update, which will introduce a wide range of functional, technical and AI-driven improvements. Kaya Can Kayali, Solution Architect at HR Path, shares three practical tips to help organisations prepare effectively for the R1 rollout.

Every year, Workday pushes two feature updates to its users. The first for 2026, 2026 R1, is scheduled to go live in mid-March and brings a mix of functional improvements, user-experience enhancements, and deeper automation across core HR and finance processes.

As with past R1 releases, customers are recommended to use the Preview Window (which opens on February 7) to test and explore changes ahead of the update and ensure smooth adoption within their unique configurations. The Preview Window exists to validate what’s new, not to rescue what has quietly accumulated over the last year.

1) Starting ahead of time

Most organisations believe the real work for 2026 R1 begins when the Preview Window opens. From a Solution Architect’s perspective, that timing is already too late. The strongest upgrades don’t start with feature testing; they start with tenant discipline. So the weeks before the Preview Window is where the foundation gets stabilized, and that foundation determines whether February becomes a confident testing cycle or a frantic attempt to untangle the backlog.

For example: when a tenant carries a heavy load of unused components, temporary security constructs, or legacy logic, the test environment becomes noisy. That noise doesn’t just slow you down; it blurs your judgment, because you end up investigating errors tied to objects no one depends on anymore. The result is that the window intended for clarity becomes a period of avoidable distraction, and the organization loses the chance to explore new capabilities properly.

This cleanup in advance is less about polish and more about protecting future capacity. When you audit unused calculated fields, remove temporary security groups, and tidy old logic that served short-term goals, you are actively reducing regression noise before it appears. The work may not be glamorous, but it creates a cleaner baseline – and this is what allows February testing to focus on real release impact.

2) Unfinished change

Another hidden trap is stacking unfinished change. If 2025 R2 introduced features that were enabled but never fully adopted, carrying that unresolved state into 2026 R1 complicates everything from training to stakeholder confidence. The problem is not only operational overload; it is also narrative overload, because teams struggle to explain what is changing, why it matters, and how success should be measured.

Stabilizing the current baseline before layering in new capabilities makes change management simpler, more credible, and far more likely to land well.

3) Data quality

Data quality deserves the same level of urgency. If 2026 R1 is indeed heavier on AI-driven capabilities [as Workday has announced], the impact of poor data will be more visible and more costly than before.

AI does not merely process information; it amplifies patterns, which means messy job profiles, inconsistent organizational structures, and unclear role definitions will surface as real barriers to adoption. In that context, a “pre-AI data scrub” is not a technical hygiene task; it is what determines whether new AI features will be meaningful, reliable, and safe to use.

These upgrade habits connect to something larger than a single release. AI-assisted configuration is moving closer to reality, and it is plausible that the near future will bring tools capable of ingesting a Customer Workbook and auto-configuring business processes, security groups, and notifications at remarkable speed. That shift will create exciting efficiency, but it also introduces a new kind of risk that is easy to underestimate.

The most dangerous outcome will not be that AI makes a careless mistake. The more subtle danger is that it builds a process perfectly even when the process itself is poorly designed for the client’s culture, governance model, or risk profile. When configuration becomes instant, the temptation is to treat speed as success, yet speed without design integrity can scale bad decisions faster than ever before.

Gaining a competitive advantage

As Workday experts prepare for 2026 R1, it is recommended to ensure careful preparation ahead of time, scoping well and mitigating unfinished change – all before the real work begins during the Preview Window. When you reduce noise, stabilize features, and clean core data, you are not only preparing for 2026 R1. You are building the fundamentals required to succeed during the actual rollout and build long-term value from the Workday system.