With a strong core of 11,500 happy customers plus a fast-growing family of role-based AI agents and a flatter global sales org, Workday cofounder and once-again CEO Aneel Bhusri is highly confident that rising customer demand for AI-powered solutions will re-accelerate growth later this year.
To fulfill that vision, Bhusri and Workday will have to not only overcome intense competitive pressure from SAP, Oracle, and others, but also the baseless but widespread “SaaSpocalypse” panic sweeping the industry and freezing the plans of many customers bewildered about the future interrelationship between AI and enterprise apps.
Fueled by Wall Street’s FOBR (Fear of Being Rational) and by some AI fanatics who irresponsibly proclaim that AI will devour everything created before 2025, this latest end-of-days fantasy calls for the collapse of companies like Workday and SAP as LLMs somehow take over the world.
Bhusri himself addressed this lunacy clearly and compellingly during Workday’s recent fiscal-Q4 earnings call with such much-needed rational thinking as I analyzed in my recent piece headlined “Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri Skewers AI Madness, Defines AI Reality.”
To me, that was the single most-important and most-valuable takeaway from the Q4 commentary. And as a further exploration of what the company revealed on that call, today I’d like to share Bhusri’s passionate belief that Workday’s future will not only not be stifled by AI’s rumored rise to omnipotence but is in fact being greatly enhanced by AI’s capabilities.
“What I’m very focused on is reaccelerating growth,” Bhusri said during the Q&A portion of the call.
“And you don’t get many chances in a career to go through two technology waves. I was there at the start of the cloud — and, I was actually there at the start of client-server, too — yes, I’m old enough for that, too — and now AI is just a huge opportunity for Workday to reaccelerate growth.” Describing the company’s core business of full suites for HR and Finance as “stable,” Bhusri said the planned upturn in growth rate will be sparked by the launch of “organic agents” being driven by President of Product and Technology Gerrit Kazmaier.
“They’re in early access right now,” Bhusri said, “but they’re a consumption-based model so there’s a delay before we see the actual revenue from it. I think we’ll see it by the end of this year and the second half of this year, and we set up a really amazing following year where we turn into a consumption platform just like the hyperscalers.”
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That shift to a consumption model will enable Workday to create a new revenue stream coming from other software vendors that have been leveraging the Workday platform and data.
“I’m really excited to get to that place where it’s not just our agents on the platform but also be all the third-party agents that get built and that leverage our APIs that will also be based on that Flex Credits consumption model,” Bhusri said.
“So there’s a lot of upside that I see coming forward. But I would end with what I started with: the core is very stable. Our systems are embedded in our customer sites. We have long-term contracts. It’s our opportunity now to build on top of that.”
Indeed, Bhusri opened by explaining that while agentic AI has enormous potential, its full value can only be realized in combination with existing enterprise apps that understand a customer’s processes, governance, security, data models, and more. It’s not a case of either-or, he said, but of “both.”
“Our core enterprise apps in HR, Finance, and Student will continue to thrive, recognizing that in some areas like HR we have high levels of market share, so the growth will come from new apps sold to the customer base,” Bhusri said, noting those new agent-powered apps will include those recently acquired by Workday as well as those it has built itself.
“The accelerating growth will come from the agents we build on top of Workday, both inorganic and organic. If FY26 proved that customers trusted Workday to buy our acquired agents, we believe that FY27 and beyond will prove that customers will buy our organically built agents that are in early access today. Across the board, these new agents are deeply embedded into the Workday core, are meaningful in their scope, and have significant ROI attached to each and every one of them.”
Final Thought
At this point in his legendary career, Aneel Bhusri does not need to work. And with all he’s accomplished, he certainly does not need the “glamor” of being a CEO once more, particularly for a company whose market cap has been chopped in half over the past six months.
So when Aneel Bhusri says he’s excited and pumped-up and extremely eager, we can confidently and comfortably take him at his word.
“Those of you who know me know that I’m an unabashed optimist. I truly believe that our investments in agentic AI will enable Workday to reaccelerate growth, increase customer satisfaction, and set us up for long-term leadership.
“I will end by saying that I’m excited to be back — this is a fun time to be a product person.”
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