Workday CEO: "We've transformed the organization to be ready for AI and to deliver products"

Workday announced a raft of agentic products at its 2026 Rising event, and the software giant’s AI-enabled advances over the past 12 months signal what’s to come in the next year and beyond.

That’s according to Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri, who responded to a question from ITPro during a press panel on AI innovation after the firm’s keynote presentation in Las Vegas. “We've transformed the organization to be ready for AI and to deliver products,” he said.

Bhusri, who co-founded the company in 2005 and stepped down from the CEO role in 2024, returned to the CEO role in February 2026 to help lead the firm into the AI era. He recognized he’s overseen a hectic period, leading the integration of AI platform Sana – which was acquired by Workday in November 2025 – into the heart of Workday's technology.

“Sana, as the front end, is becoming transformational,” he said, reflecting on the company’s developments. At the event, it was announced that Sana is now the default home screen for Workday, providing an agentic experience for all users, allowing HR, finance, and other professionals to complete tasks with natural language requests.

“In a short amount of time, we've got 17 agents live,” continued Bhusri, referring to the firm’s rapid development pace during the past 12 months. “The self-service agent is becoming transformational for the company.”

Workday also announced agents across disparate areas, including a Talent Acquisition Agent, a Developer Agent, and Sana Concierge, an overarching HR and IT service that manages multiple activities.

Bhusri said the direction of travel is to refine everything the company does to help professionals complete valuable work more effectively. “Do I know exactly what that looks like?” he said. “It's a journey. I think we'll just be leaner, faster, and more enabled by services for people to do real work, not mundane work.”

In a one-to-one chat with ITPro at the event, Dean Arnold, VP of AI platform at Workday, suggested the things his team builds in prototype are significantly different than before AI.

“We are working faster, working with fully agentic tooling – that's the process. All our teams do it. The jump in velocity is significant,” he said.

Arnold’s team has built a new agentic platform for Workday, including gateways, authentications, and agent-ready tools. Like Bhusri, he suggested the company is prepared to pivot startup-like to deal with new models and priorities.

“Our work is continually evolving all the time,” he said. “I don't think we can ever claim that it's done because there's always the next thing to do.”