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 explore why Aneel Bhusri believes this is Workday’s moment as its AI business gains momentum.
Highlights
00:02 — Workday last week reported its Q2 results. They came in pretty strong, and I think if we look at the tenor of some of the comments that co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri made on the Q2 earnings call last week, we’ll see that he’s generally pretty low-key. But he’s quite bullish now about what’s going on with the early momentum Workday is gaining from its AI products.
00:49 — First, quick overview of some key Q2 numbers. Subscription revenue was up 13.9% to $2.47 billion. Its current RPO was up 14.2% to just over $9 billion. And for all of fiscal ’27, which will end January 31, its guidance now says that the company expects to grow 13% to about $9.945 billion.
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01:54 — AI tools drove more than $100 million in annual contract value in Q2. Workday is very excited about that and believes that that shows good evidence of the uptake from customers and the rising demand for these AI solutions. Also, the AI run rate for AI SKUs, as Workday calls it, across the company is now almost $600 million, and it said that’s up 200%.
02:55 — And then what I’m calling the power of enterprise context. Bhusri said, “We’re an enterprise context company.” And he said that context — who reports to whom, who pays the bills, where different people are organized, and so on — all those little sort of unstructured things that go on within corporations. Workday has it.
03:35 — So, it has been six months now since Aneel Bhusri returned to Workday as CEO. He felt that with the rise of AI, the AI revolution, that it was time Workday needed to have a deep technologist in the CEO spot, leading the company through this tumultuous change. So, he’s increased the pace of technology innovation. He has got the growth rate moving back upward.
