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 analyze how Aneel Bhusri is reshaping Workday’s agentic AI strategy following his return as CEO.
Highlights
00:03 — Interesting conversations on the Workday FY27 Q2 earnings call last week. One of the things that came up here was the difference in their approach to agentic AI that’s come about over the last several months since the return of CEO Aneel Bhusri.
00:48 — One of the big things that happened here, he said, we don’t necessarily want to have a whole lot of agents for a lot of simple functions. We want to focus on agentic AI that targets big, complex processes and challenges that our companies, that our customers are facing in HR and financials.
01:08 — Here’s one of the quotes that he gave on the Q2 earnings call. He said, “We have to have agents that deliver real ROI.” He said, “We’ve killed a lot of agents since I’ve come back, or we’ve rolled small, simple agents up into bigger, more complex agents.”
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01:27 — He said, “Anybody can solve the simple problems. That’s not a place where we’re going to be able to deliver this real ROI for customers.” So, interesting time now for Workday, right? Because they’re a big company, right? They’re guiding to $10 billion in revenue for FY27, which will end January 31st.
02:41 — I’ve got an article later that offers some more perspectives on this. Also, some comments from President and Chief Product and Technology Officer Gerrit Kazmeier. He goes into some detail about why this new wave of agents is so vital: that they’ve got to be able to be connected to everything, be able to handle these complex problems, and drive that big ROI.
