For the 123rd episode of Burning Platform, we host Jay Wieczorkowski, GM Extend, and discuss many aspects of the Workday platform and the growing ecosystem around it
The first 25 minutes are a presentation by Jay where he discusses platform features and use cases, the recent hackathon at their DevCon event, the GenAI impact on the platform, the growing user and partner developed applications
We then have a discussion around how Workday is managing the wide spectrum of users of the platform – end user and citizen developers and much more sophisticated partner and IT developers.
We cover the growing partner ecosystem (which Matt Brandt, Senior Vice President, Global Partners had also discussed in this episode) and the fact that developer productivity is shaping up as one of the most promising uses for Gen AI, and how Workday is balancing that with its goals of “responsible AI”.
We discuss the co-opetition with hyperscaler platforms. Jay says it’s “not a zero sum game” and discusses how they are leveraging AWS Textract and Lambda and Google Gemini among other capabilities.
I love his passion when he describes the energy and intensity of the hackathon
“We have 40 judges that go around to each table, and (project teams do) 10 rounds of rapid fire presentations where they have to literally present their project to people 10 times in a row, five minutes each time. The energy in the room between the judges scrambling to go to the next table and then learning about all these projects, and then real time judging on their phone, and then the teams, practicing and rehearsing and honing their presentations. They keep getting better with each round, and we use that process to create our top 10, where they present on stage, and then we choose the final winners. That energy truly encapsulates our community. These are folks that built their career on Workday, folks that we are committed to investing in. These are folks that are often behind the curtains, making change happen, and it's just really exciting to celebrate that and also celebrate that they are learning new technology, exploring and seeing the art of the possible…that brings it all together.”
Very nicely done in under 40 minutes.
