While Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce and others have been touting the imminent release of hundreds of AI agents, Workday is purposefully limiting its current launch plans to less than 10 agents because customers have overwhelmingly expressed their interest in quality rather than quantity.
At Workday’s recent Innovation Summit for industry analysts, the company’s top product leaders — Co-Founder and Chairman Aneel Bhusri, President of Products and Technology Gerrit Kazmaier, and Chief Product Officer David Somers — each stated emphatically that almost all Workday customers are excited by the potential of AI agents. However, those customers are not looking at deploying large numbers of agents in the short term but instead are intently focused on ensuring that a small number of agentic-AI projects — perhaps two or three, and certainly less than five — operate flawlessly and deliver outstanding business outcomes.
Workday’s quality-over-quantity stance is absolutely not an indication of lack of confidence in the business impact of agentic AI — quite the opposite.
Co-Founder Bhusri opened his presentation at the event by saying that “AI is the most consequential technology ever — and I am not given to tech hyperbole.”
During a Q&A session later in the event, Bhusri and Somers were asked what Workday needs to do to double or triple the number of agents it will launch before the end of 2025. Bhusri dismissed the idea out of hand, saying that (a) he’s not seeing that type of demand from customers and (b) many customers are still getting their data estates in order, and simply aren’t equipped to handle more than a few narrow but high-impact agentic-AI projects.
Along those same lines, Somers was equally emphatic in stating that while it is technically possible for Workday to crank out lots more agents, such an approach would be totally out of synch with what customers currently want and need. Plus, he said, that would divert resources and focus away from related key initiatives such as ensuring the company’s global ecosystem is fully capable of helping customers achieve complete success with their agentic AI projects.
Newly hired President of Products and Technology Kazmaier cited Workday’s desire to map its innovation pipeline to customer priorities rather than trying to match other big apps vendors in numbers of new agents under development.
“Remember, we are still in the very early days of AI,” Kazmaier said during a Q&A session.
“Today, most companies say ROI for AI projects is low, coming in at less than 5%. But they’re still ramping up their investments in this transformational technology.”
On top of that, Kazmaier said, enterprise-level AI “still doesn’t know exactly how to use and work with enterprise APIs or workflows — but progress is being made.
“For Workday, our big opportunity is that we have deep domain expertise, we have the single data set that is essential for workflow agents and and for role-specific agents, and we know how to train models in a workflow context with very high accuracy,” he added.
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To give you a sense of where the leading agentic-AI vendors stand at this time, here’s a recap for each:
Workday’s Agentic AI Portfolio
After launching four agents in September 2024, Workday introduced four more in February, along with its groundbreaking AI Agent System of Record.
Microsoft’s Agentic AI Portfolio
“AGENT WARS: Microsoft Grabs Lead as 160,000 Customers Build 400,000 AI Agents“
Oracle’s Agentic AI Portfolio
In September of last year, Oracle announced 50 new agents “within the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite that will help successfully execute frequent, repetitive tasks and allow employees and managers to focus their time on more strategic tasks and initiatives.”
Salesforce’s Agentic AI Portfolio
Marc Benioff has said Agentforce customers will create hundreds of thousands of agents in a very short time, and I think it’s fair to say that on the subject of agentic AI, Benioff has been the most visible and most bullish of the Cloud Wars Top 10 CEOs. And yesterday, Salesforce announced a dramatic new pricing plan for Agentforce that will make it simpler — and frequently less expensive — for businesses to use Agentforce.
SAP’s Agentic AI Portfolio
“With 130+ AI scenarios available and a total of 400 planned by the end of 2025, SAP has the largest AI offering portfolio to help you accomplish your goals across every business function, faster.”
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