Fortune Magazine · Oct 14, 2026 · 40m · 32m saved
With Aneel Bhusri, Co-founder and CEO of Workday
Workday had 50 AI agents in development when its co-founder came back as CEO in February 2026. He cut the list to 20.
Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO of Workday, told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell on Fortune's Titans and Disruptors that AI will cost a lot of jobs within five years. Software investors spent February worrying that AI coding tools would replace companies like Workday. Aneel's concern is the work done by his customers' own employees.
"The cold hard reality is AI is replacing labor. I think there will be a lot of job displacement because of AI." — Aneel Bhusri
Aneel co-founded Workday with Dave Duffield in 2005 and spent about two years as executive chair before taking the CEO seat back. Google, Anthropic and OpenAI are all customers.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 40 minutes of audio, 8 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
AI is a "refounding moment" for Workday, unlike the earlier moves to client-server, the web and the cloud
Aneel cut Workday's AI agents in development from 50 to 20 after returning as CEO
Aneel expects significant job displacement within five years, starting with work done by junior auditors and lawyers
Workday is removing layers of management because agents now do much of the low-level management work
All three major AI companies run Workday, and no customer he has met plans to replace it with software built by a model
Workday's self-service HR agent handles 25–30% of employee cases today, with 80–90% the goal
Agent workloads are moving to consumption pricing, while human users stay on per-seat pricing
1. A Refounding Moment
Aneel returned as CEO in February 2026, after about two years as executive chair while Carl Eschenbach served as co-CEO. He does not see AI as one more computing shift like the earlier moves from mainframe to client-server, the web and the cloud.
Aneel Bhusri treats AI as a reason to rethink Workday from the start
"When AI showed up, it was a refounding moment in that all bets are off. It's a brand new world." — Aneel Bhusri
The earlier platforms ran fixed, rule-based business processes. AI, in his description, is a probabilistic "reasoning engine." Applications built on it change almost daily rather than every six months.
"AI is trying to... has the promise of replacing how humans think and act, and so it's pretty profound." — Aneel Bhusri
