Workday is moving like a start-up to compete in the AI era

You’ve got to move quickly if you’re an IT vendor trying to create a competitive advantage in the AI age. At the recent Workday Rising event in Las Vegas, the software giant’s executives acknowledged the rapid pace of change and set an agentic-enabled course for the firm’s future product roadmap.

“We're so focused on AI,” said CEO Aneel Bhusri at the start of his product keynote at the event. “Workday was born in the cloud. Humbly, I think we are one of the leaders in the cloud. But now AI shows up, and it's again our opportunity to shine and bring great products to you in the next chapter of the technology industry.”

Building on a solid foundation

In a media session before the event, Bhusri suggested that Workday has been building for this moment for the past 20 years. Today, Workday, which processed more than 1.4 trillion transactions last year, supports more than 80 million users. Now, the firm’s internal innovators are drawing on these experiences to create a fresh set of services for customers.

“AI is one of the biggest opportunities in Workday's history,” said Bhusri during the press briefing. “We're moving faster than we have since the founding of Workday, and we need to be there for our customers and help them to take advantage of AI in a way that is trusted and built for the enterprise.”

Bhusri, who co-founded the company in 2005 and stepped down from the CEO role in 2024, returned to the helm in February 2026. He acknowledged that 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.

At the Rising event, it was announced that Sana is now the default home screen for Workday. Referred to as Workday Home, users can communicate with the platform in natural language and orchestrate agents to complete work activities. Bhusri said this new front door allows professionals to ask questions about their tasks rather than search for answers.

Alongside Sana, the keynote presentation also showcased a series of new agentic services. Workday launched Autopilot Agents that work continuously in the background. These AI agents work across disparate areas, including a Talent Acquisition Agent, a Developer Agent, and Sana Concierge, an overarching HR and IT service that manages multiple activities.

More time to add value elsewhere

Across the event agenda, Workday executives explained how the 17 agentic services the firm has developed during the past 12 months automatically anticipate tasks that need attention, freeing up professionals to work on more valuable activities, such as the personal relationships that are crucial to hiring and reskilling in HR.

Workday’s key message for customers in Las Vegas was that it’s building agentic capabilities into its platform, rather than bolting them on. Responding to a question from IT Pro during a media session following the firm’s keynote presentation, Bhusri recognized that this AI-enabled approach involves significant effort, particularly given the pace of change.

“Every week we read about a different model being the leading model, and we can just translate that pace of change to Workday,” he said. “In the nine months I've been back, we've transformed the organization to be ready for AI and to deliver on AI products.”

Bhusri said tech companies like Workday must change culturally to meet this development cadence. By working with the team from Sana and encouraging a startup-like culture within Workday, Bhusri believes the firm is now set up to deliver a set of flexible products that are commensurate with customer demands in an era of almost constant change.

“It's one of the reasons why we stay agnostic to the models,” said Bhusri, responding to ITPro, asserting that his firm is developing an increasingly open platform.

“We'll work with all model providers. But who knows how this is going to shake out? We must deliver great value for our customers, and that's what we're focused on.”

Bhusri said that acting like a startup means working leaner and faster. As part of this strategy, Workday announced a global workforce reduction of approximately 2.5% in late September 2026, affecting about 500 employees. Bhusri addressed the cuts in the media session.

“There were, in some parts of the development organization, 10 layers between me and the developer getting work done, and it was the actual individual contributors and developers themselves who said, ‘I can't get anything done. There are too many layers of approval.’”

The hope is that a leaner, faster Workday will continue to pick up the pace of innovation for its customers. In a one-to-one chat with ITPro at the event, Dean Arnold, VP of the AI platform at Workday, said he hoped customers at the event would recognize that the firm is ready to meet them with agents that can help them solve their key business challenges.

“We’re fundamentally showing up and saying, ‘We have these solutions. They're critical, and we can work with you on them,’” he said.

“And we've got flexibility as well. We're playing in our ecosystem, outside our ecosystem, and the ecosystem’s expanded. We have agents available right now for you to use. The next thing is to help our customers adopt them.”

Early adopters

Some customers have already made that shift. ITPro spoke with Hezha Guimond, VP for HR technology and integration at Anew Health, who is using Workday’s AI Talent Suite, particularly Recruiting Agent and Candidate Experience Agent, to identify and hire staff faster. She said Rising allowed her team to see the future roadmap firsthand.

“It builds up the excitement,” she said. “I know my team loves coming here because I feel like it energizes them to be able to go back and think through what else we could do. So, there’s a couple of products we have been texting back and forth about during the different sessions at the conference.”

What’s clear is the changes announced at the event are just the start. Yes, Workday is startup-like in delivering new features, but can its customers keep up with the rapid pace of innovation? The answer, suggested Bhusri, is that his company is moving faster than the digital leaders buying its products, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“We're ahead of our customers, but that's where we're supposed to be,” he said. “That's why they choose us. That's why they pay for us. We should be ahead of them, and the leaders are trying to keep up with us, and that's the way it should be.”