When Workday co-founder and chairman Aneel Bhusri hired Carl Eschenbach as co-CEO just over a year ago, Bhusri expected Eschenbach to double the size of the company in the next few years by improving its go-to-market talent and performance thus increasing his level of interaction with customers and driving significant operational changes.
And as the dedicated Eschenbach begins his second year as CEO and public face of Workday, it's clear that while great progress has been made in all of these areas, Eschenbach is just getting started.
As Workday's customers undergo their own significant transformations and pursue a range of new opportunities amid rapidly changing market dynamics across sectors, Eschenbach says Workday must be able to move as quickly as the world it serves.
“Frankly, the pace and speed of change we've seen here at Workday over the last year has been pretty aggressive,” Eschenbach told me in a recent Zoom interview for this CEO Outlook 2024 series. (You can watch my full interview with Eschenbach here.)
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“I couldn't be prouder of how the company has embraced change, embraced many of the transitions and transformations that we're going through, embraced the new leaders that have come on board here at Workday and adapted very quickly to that “We have the talent and great leaders we've had at Workday for so many years,” he said.
“But the one thing that keeps all of us here at Workday grounded are Workday’s core values, which are the foundation of our company,” Eschenbach added, pointing to a company culture that has existed since the company was founded by Bhusri and Dave Duffield received numerous awards in 2005.
That's a delicate balance for any executive, but Eschenbach's adventure was certainly helped by being a board member at Workday for nearly five years, an experience that allowed him to deeply understand the company, its customers and its opportunities.
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As Workday prepares to enter fiscal 2025 on February 1, Eschenbach outlined some of the key initiatives he has launched:
- International: While it represents 50% of Workday's total addressable market (TAM), it only accounts for 25% of revenue, and Eschenbach has brought in a number of new regional and national leaders around the world
- Ecosystem: While this has been an important area for Workday in the past, “I think we're just at the beginning of everything we can do with our partners,” he said
- Expand platform: Over the past year, the number of applications built on Extend has increased by 70%; And
- Commitment to customers: Noting that engagement is one of Workday's six core values, Eschenbach said Workday customers are “cautiously optimistic” and “absolutely still buying,” albeit with more “business scrutiny on every decision.”
And of course, something every Workday customer wants to talk about and understand is artificial intelligence (AI). From his hundreds of conversations with customers, Eschenbach said that while they all expect best-in-class AI technology and capabilities, the other key ingredient they insist on is trust.
“As we work not only with CEOs, but also CIOs, CHROs and CFOs, we are all trying to better understand the potential impact of AI,” he said. “And I believe it can create a massive incremental change in human productivity. But people are having a hard time figuring out how to use it, how to implement it, and how to make sure it's done in a very trustful and responsible way. And I think we are uniquely positioned here.
“When you think about Workday, our history has been supporting our customers’ most valuable assets: their people and their money,” said Eschenbach. Because of the highly strategic nature of these assignments, Workday had to earn the trust of thousands of customers before it won the right to help them take care of their employees and their money. And as the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) revolution is in full swing, Eschenbach believes customers will extend that trust into AI as well, ultimately becoming the key part of what he calls “systems of trust.”
“If you think about what we started almost 19 years ago, our goal was to build a system of record in the cloud – no one else thought of it. And by doing that, we've taken all of this valuable data of their people and their money and put it in the cloud, we've protected it, we've secured it and we've made sure that by moving to that cloud we deliver tremendous business value to them Customers have achieved model,” he said.
“We have evolved from a system of record to a system of engagement and now have 65 million users on the Workday platform with an output of 600 billion transactions per year on top of Workday. “So we became not just a system of record, but a system of engagement, and that was quickly followed by integrating more than a decade of AI and machine learning deep into the platform rather than bolted on,” Eschenbach said.
“So this system of record became a system of engagement and is now a system of intelligence, and all of this is wrapped in what we call the system of trust in the enterprise of trust. Our customers trusted us 19 years ago, and fast forward to today, they continue to trust us to deliver ethical, responsible and safe AI solutions for them.”
Final thought
“Systems of trust” is easy to say and very difficult to implement, but it's clear that Workday believes its strong customer loyalty values will help them achieve this vision. Similarly, one of the other ambitious visions that I think is an example of what Eschenbach brought to Workday is his idea of taking the company's rapidly growing ecosystem beyond the typical industry model and into a self-sustaining “economy.” .
“I talked to everyone about the strength of our ecosystem and where it stands today, but I also talked about what the future might hold if we thought a little differently about the partner ecosystem,” Eschenbach said.
“I don't think we're just building an ecosystem – I literally believe that with the strength of our technology and our platform and the innovations we continue to bring to market, we're building an entire economy around Workday. “With all the investments we've made over the last 12 months to focus on the partner ecosystem, we're just getting started, right?”
As Eschenbach prepares to become sole CEO next month while Bhusri moves to chairman, I don't think it's a stretch to think that this phrase – “we're just getting started” – will characterize what Workday is for the company is progressing The Eschenbach era will begin in the next few years.
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