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.
