Workday CEO: ‘For all the dollars that’s been invested so far, we have yet to realize the full promise of AI’

We are living in the middle of the largest tectonic shift ever seen in technology.

“Every business in every industry around the world is being reimagined in the age of AI” – that was the opening message at Workday Rising in Las Vegas from the tech giant’s CEO Carl Eschenbach.

Speaking to 18,000 people in the audience, Eschenbach stated that the current problem is that “for all the dollars that have been invested so far and all the buzz, we have yet to realize the full promise of what AI can deliver as business leaders”, not everyone is seeing return on investment from AI.

“We’re still in the very early stages”, and currently businesses aren’t necessarily applying AI in the right way.

This was echoed by Workday Co-Founder and Executive Chair Aneel Bhusri during his day two keynote.

Bhursri added: “There’s been so much hype the last couple of years about what AI could do.”

For Eschenbach, we’re now at an “inflection point” with AI. It is time to rethink approaches to AI and “move from a world where it’s people working for technology to a world where technology is working for people”.

That’s where the world will see the true productivity and business gains from this revolutionary technology.

Meet Workday Illuminate

This backdrop explains why Workday used the Las Vegas conference to launch the next generation of its AI vision and products, Illuminate.

There are three core elements of Illuminate – Accelerate, Assist and Transform.

As Sayan Chakraborty, Co-President at Workday, explains in an exclusive media briefing at the conference, Accelerate is about “taking what you already do today and making it better with AI” without requiring large-scale changes to the organization.

While Assist is about “systems that will assist you in doing something” – aka copilots – and Transform “is where agents begin to operate, and begin to actually move from providing feedback to solving problems”, adds Chakraborthy.

“Agents are your very own team of business process experts making your life easier and enhancing the performance of business processes,” adds Bhusri.

In a media briefing, Aashna Kircher, Group GM of the Office of the CHRO at Workday, shares that Transform is particularly excited as “that’s really where AI starts to have tremendous ROI and impact for organizations and customers”.

“That’s where it’s not just about a bit of time savings here or there, but truly incredible time savings and incredible quality improvements”.

At Workday Rising, the tech company announced four agents – Recruiter Agent, Expenses Agent, Succession Agent and Workday Optimize – on the main stage.

Kircher adds that “Workday Optimize is really for our HR leaders – that’s about transforming how they think about deploy, use technology, and helping them to do that in a much faster way”.

The agents that have been launched are not the end of Workday – these are just “based on the loudest pain points from customers – you’ll continue to see us invest in agents that transform business flows based directly on feedback that we’re hearing”, notes Kircher.

Chakraborty is very clear that Workday’s approach to AI is fundamentally different to the consumer tech giants, like Microsoft, Meta and Google.

We’re not training large foundational models” that “can just pull data form the internet” – instead, Workday is being very focused on enterprises and their specialist needs, and only pulls from its own data set.

Workday has 70 million licensed users on the platform, 800 million transactions, which according to Bhusri, is the “largest and cleanest set of finance and HR data in the industry”.

Using ChatGPT or other general purpose LLMs for everything “would be like owning one knife in your kitchen and doing everything with it. Can you do it? Sure, but no-one does. Everyone has multiple knives that do different things”.

It is time to “move out of simply using an LLM because we can”, and instead look past the hype cycle, and leverage particular tools and platforms for their specific uses.

Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach announcing Illuminate during the opening keynote.

For Workday, Illuminate is more than just about the tech giant and it’s solution.

As CTO Jim Stratton put it during his keynote, the platform is a “force multiplier” because it enables 3X innovation by collaborating with customers and vendor partners. This happens through Workday Extend, which is run natively on the Workday platform, and currently there are 2,000 apps in production and 1,000 customers are building on Extend.

David Sommers, Chief Product Officer, shared some examples of how this three-fold innovation is “pushing the envelop of what’s possible”.

Target, for instance, has built a custom app for employee discounts to really drive retention and loyalty.

The power of Workday and its data set is “what could have taken years to develop can now take months”, noted Sommers during his keynote.

A human-centric approach to AI at Workday

Another core part of Workday’s vision around AI is keeping the human in the loop.

Chakraborty notes: “This technology can be really powerful if it helps people make better decisions. It’s dangerous if it starts making decisions.”

In answering a question from UNLEASH during an exclusive media briefing, Eschenbach echoes this, emphasizing: “We are not here to replace humans, we’re here to augment”.

We’re going to create a world where there will be peaceful coexistence between people and AI just like in every other technology revolution we’ve experienced,” he adds.

Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach interviewing McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown on the main stage at Workday Rising.

This sentiment was echoed by Eschenbach’s interview with McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown on the main stage at Day 1 of Workday Rising.

For Brown, McLaren has to have it all – great people and great tech – “a great driver can’t overcome a car that’s not up to the job”. Having a tech savvy driver is essential – “driving is almost the easy part”, shared Brown.

This human-centric approach to technology (and AI) is central why Eschenbach thinks that Workday will continue to standout in the HR tech and continue to be trusted by customers.

UNLEASH actually asked all the Workday executives we interviewed at Workday Rising event in Las Vegas this same question.

This people element came out strongly in their answers.

Workday’s CPO Ashley Goldsmith states that while the tech giant has six values, “our employees are our number one value.”

“We believe very deeply in this very basic formula: Happy employees = happy customers. If we treat our employees like they matter, like what they do matters, we value and respect them, they will turn around and do the same for customers,” adds Goldsmith.

While Chris Ernst, CLO at Workday, picks out another value: innovation.

He argues that rather than getting up stuck in the hype cycle, Workday has a “steadfast commitment to innovation, doing it the right way, quarter after quarter”.

This has enabled the company to improve and grow “in a way that builds trust and credibility with our customers”, and actually solves their day to day challenges.

Increasingly, through Workday Extend, this innovation is happening in concert with partners and customers – and this, states Ernst, is going to be a huge theme as Workday continues to iterate and evolve its AI offering into the future.