In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how CEO Aneel Bhusri is accelerating Workday’s AI ambitions and positioning the company to compete with larger enterprise technology rivals.
Highlights
00:09 — Workday introduced some very interesting new agentic solutions and innovations this week at Workday Rising, and I wanted to touch on those. And also mention, I think, a very key partnership that Workday has strengthened with Anthropic. It’s really going to be part of what I’m calling its all-in commitment to agentic AI.
00:35 — More recently, three big things have really paved the way for Workday’s emergence into the AI field in a big time. One was about a year and a half ago, the hiring of Gerrit Kazmeier from Google Cloud. He’s now Workday’s president of products and technology. He’s been a huge proponent for the AI boost.
00:54 — The second thing was about a year ago, the acquisition of Sana for $1.1 billion, and third was early this year, Aneel Bhusri’s move from executive chairman back into the CEO role to really push this forward. So a lot of what they announced at Rising this week were the fruits of those developments.
01:18 — First, Sana is now the Workday home. It’s a single, sort of wide-open AI experience that’s going to run all of Workday’s applications, but it also orchestrates the agentic work that’s being done, not just agents that ask questions and offer suggestions, but get the work done.
01:39 — Second thing is four new, what Workday calls autopilot agents. You know, playing on the notion copilots help, autopilots actually do the work. So these autopilot agents are in accounting, payroll, talent acquisition, and deployment, where they can help you figure out the right way to handle all these things.
02:16 — Their decision intelligence is a new set of agents working across HR and finance that help model out the best scenarios, all with the grounded, governed data that Workday has. Work Intelligence helps customers figure out the right place to deploy agentic solutions, how to work those, how to get the best ROI from them.
03:12 — Now Workday, being smaller than most of the big ones like Oracle and SAP and Salesforce and Microsoft, has had to use advanced technology and being out on the front edge of these things to remain fully competitive, and to give customers the trust that Workday is going to continue to push them into some of these new advanced areas.
