Aneel Bhusri

As more organizations move from pilot to production, more than a quarter of new annual contract value at Workday now comes from AI products, with over 5,500 customers now actively running at least one agent, up 35% since last quarter.

In the six months since Aneel Bhusri returned as CEO, there has been a lot of progress he can point to on the agentic push:

It’s all about adoption and customer success. We have to have agents that have real ROI, and that’s been the lens we’ve been looking at it since I came back. We had a lot more agents when I came back. We killed a lot or we rolled them into bigger agents. The ones that we have right now, I’m very optimistic they’re all very meaningful to our customers.

He cites US bank BMO as a case in point of how Workday customers are getting engaged with agent tech:

They piloted Self-Service Agent with 500 employees in May and successfully rolled it out to all 55,000 employees in June. SSA gives BMO employees and managers a personal, intuitive way to get HR questions answered and work done faster and easier. And because it’s native to Workday, the agent understands employee permissions and which HR policies apply to them. That built-in context is exactly what makes this a responsible and scalable AI deployment for BMO.

That’s just one example, he adds: 

Customers are making five year, seven year decisions on new platforms and AI is a huge decision point for them. And if anything, it’s impacting our win rates on the platform because we’re viewed as the much stronger player in terms of an AI vision and AI agents than our legacy competitors that we all know so well.

Fast-moving

And things are moving fast, he observes:

The difference on these agents versus traditional applications, they iterate and become better so much faster. So I’m very optimistic that we’re going to see ramping up usage of these agents faster than we ever saw of our apps…new customers [are] choosing Workday because of our agentic strategy. Existing customers, they have an AI budget. And now we have products that actually fit in that AI budget, which is a big win for us.

Workday is “trying to be very thoughtful” in the way it’s building its agentic solutions, according to Bhusri:

They’re not meant to solve simple problems. Anybody can solve the simple problems. When I look at what we’re doing with the Self-Service Agent, it’s really hard. What we’re doing with the Financial Audit Agent is really hard.

But by building these agents and coming out the other end, they add tremendous value to our customers. And frankly, from a competitive perspective, they’re really, really hard for anybody to compete with because they’re so deeply embedded in the bowels of Workday.

And after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s robust call to stop talking about the so-called SaaSpocalypse earlier in the week, Bhusri adds his voice against the narrative:

[Previously], I told you I hadn’t met a single customer looking to replace Workday with something they’re building internally or buying from a start-up. A quarter later, that hasn’t changed. The reason is the deterministic rails I’ve talked about before. Our agents are lawful. They work inside the permissions, policies and business processes a company already runs on. That’s why our customers can trust them with the work that matters, and it’s why we’re seeing our organic agents really take off this year.

My take

Time flies when you’re having fun, and I’m having a lot of fun.

Workday just turned in a strong set of quarterly numbers that won’t change Bhusri’s mood. For Q2 2026, the firm turned in net income of $228 million, a 72.7% year-on-year growth, while revenues topped $2.35 billion, up 12.6% from a year ago. Subscription revenue in Q2 was $2.471 billion, up 14%, while Professional services revenue was $178 million.

There was, of course, an elephant in the room skulking unreferred to in the corner in the shape of recent scuttlebutt that Workday is talking to Silverlake about a PE buyout by Workday. Nothing was said directly in relation to this yesterday and none of the participants on the post-earnings analyst call felt it was important enough a topic to raise.

But in terms of the future, Bhusri does remark:

I’m an unabashed optimist, but I’m not leaning on optimism here. We’re shipping AI products. Our customers are adopting them rapidly, and it’s happening across the board from the agents we built ourselves to the ones we’ve acquired. This is Workday’s moment and I never felt better about where we’re headed.

Onwards now to Workday Rising in October!