Can an agent do that and replace a human at a lower cost? Yes. Will companies want to do that? Yes. Am I worried about the job displacement? Absolutely.
If you don't know what Workday does, chances are your head of HR or your head of finance does. I'm going to talk to Aneel Bhusri today. He and his buddy Dave Duffield founded it in 2005, and now he's back in the CEO seat in 2026, reinventing the company for AI.
When AI showed up, it was a refounding moment in that all bets are off. It's a brand new world.
We talk about a lot of things, including where we are in this moment for the workforce, what the future workforce will look like, and he's pretty candid about his thoughts about job displacement. And what timeline do you think this will play out within the next five years?
I'm Allison Chantel, and this is Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry. We'll be back after a short message from our sponsor.
Fortune spoke with Deloitte U.S. CEO Jason Girzadas on building a culture of speed and agility to drive innovation in large organizations.
There's a natural tendency for large organizations to become slow and deliberate, but in this environment, given the pace of technology and other competitive dynamics, there's also a need to increase agility, increase speed, and so there's a way through evaluating cultural drivers of the speed of decision making, the speed of communications, accountability for decision making—that large organizations can be agile. It doesn't have to be an either-or. An entrepreneurial culture within a large organization really means that the speed of decision making is a priority. That the decision-making process, accountability, clarity of decision rights, a culture of making speed a priority can thrive. It's a CEO's job, a leader's job to make sure that individual units or divisions or groups or teams within a large organization feel that degree of empowerment and support and expectation that the speed of decision making is a priority. It's something that winning larger enterprises are intentional about.
Aneel Bhusri, thank you for joining me today for our podcast. I'm sitting here across from Fortune 500 CEO of Workday, which is now number 430 on the ranking, 21,000 employees, about 10 billion in annual revenue. So a lot has changed since you were 39, 2005, starting this company.
Sure has, sure has. It's been a—it's been a great ride.
Incredible, and you recently came back into the CEO seat after a brief hiatus, a couple years. But first, I want to get your big picture thoughts. I don't think there's anyone more credible we could be speaking to about what the future of work looks like. You have about 60% of the Fortune 500 as your clients using software and even now agents to help figure out efficiencies within their orgs. And so I'm curious, what do you see in 2030, the future of work from an employee standpoint and an employer standpoint looking like?
Yeah, I don't think anybody has a crystal ball. We actually have a project called HR 2030 to try to figure out what organizations are going to look like, but there's never been a more profound change in technology than AI. I've never seen like it, you know. And I'm old enough that I've seen the mainframe, the client-server, web, cloud. But AI is different. AI is trying to—has the promise of replacing how humans think and act, and so it's—it's pretty profound. We're going to live in a world of humans and agents, and they're going to have to coexist. And I'm optimistic we're going to find a path where it's mutually beneficial as opposed to just agent technology replacing humans. But it's still to be determined.
So a lot of this is playing out. But based on what you're seeing and how you're seeing companies adopting the agents you're putting out, do you think organizations will be as big? Do you think job functions will change drastically? What are you thinking there?
I do think job functions are going to change. Agents are effectively role-based technologies that you can look at a specific job and say the agent can do that equally well as a human, and that to me is both exciting and a little bit scary. The more rote, repeatable work that doesn't require a lot of human judgment, that will be replaced by agents, and I think that's already happening across the board. The ability to analyze an amazing amount of data in a short amount of time and come up with predictions at a much faster pace than humans, yeah, that's what AI is really good at. The question is how far it goes. What I see from startups is that they're designing their business models around AI. Large companies are trying to figure out how to put AI into their existing business model, and I think there's a lot to learn from the startups and what an organization in the future looks like. To me, a lot of the great talent going forward from the human perspective will be people that really know how to use AI, as opposed to be replaced by it. Figure out how to use it, and I see that in our own company. The best coders are not just great coders, but they are great at using the coding tools. And I think that's across the board. Whatever profession you're in, become proficient at using the AI tools.
It's always hard for an incumbent to adopt new technology and really seep it into its core. And I know you advise a lot of startups, and so you have a very good viewpoint of both working with the incumbents, being one yourself, and trying to transform it, and seeing the startup scene. There are predictions of, you know, the most turmoil in the Fortune 500 over the next decade than ever before. I think I interviewed Vinod Khosla earlier this year, a venture capitalist, who very famously has said this. Do you feel that's the same? Do you think the clients you work with will change drastically over the next few years?
I don't know if they'll change drastically, but they're going to—they're going to have to change. There's always going to be an upstart that has, you know, a brand new model using AI, and they're going to have to counter that, but at the same point, you know, companies have great brands, they have great products, and that's not going to go away overnight. I do believe in this hybrid world going forward, and at the same point, I think every large company needs to think about what they would look like if they were a startup. How would you approach it with a clean sheet of paper? And that's how we're doing it at Workday. It's kind of a refounding—we call it a refounding moment. And thinking about if we were a startup today, how would we run the company? And we're applying a lot of startup principles and thinking about AI as a native technology, not adding it on to the product we've already built.
So talk to me about the refounding moment because you have been back in the CEO seat officially since February 10th of this year. There were two years where you were executive chair of the board, still working closely with the company and advising Carl, who had been your co-CEO. But now you're back fully in the saddle. What drove that decision? Because when I hear you talk about the transformation that has to happen, my goodness, it's daunting. And not only that. You said you were having fun doing it in your last earnings, and that's not something I hear a lot of CEOs saying right now. So, what drove the decision to come back and refound?
You know, at the core, I'm not a—I will be the first to admit I'm not a great operating executive or guy. I'm an entrepreneur, and I love products and technology. And the 25th version of cloud, there are better people to run Workday than me. When AI showed up, it was a refounding moment in that all bets are off. It's a brand new world, and AI is so different from any technology I've ever seen. It's a reasoning engine. It's more about probabilistic work than a deterministic business process platform. It's a fundamentally different way to approach the applications that you build, and they are iterative. They're changing almost on a daily basis, as opposed to a business application that you might change every six months. And so, you have to reinvent yourself. And for me, that was something I'd be excited about, you know, being an entrepreneur and a product person, and you know, we call it a refounding moment. And I think part of it is when you look at the history of technology. Great tech companies are not built on one generation of technology; they pass the test of time. Microsoft: desktop to client-server to cloud and now to AI. Google the same, Apple the same. There are companies that pass the test of time, and I really wanted Workday to be one of those companies that was not just great in cloud, but is also great in this next generation of technology. And I felt I had a role to play in getting us to be a leader in this new world, and so that's why I came back, and it's really exciting. The pace of change is like nothing I've ever seen in my life. The models change; they seem to be on a weekly basis. And you know, I'm 60 now, so I'm fortunate. I have this great partner in Gerrit Kazmier, who's in his early 40s, and he's really driving the products. I'm working with him to set the vision and, more importantly, set the tone for the culture. But it's an environment I've never seen before, and it's exhilarating. It's fun and scary at the same point.
In 2005, you and Dave Duffield decide to start Workday, and we're walking by a diner in the middle of the office. It's called Truckee Diner, and I was wondering how this pertains to the founding story of you and Dave in Workday?
Well, so we had just come off the hostile takeover of PeopleSoft by Oracle, and honestly, I was trying to convince him to start one more. And we both like diners and dives, right? I'm a big Guy Fieri fan, and so we would meet at Truckee Diner, which is actually called Jack's on the Tracks. I think we met four or five times, and we would talk to each other and think about whether we really wanted to do it. And then we started building our plans for starting Workday.
And so, as you're thinking about studying the culture, I understand you studied Steve Jobs's return to Apple when he came back as CEO. What did you take away from those learnings, and what are you doing to put your mark on this company for a second time around?
So in coming back, there's just not a lot of examples of founders leaving and then coming back several years later. And I was just trying to think, well, what should I do when I come back? And I'm a huge Steve Jobs disciple as it relates to his products and market thinking, and so I watched video after video, interview after interview about him. Drove my management team crazy because I send them these Instagram clips. There was one All Things D interview he did where he talked about making Apple the biggest startup in the world, getting back to ownership, accountability, speed, reducing the number of products to ones that really mattered. When I came back, we had 50 agents under development. Now we have 20. There are a lot of other projects that were not core to the future. We just had to end those projects and really get focused on what really mattered, and the best lens on that is what matters for the customer. And so, some of the agents just weren't that impactful. Some were features that got rolled into other agents, and we've just got a lot more focus. And I learned that watching countless hours of his videos. I mean, he wasn't just a product genius; he was a management genius too, in the way he organized Apple for success, and then you know Tim Cook took it to greater heights. And so I'm trying to bring that same mentality of recreating that startup mindset, clear accountability. When I came back, there were multiple owners of AI on the agent side, multiple owners on the API side, multiple owners on the platform side, and I thought, well, this—I don't know who owns it. So now we have one owner for building our agents, one owner for building our AI platform, one owner for building the tools, and we're moving at breakneck speed. And so that's part of the set of lessons I learned from watching his videos.
So it sounds like your first six months has been spent getting the leadership team settled, everyone aligned on the mission and the goals, having ownership so that they feel committed to and accountable to what they're doing, and refocusing—the dwindling of 50 agents down to 20 sounds purposeful and smart. You want to be great at a few, not overwhelming at many. Is there anything else in the first six months that you feel like you've really done to try and set the stage for growth? You've now had two really nice quarters in a row.
My co-founder Dave had this great expression: 'The best product doesn't always win, but it sure wins a lot.' And so, just getting back to that best product mindset has been a big part of the last six months. Getting people to take risks in products—not with customer data, but take risks in terms of innovating and seeing what's possible, and if it doesn't work, that's fine. It's okay. Move on to the next thing. And getting the company very focused on really three things: build our AI future with our customers, get close to our customers again, and live our values. Those three things are—it's really simple, but it's not 20 different initiatives. It gets everybody centered on what's, you know, what's right, and so far it's working. The salespeople are really excited because they've got exciting new products to sell, and the first wave of these products are doing quite well.
You know, you mentioned a little bit ago too that you are not a great operator, but you are an innovator, and I think a few years ago we heard this term 'founder mode' emerge. It was started by Brian Chesky, who's the founder of Airbnb, and it sort of lit a fire in the business community. And I think we're seeing that more and more now. The operator COO was good leadership for maybe a particular set of time, but I'm seeing more companies, even Apple just this last week, with Tim Cook going into a chairman position and John Ternus, a product guy, kind of trying to drive innovation in this era. I think that's a leadership change a lot of companies are making.
Tech companies, like any company, they go through cycles, and there's a period of time when innovation is front and center and the most important thing. I think innovation always matters, but then there's a period of time when the innovation's been brought to the market, where scaling the company matters. We're back to a point in time where it's all about innovation again. And so, I definitely think Workday's in founder mode right now. I mean, I came back and I didn't come back to run the company better. Carl's a very good operator. I came back to make sure that we are super innovative with the AI products, and we do it responsibly. It's an incredibly powerful technology. We have to do it the right way, especially in our worlds of HR and finance. And it's a daunting but exciting task.
So I definitely want to get into the security and the AI agent moment that we're in. First, though, I want to talk about around February when you came back was also the SaaS apocalypse. A bunch of—not just you, but your competitive set—took a dive in the markets. I think Anthropic released something that made people feel like, oh my gosh, all of the enterprise companies that are like a pay-per-seat or are servicing enterprise clients with software had been a great business before, but now with one product release, Anthropic or OpenAI can eat their lunch.
Was there reality in that SaaS apocalypse? Was it just market jitters? Like, how did you make sense of that moment?
There's always some truth to it. I don't think it honestly applied to Workday unless we stand still for the next five years. The coding tools that came out of OpenAI and Anthropic and Cursor—they're incredibly powerful, and could they be used to build something that's competitive with Workday? Absolutely, but we're using those same tools too. And I think that was lost in the market. We're big users of all three of those platforms, and so I don't know. I think half of our development now is being driven by those tools. I think the part that people miss is that AI is a really amazing reasoning engine. At the end of the day, the technology is trying to predict the next token, right? It's probabilistic. It's creating—it's 90% probably that's the next thing to happen. Deeply embedded business processes like Workday, they're deterministic. You start a payroll process, you end a payroll process. You can't be 90% right 90% of the time, especially if you're 90% right 90% of the time, and the 90% changes between the two payroll runs. We got to be 100% right 100% of the time, and that's the way payroll works. That's the way HR works. That's the way finance works. You can't get the audit partially right. You got to get it completely right. So the real power is combining the two technologies. Now, are there some SaaS companies that were much more about content generation versus business process, or were they more about workflow orchestration versus a system of record? Yeah, they might be more exposed. But what we do is—and I call it the swamp—all three major AI companies run Workday. So Google runs Workday, Anthropic runs Workday, and so does OpenAI. And so I think there's some sensibility in there that the market lost. And I just—I always worry when investors who are not fully informed just make these huge, gross generalizations, and they don't always have the right incentives, and they drive stocks up or down without really knowing the underlying fundamentals. I've now been back for seven months. I've yet to meet a single customer that's thinking about replacing Workday with anything that's, you know, vibe-coded or built by a model.
So it sounds like—and I'm not surprised to hear you say—Workday sounds like it's safe. And some of the competitors, like the Oracles and SAPs, probably same category. But there are—pains me to say that, but Oracle and SAP are safe.
Okay. But it sounds like there are some things that are not. Maybe some companies that are more consumer-facing, but also employees. I pulled a quote from an interview you did in May. You're pretty honest about where you think the jobs market is headed. 'The cold hard reality is AI is replacing labor. I think there will be a lot of job displacement because of AI.' So I'm curious if you can expand on what makes you say that when a lot of people won't, at least publicly—and I commend you for saying it publicly. And what timeline do you think this will play out?
You know, timeline—I think it's within the next five years. But I look at what we're doing with some of our agent technology, say like a financial audit agent. It's going to replace the work of junior auditors. I look at what we're doing with our contract intelligence agent. It does replace the work of lawyers, or at least a subset of lawyers. And I think we just have to be honest about it. It's why Workday is involved with Raise U.S. We've got to figure out how to retrain the people that get displaced. The first wave of AI will be low-level business process automation that didn't get done by cloud, but you know, taking you step by step through the payroll process is a pretty rote process. Can an agent do that and replace a human at a lower cost? Yes. Will companies want to do that? Yes. Am I worried about the job displacement? Absolutely. So we have to figure out what we're going to retrain these folks who get displaced into, or we're going to have a set of social issues. And so you know, Dario has been pretty open about these issues coming, and I think we just need to have a plan. So that's why we joined Raise U.S. as an early investor, and we're also doing our own learning and education programs to help people get through this transition.
Can you explain what Raise U.S. does and what the initiative is, and some of the solutions? I think a lot of people hear, 'Oh my gosh, my job is being taken, and there is no plan.'
It was started by Gina Raimondo and Eric Holcomb, two former governors, and they see the same issue about job displacement, and they're really focused on retraining. First of all, exposing what the set of issues are, so we actually have the understanding of where jobs are getting displaced, and then come up with a plan to retrain the folks that are being displaced. And there's a whole bunch of companies involved. We're involved. I know Cisco's involved. Microsoft's involved. OpenAI's involved. Anthropic. We're all involved to try to figure out a plan to retrain the folks that get displaced.
