The Hidden Costs of Workday AMS (And How to Cut Them)

The AMS Trap

You've successfully implemented Workday. The system is live, the consultants have packed up, and now you have to maintain it. Enter the AMS (Application Managed Services) contract.

For most enterprises, the AMS contract is a painful reality. You sign a multi-year deal with a tier-1 system integrator, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for a bucket of "support hours." But when you look closely at what you are actually paying for, the model breaks down.

What You Are Actually Paying For

In a traditional AMS model, a significant portion of your budget goes toward resolving low-level, repetitive tickets:

• "How do I reset my password?"
• "Why didn't my expense report route to my new manager?"
• "Can you build a custom report showing Q3 turnover?"

You are paying premium consulting rates for offshore teams to manually read tickets, search a knowledge base, and type out responses. It's slow, it's expensive, and it doesn't actually improve your Workday environment.

The Problem with "Bucket of Hours" Pricing

Traditional SIs sell you a bucket of hours each month. If you don't use them, you lose them. If you go over, you pay overage fees. This creates a perverse incentive: the SI makes the most money when you have a steady stream of problems that take just long enough to burn through your hours.

They have zero financial incentive to actually fix the root cause of your problems.

The AI-Powered Alternative

At AssistNow, we believe you shouldn't pay a human to do a machine's job. We changed the AMS pricing model by deploying Assistly®, our AI-powered support agent, on day one of every support contract.

Assistly integrates directly into your Slack, Teams, and Workday environment. When an employee asks, "Why is my paycheck different this week?", Assistly doesn't just link to an FAQ. It securely checks their specific Workday record, sees they changed their 401(k) contribution, and explains the difference in plain language.

The Financial Impact

Because Assistly resolves up to 68% of tier-1 and tier-2 support tickets autonomously, our AMS contracts look very different from the traditional SI model.

Instead of paying for a large team of offshore ticket-handlers, you pay a much lower, predictable fee for the AI platform and a small team of senior Workday architects. Those senior architects don't reset passwords — they focus entirely on strategic work: deploying new modules, building Workday Extend apps, and improving your business processes.

Stop Paying for Inefficiency

If your AMS contract is based on billable hours for basic support tickets, you are subsidizing your SI's inefficiency. It's time to demand an AMS model that uses AI to drive costs down.

Want to see how much you could save on Workday AMS? Request an AMS audit.