Workday buys SkipFlag to bolster machine learning capabilities

Workday announced Tuesday that it has acquired SkipFlag, makers of a so-called AI knowledge base that builds itself from a company's internal communications. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Based in San Francisco, SkipFlag's AI system sucks in a bevy of enterprise data -- from support tickets and employee profiles to corporate documentation and messages -- and builds a database from which answers to employee questions are automatically pulled.

Or as Workday CTO Joe Korngiebel explained in the company's acquisition announcement,SkipFlag "uses deep learning to help people make sense of mountains of data across multiple applications used by today's workforce."

SkipFlag's founders hail from LinkedIn, where they ran the social network's data and engineering teams responsible for LinkedIn's machine learning technologies and platform features, including People You May Know, Who's Viewed My Profile?, and Skills & Endorsements.

Workday said the deal marks another step in the company's efforts to invest in the areas of machine learning, advanced search, and natural language processing. SkipFlag's team is set to join Workday and its technology will be folded into Workday's core platform.

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