Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri’s unfinished business
Fortune · Andrew Nusca ·
Workday rode a startup revolution in the 2010s to become a Fortune 500 software company. Can it turn back time to survive a new, AI-led uprising under the tutelage of one of its founders?
Aneel Bhusri, slumping his shoulders and clasping his hands in his lap like he’s waiting to be called into the principal’s office, sits on a hard chair under hot stage lights and tries, to no avail, to make himself more comfortable. He shifts his weight to the right, and then to the left. He folds and refolds his hands. The Workday CEO gives fleeting acknowledgement to the hundreds of people in the audience before him, but it’s clear that he’s far more relieved to train his attention—and the audience’s—on the single executive seated directly opposite. That man, Sana founder-CEO Joel Hellermark, leans back into his chair and smiles, throwing one leg over the other with the nonchalance of a man half Bhusri’s age. (Indeed, at 30, he is exactly that.) They talk about the future of artificial intelligence.
Bhusri may not be keen on soaking up the limelight, preferring instead to deflect it to one of his young mentees. But make no mistake, he is happy to be here, at the annual customer conference for Sana, the Swedish agentic AI startup Workday acquired six months prior for more than $1 billion. He has good reason to be. Fifteen years ago Workday, which Bhusri cofounded with David Duffield in 2005, was the rebellious, HR-focused, San Francisco Bay Area upstart whose cloud-based service threatened the hegemony of Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft—generational giants of enterprise resource planning software. Today, Workday is a Fortune 500 incumbent in its own right, facing a new technological revolution it didn’t start: AI.
If the technology’s most extreme adherents have it right, AI will lay waste to the entire software-as-a-service category in an epic “SaaSpocalypse” that fundamentally upends how businesses buy and use software. While that cataclysm has yet to materialize, Workday’s business has been under pressure. Revenue in its most recent fiscal year grew 13%, its slowest pace in years, and the company has undergone several rounds of layoffs.