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 discuss my conversation with Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach, who shared insights on the growing demand for clear ROI metrics in AI investments and the accelerating shift toward AI applications in 2025.
Highlights
00:07 —Today, I want to talk about my conversation with Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach. Workday is number seven on the Cloud Wars Top 10. Carl’s been the CEO there for a couple of years. He has brought a new sense of dynamism and growth and vitality to the sales organization, while co-founder Aneel Bushri moved from CEO to chairman.
01:09 — Carl’s view is that we’re moving in 2025 out of the experimental phase with AI, and customers are really going to demand some very strong proof demonstrations. Carl also said that in 2023 and 2024, a lot of the AI investments were going into infrastructure, hardware; this year that’s shifting to applications and agents. For Workday, he thinks this is going to be good.
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02:16 — Now he sees that this AI spending could be in hyper-growth this year. In particular, he said HR and financials (Workday’s specialty) are now some of the top priorities for investments from customers.
03:04 — Also, a big topic that Eschenbach said we’ll see play out in 2025 is vendor consolidation. He said this has been going on for a while, but he thinks the move to AI is going to be an accelerant for consolidation because a lot of point solutions can be trouble for customers to integrate on their own.
03:48 — He emphasized the point that business leaders he speaks with are wide open to the possibility of AI investment, and bigger portions of their budget going to AI. But he said the first thing we’ve got to understand is: What’s the business outcome going to be? Where’s the ROI, where’s the productivity?
04:20 — So what we’re hearing from Carl Eschenbach is something we’ve heard a couple of other Cloud Wars CEOs talk about in this Outlook series. Later this morning, here on Cloud Wars, we’ll be posting a full-length article based on the interview.
