Workday goes headless; CIOs must lay the groundwork

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SAN DIEGO — Coming into Workday Rising, I wondered about the company's prospects. Recent quarterly results showed a near 13% increase in revenue. At the same time, Workday has been cutting head count.

At its annual user conference this week, Workday CEO and co-founder Aneel Bhusri insisted the cuts were made to improve business agility and reporting.

"We had 13 levels between me and a developer, and we offer middle managers individual contributor roles," he said during a press Q&A after the keynote. Bhusri returned to the helm in February.

At the same time, speculation that Workday has been in discussions about taking the company private continues to swirl. If Workday goes private, this will, without question, be an outgrowth of the SaaSpocalypse, where generative AI created market panic for SaaS business models. But what will the company gain?

Workday has dominated the enterprise human capital management (HCM) market and, to a lesser degree, cloud-based ERP. My question coming into Workday Rising was: Can the vendor pivot to the AI shift?

Related:Even now, ERP implementations can make or break CIOs

My answer, in a word, is yes.

Headless capabilities on display

Despite Hurricane Isaias disrupting travel in Las Vegas, the conference brought together 17,000 HR, ERP and IT professionals who likely wanted to hear about the disruptive changes coming to HR and the business functions HR supports.

It was clear from my conversations: Workday is fully engaging the technology trends of the time to address those disruptions — by not only automating AI agents but also introducing headless capabilities.

This embrace of headless was refreshing to see, given this is where applications supported by agentic AI are likely headed, and some vendors are slower to move in that direction. Last week, for example, SAP's president of products discussed with me how it's only exposing APIs as a move to headless. In Workday's case, the company is not only going headless, but it is also surrounding its architecture with an agent platform and developer resources to support anyone building on its code base interface agents.

It's an aggressive step for Workday that recognizes the benefit of separating back-end tech stack from the front-end capabilities. Unlike Salesforce, which highlighted at Dreamforce its push toward headless and toward becoming the UI of choice, Workday is not ready to announce that it is disinvesting from the GUI. Workday, on the other hand, expanded Sana across the enterprise. The agentic experience and orchestration platform is based on technology the company acquired in 2025; it uses the Model Context Protocol to operate within third-party AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise and Slack.

Related:Dreamforce opens with AI, but questions for CIOs remain

Workday is providing knowledge workers immediate agentic experiences to complete work, not just answer questions. Employees can make requests in natural language and have agents act on them directly. A concierge agent, for example, can resolve HR and IT requests, such as onboarding and password resets, before they become help desk tickets. This could provide tangible labor cost savings.

Workday's announcements also included automating AI agents to work continuously in the background across IT, finance, compliance and HR. The company also introduced a talent acquisition autopilot agent, which is now in early access. Workday said these agents are coded with a company's policies, permissions and approval rules so they can advise or act within each workers' policies and approval limits. Workday said its goal is to free up teams to focus on decisions that require human judgment.

Time will tell.

Workday also announced it is acquiring C1.ai, an agentic identity platform for people and agents, following another trend. As the software industry becomes dependent on AI foundation models, application and data vendors are buying the access and security layer. For Workday, the acquisition makes sense: HR is where roles and privileges are defined. But it also suggests application vendors aren't waiting for security vendors to catch up and create the appropriate guardrails.

Related:How AI agents broke traditional SaaS pricing

Needed: CIO skills

Given the product news and in my conversations with attendees, one theme stood out to me: This is a moment that calls for CIO skills.

Bhusri put it plainly during a press Q&A: "None of this works without high-quality data."

This is critical to creating the context. Just as humans need it to do their jobs well, AI needs high-fidelity data, a semantic layer and an ontology. CIOs are crucial to building that foundational data layer and helping HR define the business context that gives the data meaning. For Workday, its Zero-Copy Data In layer, which enables users to query external data where it resides, is built on data corrected and mastered in systems such as Snowflake that CIOs and their teams manage. And this matters because with finance and accounting, there is zero margin for error.

Beyond building the foundation for the data cloud, CIOs and their teams are needed to ensure the supporting APIs are in place to pull other data sources, along with governance for APIs, data and processes. They are also essential to solving larger transformation challenges that extend beyond HR.

Part of that work is keeping the corporate data harness secure and operational, which means confirming guardrails work as planned and are validated regularly.

What do CIOs need to do

From the #CIOChat that I hosted for years, vanguard IT leaders have always worked closely with their chief human resources officers. This was especially the case as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and companies needed to operate on digital platforms.

But this hasn't been a universal experience. During #CIOChat, I observed two types of CIOs: The first had a strong relationship with business leaders and worked to solve business problems; the second focused on technology and have since been pushed out of the role.

"When human capital management solutions were managed on-premises, IT played a significant role in managing those systems," Dave Eberhardt, partner for HR transformation at PwC, told me. This was at a time when some CIOs focused solely on infrastructure. As HCM systems pivoted to the cloud, technology ownership shifted from IT to HR, he added.

I asked Isaac Sacolick, former McGraw Hill Construction CIO, about this. Sacolick said, "At that time, too many CIOs, unfortunately, were infrastructure-related. But it was not all of them."

It's time to close that gap.

David Wachtel, general manager of core HR products at Workday, said CIOs can play a meaningful role. He said CHROs "would be … welcoming of CIOs who wanted to help. CHROs would breathe a welcome sigh of relief. They honestly would appreciate the outreach and desire to play together."

It is time for CIOs to dig in and understand the HR piece of the tech stack as it increasingly is about agents and relating them and human workers together. CIOs who are just about infrastructure are no longer valuable to their companies.

Workday Rising provided a look at the company's push to make its platforms and capabilities headless. Is your company looking for that kind of flexibility in its technology stack? Let us know at [email protected].

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