LAS VEGAS — Coming into Workday Rising, I questioned concerning the firm’s prospects. Latest quarterly outcomes confirmed a close to 13% improve in income. On the similar time, Workday has been chopping head rely.
At its annual person convention this week, Workday CEO and co-founder Aneel Bhusri insisted the cuts have been made to enhance enterprise agility and reporting.
“We had 13 ranges between me and a developer, and we provide center managers particular person contributor roles,” he stated throughout a press Q&A after the keynote. Bhusri returned to the helm in February.
On the similar time, hypothesis that Workday has been in discussions about taking the corporate personal continues to swirl. If Workday goes personal, this can, with out query, be an outgrowth of the SaaSpocalypse, the place generative AI created market panic for SaaS enterprise fashions. However what’s going to the corporate acquire?
Workday has dominated the enterprise human capital administration (HCM) market and, to a lesser diploma, cloud-based ERP. My query coming into Workday Rising was: Can the seller pivot to the AI shift?
My reply, in a phrase, is sure.
Headless capabilities on show
Regardless of Hurricane Isaias disrupting journey in Las Vegas, the convention introduced collectively 17,000 HR, ERP and IT professionals who probably needed to listen to concerning the disruptive adjustments coming to HR and the enterprise features HR helps.
It was clear from my conversations: Workday is absolutely partaking the know-how traits of the time to deal with these disruptions — by not solely automating AI brokers but additionally introducing headless capabilities.
This embrace of headless was refreshing to see, given that is the place functions supported by agentic AI are probably headed, and a few distributors are slower to maneuver in that path. Final week, for instance, SAP’s president of merchandise mentioned with me the way it’s solely exposing APIs as a transfer to headless. In Workday’s case, the corporate will not be solely going headless, however it’s also surrounding its structure with an agent platform and developer sources to assist anybody constructing on its code base interface brokers.
It is an aggressive step for Workday that acknowledges the advantage of separating back-end tech stack from the front-end capabilities. Not like Salesforce, which highlighted at Dreamforce its push towards headless and towards turning into the UI of alternative, Workday will not be able to announce that it’s disinvesting from the GUI. Workday, alternatively, expanded Sana throughout the enterprise. The agentic expertise and orchestration platform is predicated on know-how the corporate acquired in 2025; it makes use of the Mannequin Context Protocol to function inside third-party AI instruments equivalent to Microsoft Copilot, Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise and Slack.
Workday is offering information staff fast agentic experiences to finish work, not simply reply questions. Staff could make requests in pure language and have brokers act on them immediately. A concierge agent, for instance, can resolve HR and IT requests, equivalent to onboarding and password resets, earlier than they turn out to be assist desk tickets. This might present tangible labor value financial savings.
Workday’s bulletins additionally included automating AI brokers to work repeatedly within the background throughout IT, finance, compliance and HR. The corporate additionally launched a expertise acquisition autopilot agent, which is now in early entry. Workday stated these brokers are coded with an organization’s insurance policies, permissions and approval guidelines to allow them to advise or act inside every staff’ insurance policies and approval limits. Workday stated its purpose is to liberate groups to deal with choices that require human judgment.
Time will inform.
Workday additionally introduced it’s buying C1.ai, an agentic id platform for folks and brokers, following one other pattern. Because the software program trade turns into depending on AI basis fashions, software and information distributors are shopping for the entry and safety layer. For Workday, the acquisition is smart: HR is the place roles and privileges are outlined. Nevertheless it additionally suggests software distributors aren’t ready for safety distributors to catch up and create the suitable guardrails.
Wanted: CIO expertise
Given the product information and in my conversations with attendees, one theme stood out to me: This can be a second that requires CIO expertise.
Bhusri put it plainly throughout a press Q&A: “None of this works with out high-quality information.”
That is essential to creating the context. Simply as people want it to do their jobs nicely, AI wants high-fidelity information, a semantic layer and an ontology. CIOs are essential to constructing that foundational information layer and serving to HR outline the enterprise context that provides the information which means. For Workday, its Zero-Copy Information In layer, which allows customers to question exterior information the place it resides, is constructed on information corrected and mastered in programs equivalent to Snowflake that CIOs and their groups handle. And this issues as a result of with finance and accounting, there may be zero margin for error.
Past constructing the muse for the information cloud, CIOs and their groups are wanted to make sure the supporting APIs are in place to drag different information sources, together with governance for APIs, information and processes. They’re additionally important to fixing bigger transformation challenges that stretch past HR.
A part of that work is protecting the company information harness safe and operational, which implies confirming guardrails work as deliberate and are validated recurrently.
What do CIOs must do
From the #CIOChat that I hosted for years, vanguard IT leaders have at all times labored carefully with their chief human sources officers. This was particularly the case because the COVID-19 pandemic hit and firms wanted to function on digital platforms.
However this hasn’t been a common expertise. Throughout #CIOChat, I noticed two forms of CIOs: The primary had a robust relationship with enterprise leaders and labored to unravel enterprise issues; the second centered on know-how and have since been pushed out of the position.
“When human capital administration options have been managed on-premises, IT performed a big position in managing these programs,” Dave Eberhardt, accomplice for HR transformation at PwC, informed me. This was at a time when some CIOs centered solely on infrastructure. As HCM programs pivoted to the cloud, know-how possession shifted from IT to HR, he added.
I requested Isaac Sacolick, former McGraw Hill Building CIO, about this. Sacolick stated, “At the moment, too many CIOs, sadly, have been infrastructure-related. Nevertheless it was not all of them.”
It is time to shut that hole.
David Wachtel, common supervisor of core HR merchandise at Workday, stated CIOs can play a significant position. He stated CHROs “can be … welcoming of CIOs who needed to assist. CHROs would breathe a welcome sigh of aid. They truthfully would recognize the outreach and need to play collectively.”
It’s time for CIOs to dig in and perceive the HR piece of the tech stack because it more and more is about brokers and relating them and human staff collectively. CIOs who’re nearly infrastructure are not invaluable to their corporations.
Workday Rising offered a take a look at the corporate’s push to make its platforms and capabilities headless. Is your organization in search of that sort of flexibility in its know-how stack? Tell us at [email protected].
