My marketing people would kill me, but next week is going to be a very important and groundbreaking week for Workday.

It’s been eight months since Carl Eschenbach became Workday’s sole CEO, after sharing the role with founder Aneel Bhusri since late 2022. This week, he’s leading the company’s annual Rising conference in Las Vegas, hence the above comment he made at last week’s Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference.

What can we expect this week? Well, AI, of course — it’s 2024! — but unlike many other enterprise vendors, Workday is taking a very pragmatic approach to the hype cycle, which is especially welcome against the macroeconomic backdrop in which customers are operating. Eschenbach believes that the current climate is actually the new normal:

If you go back to pre-COVID, this was the normal operating environment and the sales environment that we were all dealing with. Then we saw hyper-growth over the last few years, and it’s moderated again, but it’s been pretty consistent. There’s a lot of scrutiny and customers need to see a strong ROI or Total Cost of Ownership benefit to make a decision.

This actually plays to our advantage. I say that because there are a lot of tools, a lot of software, a lot of applications that have been sought after over the last few years. Now people are trying to drive consolidation. And when you do consolidation, you consolidate on a platform, and Workday is a platform. We have two of the best apps in the world between our HCM and our Financials, but we are a platform. And because we are a platform, our customers are talking to us about how do we consolidate and drive better total cost of ownership? Leveraging something like Workday, that is an ongoing conversation.

And then the next conversation is, how can you layer AI on top of that to drive even more efficiency at scale? That’s the conversation we’re having with our customers. It’s consolidation. It’s better ROI. It’s simplifying their operational environment and then using AI to drive efficiency gains and a step change in human productivity.

Specific needs

That’s the client’s ‘bigger’ agenda, but it breaks down into specific needs and interests of the constituency, he added:

On the HR side, I think talent is a huge imperative right now when you talk to CEOs. They’re all trying to figure out how to recruit, and not just recruit, but how to hire and how to retain, because a significant part of how you grow a business in our industry right now isn’t just about recruiting. It’s about how you retain them. And one of the ways you retain them is by giving your employees a great user experience. That’s what we talk to our clients about, is how do you give your employees a user experience that makes them want to stay where they are and not change jobs in the industry like we’ve seen in the past. I think it’s about retaining your workforce.

On the finance side, I think CFOs today are thinking about how do they leverage all the data assets that they have and how do they generate deeper insights to really think about the future of the business. And honestly, I think on the finance side, compared to the HR side or the HCM side, we’re still in the early days of that transformation. There are a lot of legacy systems on-premise and people are still thinking about how do they improve the efficiency of their finance systems and generate deeper insights for the future.

AI incoming

What both sectors are interested in is AI. Eschenbach explained:

When we talk to customers today, AI comes up. I fundamentally believe that an investment in Workday is an investment in AI. The reason for that is simply because we have one of the most curated datasets in the industry to train with. It’s not the size of the dataset. It’s a highly curated dataset and the context behind that, which drives business value back to our customers.

We, with AI, can lead the enterprise through both HR and Finance to show real business value and business impact. We can help people accelerate what they do. We can scale what they do. Ultimately, we don’t just want to have employee impact, we think we can transform business processes and business workflows because we are the system of record for HR and money. So AI is at the forefront and it’s something we talk about with our customers every day.

And that brings us back to the opening comment above about what’s happening in Las Vegas this week. The details are under wraps, but Eschenbach did say:

We’re going to talk about what we’re doing today in AI and the business value that Workday is delivering to customers today.

As for the rest, we’ll have to wait and see, but expect a strong focus on practical results and benefits rather than a lot of “jam tomorrow” promises. Eschenbach points out that Workday currently has over 50 different use cases in production that customers are using:

The innovation engine behind what we do around AI is expanding rapidly and we’re going to show a whole bunch of it. I don’t want to spoil it.

My opinion

Jon Reed is in Las Vegas this week and we’ll be showing you the best of Rising over the next few days.