Workday unveils AI agents for HR automation as CEO Aneel Bhusri returns to lead transformation

Workday Shifts to Consumption-Based Pricing for AI Agents

Workday is fundamentally changing how it charges customers for enterprise software, moving beyond traditional per-employee licensing to consumption-based pricing for AI agents that automate HR and finance tasks. CEO Aneel Bhusri told investors at Workday Rising in Las Vegas that the company expects customers to fund these AI agents from staffing and outsourcing budgets rather than IT spending1

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. "It's a flywheel. Once it gets going, it really gets going," Bhusri explained, comparing the model to cloud providers like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure1

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Chief AI Officer Joel Hellermark, who joined through Workday's $1 billion acquisition of Swedish agentic AI startup Sana six months prior, told analysts that automating work could expand Workday's market "beyond the software budgets into the labor and services spend," where "customers are spending tens of millions of dollars on outsourcing"1

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. Hellermark claimed self-service AI agents had already increased resolution rates for common tasks by 25 percent1

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Aneel Bhusri Returns as CEO to Lead AI-Driven Transformation

Bhusri's return as CEO in February 2026, replacing Carl Eschenbach who received a $3.6 million lump-sum payment, marks a critical moment for the Fortune 500 company facing pressure from the AI revolution1

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. The 60-year-old Workday co-founder had planned to retire but came back specifically to lead the company through the agentic era. "If it wasn't for AI, would I have come back to Workday? I don't actually know the answer to that question," Bhusri admitted5

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. "This is not just another product cycle. This is something like none of us have seen. Simply put, this is trying to replace the human brain"5

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Taking inspiration from Steve Jobs' Apple comeback, Bhusri is transforming Workday into a "re-start-up." The company underwent a 2.5% workforce reduction focused on eliminating organizational layers rather than cost-cutting. "In some places in the R&D organization, there were 10 layers between me and someone actually building code," Bhusri explained5

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. When he returned as CEO, he found AI responsibilities were "very diffuse" across application teams, prompting him to centralize AI development to accelerate progress1

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Work Intelligence Breaks Jobs Into Tasks to Prepare for Automation

Workday launched Work Intelligence at Workday Rising 2026 on October 13, a tool that helps companies identify which tasks can be automated using AI, which require human involvement, and what skills employees need as roles change3

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. The tool breaks jobs into individual tasks and maps them to required skills, drawing on Workday Skills Cloud used by more than 3,450 customers and built on an ontology of over 75,000 skills3

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"The basic building block of work is shifting from the job to the task," said Nikki Helmer, Vice President of Talent Management and Insights at Workday3

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. Work Intelligence is now available to early access customers of Workday Human Capital Management and works with Workday Decision Intelligence to help companies assess whether to develop skills internally or hire new employees3

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. The tool also integrates with Workday Learning, powered by Sana, to create personalized learning paths based on employees' skill requirements3

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Headless Access Opens HR and Finance Systems to AI Agents

Workday announced broader "headless" access to its HR and finance systems, allowing AI agents to read data and perform tasks without users navigating its application interface1

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. Its Model Context Protocol tools provide access subject to Workday's permissions, approvals, and audit trails1

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. Workday Data Cloud supports access to operational and historical data, including sharing with platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, and Salesforce, with its architecture including a data lake using the Apache Iceberg open table format1

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Entry-Level Jobs Face Automation Risk, Urgent Reskilling Programs Needed

Bhusri acknowledged concerns about AI's impact on entry-level jobs, particularly for college graduates. "A lot of those jobs are entry-level jobs that probably AI could do but they can't do the next job or the next job after that," he said at Workday Rising4

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. The company is using AI internally to grow without corresponding headcount increases. "There's also the opportunity to just not hire in areas we were hiring in the past and just leverage AI instead," Bhusri told investors1

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Gerrit Kazmaier, President of Product and Technology at Workday, emphasized the disconnect between traditional education and AI-led workplaces. "The biggest problem right now is that we are producing new graduates that are being trained in a pre-AI world and now being thrown into an AI-led workplace," he said4

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. Hellermark provided an example of successful reskilling programs, citing Sana's pandemic-era work retraining flight attendants to support hospitals in a program that historically would have taken a year4

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Workday's Competitive Advantages in AI Era Against Oracle and SAP

Bhusri highlighted Workday's technical foundations as key differentiators against competitors like Oracle and SAP. "We're down to one data model. One data model means we can aggregate all the data across all of our customers and train the models in ways that nobody can touch," he explained5

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. The company manages 80 million employees across its customer base, providing unmatched scale for training AI models5

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. With every customer on the same version, new agents work across all customer systems without customization between different versions5

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Workday's revenue grew 13% in its most recent fiscal year, its slowest pace in years, with the stock price swinging from $300 highs to $112 lows amid pressure from activist investor Elliott Management and its $2 billion stake2

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. The workforce transformation strategy positions AI as complementing human workers rather than replacing them entirely, with companies able to support existing talent with AI to drive growth without proportional hiring increases4

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