deal architect

Workday Innovation Summit: “Draw a bigger Enterprise Applications circle”

I thought of Bill Joy during last week’s Workday Innovation Summit. Bill was one of the Sun co-founders and overall is a tech savant. I quoted him in one of my books “If you cannot solve a problem, make the problem bigger. If you draw a bigger circle, you start to see several systems you can work on.”

It’s trite to say we are going through a computing revolution. However, for the most part we hear about consumer grade GenAI, ChatGPT and CoPilots. And in the enterprise, plenty about related infrastructure, particularly GPUs and LLMs.

However, as Malcolm Frank writes at TalentGenius “Enterprise agents are now in a full-blown Cambrian explosion; every week, dozens of new agents hit the market—from scrappy Silicon Valley startups, lumbering tech giants, consulting firms, even DIY shops inside Fortune 500s. Picking the right agent? It’s like scouting baseball players before anyone invented sabermetrics.”

This Analyst Summit was the longest and largest one Workday has ever hosted. I posted on LinkedIn “instant analysis” commentary, but here is more from the event. I especially liked the fact that most sessions drew ambitious circles defining enterprise applications to stand out in this fast changing space.

A new world of enterprise AI

It started with co-founder Aneel Bhusri, who has had time to focus more on AI product strategy since Carl Eschenbach took over as CEO a couple of years ago. Aneel is a rare breed with fingerprints on 3 generations of enterprise applications – client/server (PeopleSoft), cloud and now AI agents. He talked about Workday’s role-based agents which keep expanding in coverage. He also talked about the big differences from GenAI

“The underlying model for business process applications is deterministic. You know what is going to start and end a process. You start a hiring process; you end the hiring process. AI is very different. It's probabilistic. It's about reasoning. It's giving you the highest level of confidence as to whether your solution is right. So fundamentally, it is a very different way of organizing applications and the underlying model.

We set up a dedicated AI team's been running for a while, but now we have a dedicated AI Apps team as well, which we call the agent factory that will build these agents, because it's not like an extension of the cloud, it's something brand new.

We have probably the single biggest HR data set in the world. It's unified as one model. All the customers are running exactly the same version, so completely normalized, very different than our competitors.

The agent system of record that we've announced is going to be built just like an HR system.”

Workday knows where agents would fit on the org chart, what skills they have etc. There's no reason that they shouldn't be that third party Agent Manager as well.

Throughout the event we heard of countless titles like “Transfer Credit Agent” and “Contingent Sourcing Agent”. Many were announced under NDA – the monikers will likely undergo a rationalization.

Not just AI – many more transactional apps

The reality is the world continues to rapidly change and over the last couple of decades, cloud enterprise applications have mostly focused on horizontal business process areas across the English speaking world.

In just the last few years thanks to COVID, Ukraine war, digital transformation we have seen countless new apps become viable - telemedicine, retail returns management, digital twins and CPQ for industrials, EV charging management and billing among others.

Like Trump or not, companies are going to need a slew of new country-specific supply chain, eInvoicing, taxes, customs and other apps. Space, government, next gen making, logistics, farming, construction, plenty of new vertical opportunities will open up.

So, it was nice to hear about Workday’s growing global reach, especially with partners about their vertical applications particularly in the service sector. The wider your transaction portfolio, the bigger your domain expertise and unique data sets to train machines.

 
Ambitious Customers and Partners

Dave Somers, who was MC of the event repeatedly mentioned the Power of 3 (Workday, customers, partners). Matt Brandt discussed the expanding marketplace of apps and the explosion in formal partnerships. Jay Wieczorkowski ran a session on the journey of the Workday platform which is allowing for consistency of development across Workday, its partners and customers.

Elias Eldayrie, CIO at University of Florida presented their Workday journey starting 4 years ago and their more recent AI experiences and possibilities with Workday contract intelligence across an annual spend volume of $1 billion, recruiting 15k new employees a year out of 100k applicants and assistance during large audits a large university endures with Federal, State and Research institutions. He also shared UF’s journey as an “AI University” with over 230 AI enabled courses across colleges and curricula. NVIDIA helped them with the HiPerGator, which is the most powerful university-owned and operated supercomputer in the nation.

Magan Zee of the PGA Tour talked about using the Workday Extend platform to build a custom prize app for hundreds of tournaments they host

 Andy Palmer, Director of Technology at AWS provided a quick update on their massive product investments including Bedrock which allows for access to a long list of Foundation Models through a unified API, Nova which bundles Amazon’s own Foundation Models and their AI chips, Trainium, their training chip set, and Inferentia, which is used for inference and others

Aneel, with his Valley VC connections also talked about learning from Dario Amodei, the CEO of Antrophic, the developer of the Claude family of LLMs. Talking of big thinking, Dario has penned an essay titled The Machines of Loving Grace, a mostly optimistic piece about how people are underestimating the upside of AI (while focusing more on its risks) and his view on potential applications in biology, neuroscience and other aspects of society

Expanded leadership team

Carl introduced Rob Enslin as Chief Commercial Officer and Gerrit Kazmaier as President, Product and Technology. They bring significant global field and product expertise to Workday from Google Cloud and SAP. Throughout the event, we had a chance to spend time with new talent like Athena Karp and Jerry Ting who came with the HiredScore and Evisort acquisitions, and others like Shane Luke, Jim Stratton who are driving forward thinking product evolution. More large circles being drawn.

As we did in the 90s when the BOPS application vendors were at the peak of the tech pyramid we are entering a similar evolution. Hyperscalers, database vendors, SIs are all important but the highest business payback value will come from application and agentic vendors like Workday and their ecosystems.

Expect larger circles from all of them.

Burning Platform: Tariffs and lots more in the Trump 2.0 Economy

For the 132nd episode of Burning Platform, we host Ray Lane, Managing Partner at GreatPoint Ventures.

He is a repeat guest. This time, however, we touch on the fast shaping economy in the second Trump administration. Over the last month we have had similar conversations with other software veterans, John Wookey , Bill Hewitt  and Mark Montgomery

Ray has been part of several "dream teams" - of the Oracle executive team, the Kleiner Perkins venture capital partner group, the HP Board, the Carnegie Mellon Borad of Trustees among others and I invited him for a wide ranging conversation. We aim to keep the discussion un-political and focus more on business opportunities and risks.

So, while most of the conversation for the last couple of weeks has fixated on tariffs and the impact on stock markets, Ray points out the Trump administration has simultaneously also been renegotiating trillions in national debt, finalizing a tax cut and a scheming a number of other fiscal and other moves. He highlights the trillions in Foreign Direct Investments that have been committed to the US since Trump returned to office. About tariffs, he calls these “the first volley. These are very large increases, but I think they will be negotiated by country depending on other factors.”

We discuss the emerging world order. “I personally don't think Trump is an expansionist. He is an “America First” proponent. If you look 20, 30 years back even then he was talking then about what's good for America, what's not good for America. Similar to Ross Perot, standing against the NAFTA deal when he was running for President (in 1992). So why is he bringing up Greenland? Or why is he bringing up Panama? Well, he's bringing it up because China has been abusing their power in Panama. So he's bringing up purely as a what's good for America.”

How do Ray (and other business executives) navigate the drama that surrounds Trump? “He's not the personality I hang with. But I have worked with a lot of people whether it's Ross Perot or Larry Ellison and I respected their leadership. I have always told people you don't get half a package. You don't get his brilliance, his leadership, his technology skills, without getting some things you don't like. And so you have to buy into the Trump package and say, “Okay, I'm just going to ignore the personality side of it and the way he does things in such a blustery manner, and you'd sometimes have to figure out the policy from tweets that he puts out on social media. That's just not the way we're used to seeing our government operate.”

We discuss Trump’s cabinet and style of many of the members. About Elon Musk, we discuss space travel under NASA that he proudly recalls from his youth. “Didn't matter how much we were spending to get on the moon. That was a mission. Today, cost is as much an issue. You know you can't charge everybody a million dollars to put a satellite into space. I think Musk has proven with Tesla, with SpaceX, that it can be done (efficiently). But after two, three months, we're willing to say he doesn't know what he's doing. It's crazy. He does know what he's doing. He may not be a buttoned up process guy. In most companies, it's a committee of 18 people that make decisions, and we make sure that everybody's okay with the decision and that everything is checked. With Musk, all the Ts are not crossed and all the Is are not dotted. .He'd be the first one to admit that, but he's trying to set us on a direction of lower cost, less government, and I think it is absolutely necessary.”

We discuss US leadership in STEM areas and how Trump can help. “Imagine if Google and Meta and Nvidia were French companies. We'd be we'd be sitting here saying, how do we do that? We are the envy of the world because of our technology industry. This administration must support our technology (leadership) and not let Huawei or let Tencent or let ByteDance dominate”

Plenty more in this wide ranging 50 minute conversation. I have always appreciated his balanced perspective even in turbulent times.

Analyst Cam: Analyst Cam: Workday - 2025 Release 1

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

Rob Zwiebach, VP Product Management at Workday, does a rapid-fire summary of what is included in the 2025 R1 release this spring. While he is personally focused on the office of the CFO. I appreciated him presenting about Workday’s continued investment in “AI and hyper automation” as well as some of their industry capabilities and global expansion and compliance.

Rob discusses Workday’s focus on ecosystems of “role based” agents, developed by them and by partners. They see agents not just doing individual tasks but filling roles and being able to support humans working in similar roles.

He provides an update on how the Contract Intelligence offering has evolved since their Evisort acquisition.

As part of Workday’s global expansion, he presents on localizations for a growing set of countries. It includes a segment on Avalara ELR – e-invoicing and live reporting.

He presents on several vertical features including a CPQ module for professional services.

As he says, it is a “jam packed” release and he does a nice job speeding through in about 20 minutes