Workday wants a slice of customers' labour budget that its AI agents could replace

Workday aims to tap into customers' labour budgets for funding its AI agents, moving away from solely relying on IT spending for automation. At its annual conference in Las Vegas, SaaS company Workday highlighted how AI productivity gains could facilitate growth with fewer new hires. CEO Aneel Bhusri argued that automating HR and finance tasks might expand the company's market beyond software budgets into labor and services spend, where customers spend significant amounts on outsourcing.

Workday's Chief AI Officer, Joel Hellermark, noted that self-service AI agents had increased resolution rates for common tasks by 25 percent, suggesting that Workday could substantially reduce customers' outsourcing expenses. Bhusri emphasized that AI internally is aiding the company's growth without a corresponding increase in headcount, with plans to use AI across all software providers to drive margins.

He also mentioned that customers could pay for AI agents based on consumption, with costs rising as usage grows. Workday recently announced broader headless access to its HR and finance systems, enabling AI agents to read data and perform tasks without users navigating its application interface. This architecture includes a data lake using Apache Iceberg open table format, providing access to operational and historical data, including sharing with platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and Salesforce.