Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I break down why Workday sees agentic AI as the key to defending its 80 million-user base.
Highlights
00:02 — Workday co-founder Aneel Bhusri resumed his position as CEO. He wanted to help guide the company through the AI Revolution and help bring a solid knowledge of what’s happening and how Workday as a company has to be able to innovate and create and get with the AI-native program as rapidly as possible.
00:45 — It’s got to be able to move fast, and the margin for error is slight. The Q1 results, which came out last week, I think prove that Bhusri’s got the company on the right track. Subscription revenue up 14.3%, almost $2.4 billion. Their total subscription revenue backlog was up 11% to over $27 billion.
01:23 — It’s now got 80 million users under contract. Now, the good and the bad of that is those are 80 million users who are heavily dependent right now on yesterday’s technology. So, the good thing for Workday is they’ve got these 80 million users, and Workday’s got the first shot at converting them.
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02:23 — Bhusri said, “In technology transitions — and I’m old enough to have lived through a few of them — you have to put that new technology front and center. It’s got to be your absolute top priority in everything you do.”
03:38 — Bhusri said customers seem to want to have both open technology and the ability to use agents from lots of vendors, but they’ve also got to ensure that they’ve got the proper guardrails for compliance and legal compliance, and ensuring the privacy and safety of their customers. He also said it’s really important for Workday to reinstitute and reinvigorate a startup mentality.
04:48 — So, Aneel Bhusri is one of the good guys in the tech industry. He’s been around a long time. His return here, I called him back in February “the reluctant CEO,” because he was eager a few years ago to get out of the CEO role, but he knows now that with what’s going on in the market and this vast change of technology brought forth by AI, he needed to be CEO.
