Workday told investors at its annual conference in Las Vegas that it wants to fund its AI agents from customers' staffing and outsourcing budgets, not only IT spending. The Register's Lindsay Clark reported the strategy on October 15. Workday is opening more HR and finance functions to automation and says AI productivity could let it grow with fewer new hires.
A usage-based model
Workday expects agent charges to rise with usage rather than with the number of licensed employees. Co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri said consumption-based billing will mean bills increase as usage grows, calling it a far better model than a people-based subscription model. Chief AI Officer Joel Hellermark said automation could expand the market “beyond the software budgets into the labor and services spend,” where customers spend “tens of millions of dollars on outsourcing.” He added: “We're only getting started there.”
Platform changes
Broader headless access lets AI agents read data and perform tasks in HR and finance systems without using the application interface. Model Context Protocol tools provide access subject to Workday's permissions, approvals and audit trails. Workday Data Cloud supports operational and historical data sharing with Snowflake, Databricks and Salesforce, and includes a data lake using the Apache Iceberg open table format. Self-service AI agents reportedly raised resolution rates for common tasks by 25 percent.
Hiring and leadership
Bhusri said internal AI use helps Workday grow without matching headcount increases, noting the opportunity “to just not hire in areas we were hiring in the past.” He said AI had been very diffuse under application teams and that Workday was moving too slowly, so he is centralizing AI responsibility. Former CEO Carl Eschenbach stepped down in February with a $3.6 million lump-sum cash payment, and Bhusri returned as CEO. Reuters reported in August that Silver Lake was in talks to buy Workday, and the company did not comment at the time.
A caveat
The article includes no independent analyst commentary, so all forward-looking claims come from Workday executives.
Source: The Register. This is an AI Business Watch summary of the original report.