Workday, Inc. Class A Common Stock Investor Day 2026

Please welcome Investor Relations Vice President, Justin Furby.

Thank you. I love that video. In fact, I was actually thinking we could just end it there and go right to Q&A, if you guys are okay with that. Got a few laughs out of that. Welcome to Rising. Welcome to Analyst Day. Really thrilled to have you guys make the trip out. We've got a great group here in Las Vegas. A great group joining us on the webcast as well. So appreciate all of you. I know there's a lot going on in the market, and this week as well. So, really appreciate you making the trip out. There's a lot of energy in this room. We're going to bring it up, though, as we go through the course of the day. We're going to show a lot of product. We've come a long way just in the last year, so excited to show you.

If you took in the innovation keynote this morning, you saw some of that. We'll show you a little bit more for you all and give you a look into what we've been working on over the last, really last year, but in the last six months in particular, a lot of acceleration around innovation. This is what we're going to expect today. It's going to be about 2 hours or so. We're going to go across much of the leadership team, and talk a lot about innovation, and then how we're actually delivering it to customers, and what that adoption cycle looks like.

I think as we go through the course of the day, and we'll close out with Rob, we'll talk about, and this is a question we get a lot, what does that journey look like in practical terms when a customer goes down that path with us? So, this is my obligatory safe harbor statement. During today's presentation, we will make certain forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially. Please see our latest Form 10-Q filed with the SEC for a discussion of key risk factors. With that out of the way, it is my pleasure to invite on stage our Co-founder, CEO, and Chair, Aneel Bhusri.

I'm right here. Oh, there you are.

Where are you? I was just watching to see how you were doing.

Good afternoon. Thanks for being here. It's great to see so many familiar faces. Hope you all saw the keynote today and in the Q&A you can ask any questions about that that you'd like. What I'm especially excited to hear about, you're going to hear from all the product and technology leaders that are setting the pace for the new set of products. Zane's got a lot to cover as well. Talk about the market opportunity, the strategy we're executing against. Hopefully what you see is that there's a big bench of talent at Workday that's driving the company forward, and in many cases, new talent, because it's a new era, it's a new time, and we've got largely a pretty fresh team driving us into the future. I talked about the re-refounding moment in the keynote.

How many people were at the keynote? Everybody? Oh, some people weren't. God. Okay. What were you doing? No, I'm kidding. If it wasn't for AI, would I have come back to Workday? I don't actually know the answer to that question. I get asked that a lot. But once AI showed up, I felt like I needed to be back, and I had many discussions with my co-founder, Dave, about the future and what makes a great technology company. What lets a technology company pass the test of time as a company that people admire and that does good work for their customers? It's winning across multiple technology generations. We were a clear leader in cloud. I was part of what happened client server. But PeopleSoft didn't make it to cloud.

Workday made it to cloud, and now Workday needs to lead in this next generation of AI, and that's a large part of why I came back. Also came back, which is about driving innovation, but also came back to make sure we're refocused on our customers, refocused on our employees. I'm 9 months in. So far so good. This is not just another product cycle. This is something like none of us have seen. Everybody has all these hyperboles around what AI means. But I've been around long enough to know I've never seen a technology like this before. Simply put, it's trying to replace the human brain. No technology in the past has done that. It's all been around increasing levels of automation. Do I know where this technology's going to go?

No, but I do want to have a say in where Workday heads with this technology as it continues to evolve on an almost a daily basis. Just to remind you, I'm not going to go into detail. You've been covering Workday for a long time. We've been at AI and machine learning since 2013. One of the reasons is in the founding principles of Workday is we thought data would be really valuable at some point down the road. We weren't sure how. It was before machine learning existed. But as soon as machine learning showed up in that 2013 time period, I was actually on the board of Cloudera, one of the pioneers of Hadoop, and I saw what was the start of something really powerful and magical. We just kept investing along that trajectory, and today, those bets along the way paid off.

We're still 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. Not ADP, not SAP, not Oracle. They have their customers on multiple systems. On the HR side, no one has the scale of employees that we have at 80 million to begin with. One security model. You don't have to adjust security going from version to version, which means when you're using AI, it only has to traverse that one security model for whatever application it's using, one version of the system. Every customer on the same version, so when you come out with the new agent, you don't have to try to customize it between 6 different versions of legacy systems. One agent works on all of our customer systems.

That's where we are and lots of transactions, 20 years of trust, which is not something to underestimate, especially with so many new companies emerging. They don't have the data, they don't have the trust. They don't have the ability to actually drive the models the way we do. To get that trust with customers took a long time, but the way we translated is into this universal master service agreement that lets us use their data in an aggregate way, anonymous way, but that lets us train the models in ways that no one else can do. The other part of what we're doing is just understanding that AI is just very different. It's not about an end-to-end business process. It's about probabilities and reasoning, and I said this in the keynote this morning, you can't get a payroll 90% right.

You cannot get a close 90% right. They have to be 100% right 100% of the time. Reasoning can add an element that helps you move a process from step to step, but it cannot replace that process. When we can take what we know with our platform and tie it to AI work starts getting done on behalf of people and business, and it can rely on those guardrails. That really is our differentiation. There are a lot of spaces where AI can just run amok. Maybe it is in the creative space where you are just creating new content, you are creating new images. Not in the HR and finance world. These spaces are highly regulated. They have permissions. In some places, in the U.K., you track religion. In the U.S., it is illegal to track religion.

You cannot have agents that are just running across your data without any insight into the rules and regulations that run their business. When you get to the financial side, same thing. Those same security permissions, workflows, and biz rules, these are what customers rely on, and that is what makes for lawful use of AI. That lawful versus lawless distinction is really important to us. For those that were in the audience, you saw the ad that we did with Peyton Manning on the lawful versus lawless. In the spaces of HR and finance and ERP, that really, really matters.