At a huge Workday event in 2024, cofounder and co-CEO Aneel Bhusri paused during his keynote talk say hello to his mother, who was in the audience because both Aneel and his mother wanted to celebrate his final keynote as CEO before relinquishing the title he’d held for 15 years.
Over the past several years, as Workday steadily grew 15% to 20% per year and began to speak of its aspirations for $10 billion, the self-effacing Bhusri has said on more than one occasion that “I don’t have any training for running a multibillion-dollar corporation.”
And just over three years ago, when Bhusri hired Carl Eschenbach to be co-CEO, Bhusri eagerly described how Eschenbach’s arrival would allow Bhusri to get back to the two things he loved best: building products and setting strategy. (Eschenbach stepped down as CEO earlier this week, and the Workday board asked Bhusri to once again take on the CEO role.)
Bhusri once described his approach as being “the Pied Piper of Workday.” Several years ago when machine learning (ML) was just starting to have an impact on enterprise software, Bhusri told me that he would wander around Workday’s development offices and ask, “What are you doing with ML?”
Ask that question enough times, he said, and it wasn’t long before developers and engineers were coming up to him with ideas about ML innovation.
Bhusri also loved the competitive position Workday occupied as the much-smaller rival to SAP and Oracle, believing that Workday could leverage that difference to become the fast-moving advanced-technology leader that could dazzle customers with new capabilities and better business outcomes in advance of its much-larger competitors.
But the human condition is such that even carefully calibrated plans must surrender to reality, and Aneel Bhusri — the reluctant CEO — is once more going to take on the high-profile job that he would really rather avoid.
And that’s where the “remarkable” part of the headline comes in, because Aneel Bhusri does certainly not need to work — he’s earned more money than he could ever spend. And Bhusri’s just turned 60 years young — so he has not only nothing to prove to anyone but also plenty of other ways to occupy his time.
But Bhusri is above all a builder. And for all its technological prowess and marketplace success and credibility among customers, Workday needs to keep building its own future as it helps its customers buid theirs as:
- its customers are facing massive change and challenges as the global economy pivots aggressively toward AI;
- agents disrupt the enterprise-apps business;
- data soars in significance;
- businesses need to move faster than ever before;
- customers are becoming more sophisticated, more demanding, and more fickle; and
- its larger competitors would like nothing better than to sow confusion and doubt among key Workday customers amid this leadership change.
And faced with that environment, Bhusri says he’s ready to lead Workday through the wild new world of the AI Revolution.
“We’re now entering one of the most pivotal moments in our history,” Bhusri said in a press release. “AI is a bigger transformation than SaaS — and it will define the next generation of market leaders. I’m energized to return as CEO, working alongside our presidents Gerrit Kazmaier and Rob Enslin, and I’m excited about the opportunity in front of us.”
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Final Thought
Bhusri and Workday are blessed to have those two superb executives — Kazmaier and Enslin —during these times of Workday’s “most pivotal moments in our history.”
So I will bet that at this time next year, after Bhusri has guided Workday through the most-challenging months of these tumultuous times, the company will announce that one of those two has been elevated to co-CEO alongside Bhusri. And that 6-9 months after that, Workday will announce that the other current president is being promoted to co-CEO, freeing the reluctant CEO to return to full-time immersion in the advanced technology that has made Workday an enterprise-software powerhouse.
You’re a good man, Aneel Bhusri.
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