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

CEO eyes usage-based billing as automation pushes HR software vendor beyond traditional IT spending

Workday wants customers to fund its AI agents from staffing and outsourcing budgets, not just IT spending, as it opens more HR and finance functions to automation.

Speaking to investors at its annual conference in Las Vegas, the SaaS slinger said AI productivity gains could allow it to grow with fewer new hires.

Customers could face a different cost calculation, however. Workday expects agent charges to grow with usage rather than simply the number of employees licensed to use its software.

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Chief AI Officer Joel Hellermark told financial analysts that automating work such as HR tasks could expand Workday's market "beyond the software budgets into the labor and services spend," where "customers are spending tens of millions of dollars on outsourcing."

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Hellermark claimed self-service AI agents had increased resolution rates for common tasks by 25 percent. "We're only getting started there," Hellermark said, arguing that Workday could significantly reduce customers' outsourcing spending.

Aneel Bhusri, Workday co-founder and CEO, said using AI internally was helping the company grow without a corresponding increase in headcount.

"We're looking at the products across all of our software providers [to show] how we can use AI to drive margin," he said. "It may not be in terms of more reductions in workforce… but there's also the opportunity to just not hire in areas we were hiring in the past and just leverage AI instead."

This week, Workday announced broader "headless" access to its HR and finance systems, allowing AI agents to read data and perform tasks without users navigating its application interface. Its Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools provide access subject to Workday's permissions, approvals, and audit trails.

Workday Data Cloud supports access to operational and historical data, including sharing with platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, and Salesforce. Its architecture includes a data lake using the Apache Iceberg open table format.

Bhusri expects customers to pay for AI agents based on consumption, with bills increasing as usage grows.

"It's a flywheel. Once it gets going, it really gets going. It's a far better model than a people-based subscription-based model, which will continue for a long time. I see the bills we have to pay to Google Cloud and AWS and Azure, and I think why I'd like to be in that business," he said.

In August, Reuters reported that private equity firm Silver Lake was in talks to buy Workday. The software company did not comment at the time.

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In February, Bhusri returned as CEO, replacing Carl Eschenbach, who stepped down with a lump-sum cash payment of $3.6 million.

Speaking to investors this week, Bhusri said he wanted to centralize responsibility for AI. "When I came back, it was very diffuse. AI was owned by all the application teams; APIs were owned by all the application teams. And frankly, we're moving too slowly." ®