Since the return of CEO Aneel Bhusri six months ago, Workday has shifted its agentic AI focus from developing lots of agents handling relatively simple tasks to creating powerful agents that tackle difficult and essential processes and create significant value and ROI for customers.
This marks a significant shift for Workday and reflects Bhusri’s belief that Workday must differentiate itself by handling complex challenges that other apps/agent vendors are unable to address. Here’s how Bhusri described the new approach on the company’s recent Q2 earnings call:
“We have to have agents that have real ROI, and that’s been the lens we’ve been looking at it since I came back. We had a lot more agents when I came back [early this year]. We killed a lot or we rolled them into bigger agents. And the ones that we have right now, I’m very optimistic they’re all very meaningful to our customers.”
That strategy makes a great deal of sense because while Workday has become a truly global player whose fiscal-2027 revenue will reach about $10 billion, it is nevertheless much smaller than major competitors SAP and Oracle. So, its development resources need to be focused in areas where Workday’s unique expertise can showcase itself — and in Bhusri’s opinion, that means tackling big, challenging, and complex customer problems.
“We’re trying to be very thoughtful in the way that we’re building our agentic solutions,” Bhusri said on the call.
“They’re not meant to solve simple problems — anybody can solve the simple problems. When I look at what we’re doing with the Self-Service Agent, it’s really hard. What we’re doing with the Financial Audit Agent is really hard.
“But, by building these agents and coming out the other end, they add tremendous value to our customers. And frankly, from a competitive perspective, they’re really, really hard for anybody to compete with because they’re so deeply embedded in the bowels of Workday,” whose longtime target has been HR and financials.
From the customer side, the metric with which Bhusri’s currently obsessed with is adoption.
“Today, more than 5,500 customers are using one or more of our organic agents,” Bhusri said.
“And that’s up more than 35% from last quarter. As we continue to build organic agents on Workday, we’re also deeply integrating acquired agents like those from Paradox, HiredScore and Evisort into our platform. And we signed some of the world’s largest brands to our Lighthouse program, which gives strategic customers Sana Enterprise free for a year.”
Gerrit Kazmaier, president of products and technology, said that while this new generation of Workday agents is tackling complex problems, his team’s pace of development has been cranked up dramatically.
“When we say agents, we really mean AI systems that automate large parts of the value chains in HR and finance,” Kazmaier said on the call.
“We just put Decision Intelligence into GA, which is truly a reimagination of how you collaborate with AI on enterprise data. We are about to bring new functionality to the Recruiting Agent, and you heard earlier how much momentum that has already.
“We are also making great progress in one of the areas that Aneel is most excited on — Financial Audit and Financial Compliance Agents,” he said.
All of these agents are either out already or coming out at Rising at the end of the year.”
Meanwhile, Unleashing 22,000 Agents Internally
At the same time, Workday has unleashed an internal program that’s seen company employees create 22,000 agents in a handful of weeks to automate a wide range of processes within the company, Kazmaier said.
“We have 22,000 agents being built in the past weeks, and we really see this coming to Rising as a key moment because the face of SaaS and how work happens is going to fundamentally change.
“And frankly, we believe it’s a stark difference to what that work experience is than what you get from generic chat copilots because ours are deeply tethered into the system of action and the system of work.”
Final Thought
When Bhusri stepped back into the CEO role early this year, he said the AI Revolution was driving changes so rapid and so profound that Workday needed someone with deep technical knowledge and AI experience in the top spot.
And the changes Bhusri has driven around agentic AI represent, in my opinion, precisely why his return has reignited not only Workday’s innovation agenda but also the company’s growth potential here in the greatest growth market the world has ever known.
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