Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO of Workday, said AI will displace many jobs within five years in an episode of Fortune's Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, hosted by Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. Fortune published the transcript on October 15. The conversation took place at Workday's office.
His background
Bhusri co-founded Workday with Dave Duffield in 2005 and returned as CEO in February 2026 after about two years as executive chair. Workday ranks No. 430 on the Fortune 500, with about 21,000 employees and roughly $10 billion in annual revenue, and about 60% of Fortune 500 companies are clients.
The displacement view
Bhusri expects AI to displace many jobs within five years, starting with rote work such as payroll processing. He cited a financial audit agent that could replace junior auditors and a contract intelligence agent that could replace a subset of lawyers. In a May interview he said: “The cold, hard reality is AI is replacing labor.” He said Workday's involvement in RAISE US, a retraining initiative founded by former governors Gina Raimondo and Eric Holcomb, is meant to address this. Workday is an early investor, and participants include Cisco, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Who he says will be fine
“If you're a doer, an individual contributor, you're going to be fine,” he said, and he added that workers who learn to use AI tools well will do better, noting that Workday's top coders are strong users of coding tools. Over the long run he believes “everyone's going to be fine,” but warned of a disruptive transition.
Inside Workday
Workday cut its agents in development from 50 to 20. Bhusri says recruiting agents deliver an ROI above 50%, and HR case deflection currently sits at 25% to 30% with a target of 80% to 90%. Workday is flattening its own management layers because agents handle low-level management work. On oversight he said: “Humans should be managing the agents.” On data: “The data does not leave Workday.” And on accuracy in payroll and finance: “It can't be 90% right 90% of the time.”
Source: Fortune. This is an AI Business Watch summary of the original podcast transcript.