Workday, Inc. (WDAY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

September 27, 2023

NASDAQ US Information Technology Software investor_day 154 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

operator
#1

Please welcome Vice President of Investor Relations, Justin Furby.

Justin Furby

executive
#2

All right. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Workday Rising and Financial Analyst Day 2023. We've got a great group of folks here in the audiences through. I could feel the energy coming this way so keep it coming and the collective mind power working its way to the stage. I had a better joke but I forgot it. So it's my privilege to welcome you all here as well as the folks that are on the webcast joining us here today. I know that you all have a lot of analyst days to choose from, and we certainly appreciate you choosing to be with us today and spend the next few hours and I think we're going to have a great show today. So a couple of things before we get going. For those of you in person, I do hope you had the opportunity, and you still have the opportunity later today and tomorrow, to take part in the broader Rising experience. So hopefully, you had -- you were able to take in the innovation keynote today. There's another 1 tomorrow and you get to speak with customers and partners and prospects. And I think if you do that, you'll find this unbelievable representation across different companies, different buyers, different size organizations. And it really is an important part of the overall experience, I think. So actually, I have a couple of other slides. But for the folks backstage, I don't have the notes. And when I do the safe harbor, I'll totally botch it if the notes aren't up, if one of them wouldn't mind saying that, bringing them up. There we go. So a couple of things that we're going to do today as part of the program. First of all, we're trying to be a little more targeted with the content. So we did -- you'll notice there are fewer speakers as part of this. That was intentional. We took your feedback to heart. But I think the content we have is really what I deem to be very exciting. I hope you agree. There's a lot of really exciting things going on inside this company. There's a lot of new faces that you'll see today, a lot of familiar faces. But you're going to hear us talk a lot about some really important investment areas that we're looking forward to in terms of areas like international, the financials opportunity, AI/ML, the partner ecosystem. And so throughout the day, you'll hear those themes woven in. And then at the end of the session, Zane will bring that all home with what is a very durable medium-term updated framework through FY '27. So a couple of things before I kick it off, First of all, I really want to put a -- say a big thank you to the broader team. [ Annie Bouton ] on my team, who I know a lot of you know, went through a ton of work to put this event on and all of the -- including people that registered like 30 minutes ago that we were able to bring in. So thank you to Annie and for all the great work she does. To [ Sara Leader ], who also helped on the registration side of things to make this event happen. And then all the folks across finance and the broader Workday organization and our designer, [ Kyle Scudder ], as well. Thank you to all of you guys for making this happen. It is a labor of work and love. So anyway, the second 1 is less interesting, but equally important. This is our safe harbor statement. Please be mindful that some of the matters that we'll be discussing today include forward-looking statements regarding our strategies, operations or financial items based on information we have as of today and our current beliefs with respect to the future of our business. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and actual results and financial conditions may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Further information on risks that could affect our results is included in our most recent filings with the SEC, which are available on our Investor Relations webpage. Okay. So with that, kicking us off today will be our co-CEOs, Aneel Bhusri and Carl Eschenbach, who are going to sit down with our amazing new CMO, Emma Chalwin, and catch you up to speed on some of the important announcements coming out of this week, and more importantly, spend time talking about and offer some perspective on the really exciting opportunities we see ahead for the business. So with that, it's my delight to bring on Emma Chalwin. Emma came to us just quick -- by way of quick background, she's, I think, been a couple of months now with the company but spent 9 years at Salesforce running global field sales and before that, many, many years at Adobe. So really exciting hire for us. Excited for her to be here and part of this. And so with that, please take your hands off of your Excel models, put your hands together for Emma Chalwin.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#3

Thank you so much, Justin, and for all of you joining us here at Rising for our Financial Analyst Day. It's been wonderful. I've joined the company as CMO, as Justin said, but only just a little over 2 months ago. So it's been a fantastic journey so far and I really hope you're enjoying the event so far. And today, I have the pleasure of hosting and chatting with Aneel and Carl, our co-CEOs, where we're going to touch on a variety of topics, including our growth strategy, Workday innovation and much more. So if you are with it, I'd love to jump straight in and welcome to the stage our co-CEOs, Aneel and Carl.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#4

All right.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#5

Lovely to see you both. Welcome. We've got a nice intimate gathering with some friends there.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#6

Hello, everyone. Good afternoon.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#7

Just good.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#8

Well, that was exciting.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#9

I know.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#10

Good afternoon.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#11

There we go. I thought I was back in the U.K. for a second.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#12

Listen, you guys haven't been on stage all week like Aneel and I. There should be some excitement from you up here.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#13

Wonderful. Well, everyone is thrilled to be here. And I know that last time this audience was together was in Orlando at Rising last year. And what a difference a year makes. I think we can all agree, lots happened in the last 12 months. Aneel, I'd love to come to you first and talk a little bit about you sharing your perspective on the change in the business in the last 12 months since we last saw you.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#14

Well, we've been fortunate our business continues to be strong. I think a lot of it ties back to having great employees taking care of our customers and continue to innovate. And what I'm personally excited about is, and this has happened several times in the Workday history, we brought on new leadership to take us to that next level, starting with Carl. I couldn't be more thrilled to have Carl as my current co-CEO, but ultimately February 1, sole CEO, and I can go back to being the nerd that I'm more happy being. And then world-class marketing person in Emma and a world-class CFO in Zane. I feel like we've got this team that marries some of the traditional old of Workday with the new of where we're going and couldn't be more excited. On the product front, we've just made huge investments and leaps forward on AI and ML. And you saw -- if you saw my keynote today, it's not because we just, all of a sudden, jumped on it. We've been at it for over a decade. And as some of these new opportunities came up -- by the way, we've been pitching AI to our customers for a long time. It really was ChatGPT that got all of our customers so focused on the possibilities with AI because -- and gen AI because they could actually experience it as a consumer. So I feel like we're extremely well positioned and you saw our new wave of applications. Very excited about the new partner ecosystem. And it continues to support a strong business that's done well during COVID, that's done well during a very challenging economic time. Kudos to our sales folks. So I just -- I feel really good about where we're at.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#15

That's wonderful. And I think I can speak on behalf of Zane and Carl and myself, thank you for building such a great organization that's built on the foundation of such an amazing platform but also a company that's built on such strong values, and that's really important, I know, to all of us. So thank you for that. And on the point about new leadership joining, Carl and I'm going to come over to you, you've been busy recruiting lately, including me, so thank you. You've started describing Workday as kind of a talent magnet. Can you expand a little bit on that for me?

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#16

Yes. So first of all, again, good afternoon. It's great to be here, and it's great to be here with my partner, Aneel. I couldn't be more excited and honored and thrilled to be working with Aneel and our 18,000 Workmates around the world. It's a great opportunity for me to join an amazing company. And I always say, we all stand on the shoulders of giants at 1 point in our careers, and I feel like that's where I'm at right now, standing on the shoulders of Workday the last 18 years in what the company has built, and I'm excited to be here and I'm excited to be here at my first Rising this week with Aneel. Yes, as far as recruiting, I used the word magnet. I feel like there's a magnetic pull towards Workday right now. We've recruited some amazing talent to join forces with the existing talent that was here. So you can't have all of one or the other. But when you get great talent coming in like you, Emma, like Zane, you're going to hear Doug Robinson spend a lot of time talking about the talent in the last few quarters we've attracted across Europe, we've attracted across APJ. We'll have some exciting announcements about that today. And then on the operating side, we've brought in a number of really senior executives on the operating side, whether it's in professional services, whether it's in revenue and sales operations, we're getting some of the greatest talent in the industry wanting to come work here right now, Emma. And just last night in my hotel room, I got 2 more pings from really senior people at some really big companies wondering what's going on in San Francisco and Rising this week and how do I become part of that journey. So I forwarded that on to a bunch of people. So I just feel like with the energy and the momentum we have in the market and as a team, we can attract great talent. And when combined with the existing amazing talent you'll see up here like from Sayan, who's been here a long time, and Doug, that's when magic happens. And I think we're in a very interesting time and space in the history of Workday, and I think people want them to be on this journey with us for the foreseeable future.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#17

It's exciting times for sure. And I'm going to stay with you and kind of evolve on that a little bit more, Carl. It's your first Rising as you said, your first Rising as co-CEO. So what are some of the themes you've been hearing from customers that are really driving Workday's business right now?

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#18

Yes. So first, and there isn't a day that doesn't go by where I don't wake up and think about the massive opportunity we have ahead. We have ample opportunity across many parts of our business. It's really about how we go execute to get it and you'll hear a lot about that today. I just see opportunity everywhere we look, whether it's in how we go to market, whether it's what we've displayed on stage with Aneel and Sayan and the product team today. I guess the word I'd say is opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. And the other thing that Aneel and I actually had some customer meetings this morning. Our customers absolutely love us. They trust us. They want to be part of the Workday journey. But they're also very vocal. They're very direct and they demand a lot from us. And Aneel and I heard that this morning. It's great when you go into a customer meeting and they tell you all the good things that are happening. And then we also turn the page and say, hey, what can we do better? And they're not shy. But it's what makes us better. So I really think our customer engagement and the feedback they give us is really important. And then the last thing I'd say, I think we are in a very unique position right now. When there's a tailwind in the market, everyone does well. And Workday will do extremely well if there's a tailwind. If there's a headwind, I think our value proposition for our customers is only accelerating and becoming more prevalent. People are looking to consolidate from best-of-suite or best-of-breed to best-of-suite. We're seeing that. There's a lower total cost of ownership people are getting. By going to our platform, they see the innovation we're doing. We're opening it up to an ecosystem that we announced today on stage to go forward. So I just think I see opportunity everywhere. And the last thing I'd say is there are very few companies in the history of technology that can originate what Aneel and Dave did from being a system of record to a system of engagement to a system of intelligence where we built in deep AI and ML capabilities from the very beginning to what I then described as a system of trust going back to the customers. They trust us because we do support their most precious assets, their people and their finances. So that's what I see. And that's what gets me excited. It's opportunity, opportunity, opportunity.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#19

That's wonderful. I'm going to dive a little deeper into something you said about customer love. So I'm going to come to you for this 1 and then I'm going to sneak a little question in. We celebrated yesterday Mart News and the customer #7 from McKee Foods, which was wonderful to see him on stage, and it's such a reflection on the power of the Workday community. And really, the customer success is really our success. Is there anything else that stood out to you over the last day or so, speaking to so many customers as you do? Any special moments that you want to share with any customers or any great feedback that they've given us?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#20

Well, that was a special moment. And for any entrepreneur in any start-up, you remember those early customers that bet on you, and you're just grateful that they took the risk when -- I mean, we probably had 10 developers and we didn't have a payroll and they bought a product and we built the payroll form. I mean that's just magic. I've met with several of our large customers. What I really enjoyed is that they're having a good experience and they want to know more about AI, but they also want to know more about the full platform. So a Fortune 100 financial services company is a very, very happy HR customer. I spent an hour with them today talking about financials. And I feel like some of these very large companies are now finally moving into the cloud with financials and those conversations are happening here. I don't know when they will actually culminate in a sale, but I see that. Feedback on our UI, and they love the vision but they want it now. And so we're working on that. I still think on the AI/ML front, what I'm hearing from customers that they're still learning. And we have to do the job of not just building great products but actually educating customers on how to use them. That was a theme that came back, which is that technology sounds great, but if you're an HR executive or a finance executive, it's a little scary, help us understand how to use it, and that's where the trust comes back.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#21

Yes, the trusted adviser piece is super important there. So for both of you, Carl and Aneel, there's a handful of growth drivers that we're covering throughout the day, including international expansion, our partner ecosystem, fins, AI/ML and M&A, so lots of things. Carl, let's start with you. You've got oversight of the sales and customer experience teams. So I'd love you to start with your thoughts before we pass on to Aneel on international partners and fins, if you may.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#22

Sure. So I think we've been talking to all of the folks in the room, Emma, for at least the last 7 or 8 months as it relates to our international opportunity. I think everyone knows the metric, 25% of our revenues come from outside not North America, outside the U.S., we include Canada and our international operations. So we have a tremendous opportunity. Only 50% of the TAM, of our total addressable market, is in the U.S. The rest of it is outside we get 25% of our revenues. So we have taken a very targeted approach to how we expand and how we focus on our international build-out, starting with great people and the hiring that Doug will speak about but also how we start to think about the products and how we internationalize and localize them. And the other thing, back to a point Aneel mentioned, as we go international more and we push harder into both Europe and APJ, we're finding our customers are making a full platform decision because it is a medium enterprise. It's slightly down market from the Fortune 500 that we deal with here in the U.S. They're buying both fins at the same time as HCM and the [ rapid ] planning or adaptive planning around for both financial and workforce planning. So the international opportunity is a huge bet we're making. We're doubling down. We're hiring. We're bringing in great leadership. And then lastly, we're partnering as well to go international because we can't go direct everywhere and we need to leverage a partner ecosystem. On fins, this is a huge opportunity. As Aneel said, we're now talking to our customers, Fortune 100 customers, about looking at Workday Financials. Obviously, they're all doing well. They love the HCM platform that we continue to innovate, but now we're doubling down on fins. And Aneel and I hosted a strategic off-site meeting, I think, in January, February. And we said, this is the year we're truly doubling down on the fins opportunity, and we gave a significant amount of headcount across the company to double down on that opportunity. And at the last earnings call, I think you heard us talk about that only 20% to 25% of financials have moved to the cloud. That is a huge opportunity for us. So I think we're doubling down on the financials opportunity at a time when customers are more open to move those precious resources and assets and data to the cloud. So the financial opportunity is really massive, and we're seeing early signs of the build-out of the go-to-market there. And then lastly, partners. Our partners, you can just walk through this conference, you'll see every big partner in the world, every big global system integrator here sponsoring the conference. But really if you look at what they've done, they've built massive businesses on deploying Workday for the 18 years of our existence. And now we're starting to work with them to help us go to market so that they're not only building big businesses around the Workday practice but now we're giving referral fees, we're doing co-sell, we're doing resell. We're partnering with people like AWS, right, and selling to the marketplace. So we are absolutely looking to expand the partner ecosystem and not just for partners' sake but also go-to-market operating leverage. And that will take a while for us to get right. It will take a while for us to get the momentum we want to augment what we're doing in our direct side. But I will tell you, the early signs are quite exciting, and I think Doug will spend more time on that up here in a little bit.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#23

Wonderful. Well, I'm certainly very passionate about the international expansion piece. I'm really excited about the opportunities that we have there for sure. Aneel, you touched a little bit on AI and ML and our focus. Would love you to talk a little bit more from an innovation perspective how you're thinking about M&A as we continue to scale.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#24

Well, first of all, just as Carl mentioned, AWS and partners, I do think they're really important co-innovation partners, too. And in the model as we move more of the workloads from the private cloud to the public cloud, we're able to leverage their capabilities, and we have great relationships with both of those companies. I was on the stage for Google Next, and they're really working with us to do some very cool things on gen AI and I think that's super exciting. It allows us to do what we do best, which is to build great applications using what we're trying to solve for ML and AI. I don't think our M&A strategy really has changed very much over the years. It's interesting in the world we're in today, I see a lot of very interesting AI starts. We'll see which ones actually get some momentum. But in general, we've always looked for really strong technical teams solving a problem that is typically adjacent to the Workday marketplace like Planning or in the case of more recently, VNDLY with contingent worker management. When we look at these applications, they have to have great teams, great products. We're not looking for a lot of revenue. We're looking for a proven model, and we're looking for something that we can put into our sales force and get the scale and leverage. We've never been a company focused on really large acquisitions. I think I've told that story here every year for the last decade. And I think we're going to continue to focus in on those emerging companies that have something special that are adjacent to what Workday is building but fit our sales model of HR and finance, potentially now even IT.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#25

Okay, that's wonderful. And I know we only have a few more minutes left. So Carl, I'd love to come to you as we close. I know that you are a person that believes in, something, the power of 3s. So if the analysts have 3 main takeaways from today, what do you want everybody here in our audience to walk away remembering?

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#26

There's a lot of things I want them to take away. Maybe I'll say 4. So the first 1 is I hope you recognize the incredible talent we have at Workday. And you will see on stage today some of the best technologists, best go-to-market folks and one of the best CFOs in our industry. And if you combine that with the talent we're bringing in, I think we have some of the best talent. And they are joining us because of the core values that this company has been built on over the last 18 years, thanks to Dave and Aneel. So that's number one. Number two, I hope you walk away once again understanding the durability of the Workday business. We don't have a single tenet that we're tied to as far as customer base or new sales. It's both. We are diversified across many industries. We're going to grow our international footprint. We have a very diverse business and that gives us the opportunity to do really well in both times of tailwinds and headwinds. The second thing is we have many growth opportunities ahead. These don't happen overnight but we will get leverage in operating leverage from them. You'll hear today about our 5 core drivers, which is international, fins. We're doubling down on partners. Thanks to Aneel and Sayan, you'll hear about AI and ML and where appropriate, we'll do M&A. We have core drivers to sustain a business model well into the future. And last is you'll hear about our financial framework from Zane. This is a very good business. It's solid. It's been that way for a long time, and you're going to see a 3-year road map that allows us to continue to build on our success in the past and take it into the future. And we truly believe the durability and the resilience of this business will be seen both at the top line growth and expansion of the bottom line in operating margin. They're not mutually exclusive, right? We think they're tied together and we can expand both, right, going forward, if we execute on the growth drivers you'll hear today.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#27

Okay, wonderful. Aneel, do you want to sneak 3 in?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#28

No, I just got 1. Well, I'd first start off by saying this is a great moment for Workday. I think our future is really bright. I couldn't be more optimistic about where we're headed. It's where in the life cycle of a company, then you get a chance to be part of 2 major technology disruptions. Workday exists because we disrupted the ERP and HR markets with the cloud offering that was ahead of our competition. I think if we do it right, and you're going to hear from Sayan, we will do it right. If we do it right on AI, I think it's equally disruptive. And we've been so focused on replacing legacy software. I think we have a chance to actually replace cloud deployments of other ERP vendors and HR vendors if we do it because the value we'll bring with AI is so much better than what you get out of a legacy cloud providers and you know who I'm talking about. So I think there's a chance to just -- to also replace existing cloud deployments, not just -- not legacy. And I think that's just a phenomenal opportunity for us.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#29

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time. I, for one, have been very inspired by the conversation. I couldn't be more excited and inspired myself to be part of this organization. So with that, thank you so much.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#30

Thank you.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#31

Thank you.

Emma Chalwin

executive
#32

So hopefully, all of you attended the innovation keynote this morning and heard all of the inspiring content that we had from Sayan himself. And he's going to join the stage any second to give you some more insights into Workday's AI and ML advancements. So please join me in welcoming to the stage, our co-President, Sayan Chakraborty.

Sayan Chakraborty

executive
#33

Thanks, Emma, Carl, Aneel. Since we were last together here a year ago, a lot has changed. Most importantly, OpenAI's public release of ChatGPT in November officially inaugurated the generative AI era. And that's what I'd like to talk to you about today, how Workday is positioned to capitalize on generative AI, the revolution that's going on and share a bit about where we're going with all this. I think it helps to touch on what generative AI really is in a straightforward manner. At its core, it's just another form of machine learning based on artificial neural networks, a technology that learns from massive amounts of data to find patterns, and from those patterns, to make predictions. This technology isn't new, right? It's been around artificial neural networks since 1960s. I built a neural network at MIT in 1990. But it's taken several innovations outside of that specific technology to get us to where we are today, necessary innovations and our ability to collect data, to transfer massive amounts of data, innovations in processing capability, I think especially the realization that the math necessary for graphics processing was the same math necessary for neural networks. That allowed us to leverage GPUs for machine learning, and you've all seen that with NVIDIA's incredible success. And breakthroughs in algorithmic approaches, particularly the Transformer technology out of Google in 2017 that allowed us to take what was a serial processing model and turn it into parallel processing so we can take advantage of the massive scale of these networks. It's putting all these things together and then combining it with a market that's evolved, that's really ready now to adopt these technologies in a way that it wasn't a few years ago. So knowing ML is good at handling pattern identification and these massive amounts of data. Generative AI takes it a step further by building really gigantic models, trillions of parameters with massive amounts of data to produce emergent characteristics and able to do things that models couldn't do before. [Technical Difficulty]

Unknown Executive

executive
#34

Please take your seats. Our program is about to begin. Apologies for the inconvenience. We will continue our program. If you could please take your seats. Thank you very much.

Sayan Chakraborty

executive
#35

This is like when this happens at home, I have to go find the circuit breaker. "No, that's not the right one." So that's what they were doing back there. Picking up where we left off, we're talking about key risks that, I think, are inherent in generative AI in the way these models are built. And I think these are structural, right? And especially when you're talking about consumer generative AI built on a common crawl of the Internet, and when you're pulling these massive data sets of uncertain providence, uncertain contents, lots of comment threads off the Internet. spent time and comment threads on the Internet kind of gets what I'm talking about. There's good stuff there and not so good stuff there. And the producers of these models have been less transparent about what exactly went into their training data. And what we've seen so far is that it may never be possible to fully align our ground opaque Internet models like GPT and make them safe for high-risk use cases. I believe Workday believes that it's best to start to treat this problem much further upstream with the data that goes into training and fine-tuning these models. We found, in fact, the risks become much more manageable and we're talking about models trained on highly curated fact sets, so kind of core Workday data, coupled with our responsible approach to building and deploying AI. We do use enterprise LLMs at Workday. We've developed our own. We're not just relying on leveraging other people's Internet-trained models. We have our own in-house developed models. We also use open source models. We've been working on large language models for the last several years. We've been using them in production actually for quite some time now for search and skills. But even though we've developed our own models and are leveraging others, it's not clear to me that long-term models are going to be differentiated. They're already being commoditized. There are over 100,000 models available for public use and download on Hugging Face right now. So we believe that what will continue to matter is expertise and data. Do you have it? Are you allowed to use that data? Is it in clear form? Do you have providence on the data? Have you made efforts to identify and address inherent bias in that data? And we have data. We have a single secure large, high-quality and constantly growing data set that spans HR and finance. We have over 65 million users under contract. They produce over 600 billion transactions a year. But it's not just -- and we do talk about the structured data we have, but it's not just structured transactional data. We also have massive amounts of unstructured data tied deeply into that structured data, right? We have over 11 billion files and process logs, policy documents, contract documents. And we're on pace to exceed over 265 million job applications in 2023. It's also as important to note that every customer at Workday, and I think this is exceptional in enterprise software, is running the exact same version of software at the same time everywhere in the world. Why does that matter? Well, it certainly matters from being able to deliver security, security updates across the entire population simultaneously in an increasing threat environment. But focusing on AI, it matters because there's no conversion cost or friction associated with understanding the data we have. And when we want to deliver value back to the customer, we know they can uptake that value immediately. And the technology, our technology platform has always had security built in from the ground up, tightly controlled access and auditing. And it matters because of the way machine learning works because machine learning gets better the more you use it. It's a learning process. And the more places you use it, the variety of places you use it, it's a flywheel effect. You can see that with Workday Skills Cloud, right? We use skills throughout our product. We have skills in recruiting. We have skills in learning, and the quality of the outcome and all of those surface areas become stronger and stronger the more customers use it and the more different places they use it. But to take advantage of that flywheel, you have to deploy it as a platform technology everywhere you can, and you have to deliver that value in a trustworthy way so customers can use it and will want to use it more. So to talk more about this platform approach, look, we've built a state-of-the-art platform. We really have and I'm very proud of it. It allows us to deliver AI responsibly, responsible AI, including security and privacy. We provide customers with visibility into and control over how we use their data. We have the ability to ground and align our models to ensure the results are trustworthy and accurate during training, during tuning and at inference time when they're in active use. Our models are typically federated models and that allows us to meet regional regulatory requirements. These are edge models and so they can do final training at the edge of -- in the customer environment. And we, by our standard, always look at the problem from using hybrid ensemble or mix of expert approaches. And I think this is the way all of this technology is going to be delivered by everybody going forward. That's when you use multiple models together to produce a better outcome than any single model can. And we can actually combine Workday models, third-party models and open source models together in these ensembles. And we can actually also bring in domain-specific models that are smaller, cheaper, better, like all 3. They're smaller models, they're cheaper to operate and they actually deliver better outcomes and then we combine them with other models. But those of you who've been following Workday for a long time know that at our core, we have trusted long-term relationships with our customers. And that really pays off when you're deploying a technology like generative AI that has lots of sharp edges associated with it. We build on this relationship by providing transparency and control, so we create this environment where our customers are happy, where they want to provide us with the data. And thousands of our customers have done that so they can take advantage of our AI-powered solutions to give them internal differential advantage. And it goes just beyond our customers, right? We're actively involved in shaping AI policy to make sure that benefits can be realized and risk can be mitigated. And we're involved at the state, federal and international levels. This combination of our technology platform and approach, really the data we have, who we are as a business, and the trust we develop with our customers uniquely enables us at Workday. And so we're uniquely suited to capitalize on this moment. And going beyond that, we can get leverage from our ecosystem through our Extend platform, our new AI gateway that you've already heard about. Our Extend customers and ISVs and SIs can build their own applications. They can leverage Workday models. They can leverage Workday security. They can bring in their own or open source models or they can even leverage proprietary models from partners like OpenAI, GCP and AWS. And they can incorporate Prism into this as well. So in the future, we can enable customers to use Prism to bring data into Workday, enrich Workday's object model with that data, which allows them to then use our security model and all the controls that come with Workday, build applications on top of that data, leveraging AI gateway to bring ML to that solution and produce really exceptional results. It's very exciting. And this morning, we announced Workday AI Marketplace, which I think is a great example of the unique take that Workday has on ecosystems and what customers want and need because there's this incredible energy and excitement among this generation of AI-native AI-first companies. AI Marketplace is designed to allow our customers to fleet and safely take advantage of all the vibrancy going on outside of Workday by partnering with those companies and Workday to do it safely. Shifting from the ecosystem, you're also going to see Workday leveraging this technology internally as a way that we can reduce cost and increase productivity over time. It's going to provide our business with substantially more leverage. We're already deploying copilots across our software teams to accelerate our ability to write and deliver code. And we anticipate utilizing gen AI to bring down our costs and improve productivity and velocity across the entire software development life cycle. We see real opportunities, for example, in code review, in security review, in cybersecurity threat and log examination, in our data center operations. And even looking beyond R&D and software development, we can look at reducing the cost and speeding up the delivery and deployment of our software to our customers. It's through this combination, gen AI, incorporating our software development operations life cycle, our ongoing shift in our location strategies, continuing our leverage of public cloud that we can reduce the cost and speed up customer deployments. And we can believe that all of that together can significantly impact R&D and OpEx spend over time. And that's even as we continue to invest more in areas like generative AI. So in addition to gaining leverage, we also believe that we can add to the top line with generative AI. You've already heard from Aneel and Carl that we believe that AI in general and generative AI, in particular, are transformative technologies that organizations will want and will need to adopt to stay competitive. And we're going to offer most of these capabilities to our customers as part of their current product subscription, including generous base usage limits rather than creating haves and have-nots among our customers. But we also know that generative AI is substantially more expensive to train and use than previous AI technologies. While we do expect those cost curves to come down, they always have in technology before, our approach of using smaller domain and task-specific models will help us defray some of that cost in the near term, but we will plan to charge a usage uplift for customers once they've exceeded their base usage. So they're getting value out of it, right? We will need to cover those costs. And we want to do that in a way that equates price to value. We don't really want to discourage the use of these technologies as long as we can protect our business model. We will also offer new product SKUs wholly based on AI technologies, and we already have done that to great success with Talent Optimization. You'll be seeing announcements about new SKUs in the coming year. I'm not going to go into specifics about those here today, but I will share some of the criteria we're using to define when we want something to be a stand-alone SKU versus a base capability in the product. First is, is it additive? Is it nonessential to our core product? The second is, does it leverage unique data or combinations of data where we have a differential advantage? The third is, is this technology easy to deploy or easy to self-deploy for our customers so they can quickly realize time to value with this capability? And then we do -- and we are going to continue to look at the economics of it. Is this inherently expensive to operate? Because that may require us to have a different pricing model than the way we price our core products and make it a natural separate SKU in that case. We also expect to grow demand for some of our existing products like Extend as more customers and partners utilize technologies like AI Gateway, and they'll be charged an uplift via a new SKU and they'll get ongoing usage charges based on volume of use, especially if they're using third-party models. And with our partners, we're also introducing new revenue models. And Doug is going to speak honestly to that in more depth, but that includes direct monetization through referrals and indirect monetization through things like co-innovation and the AI Marketplace. So where does all of that put us? Four key focus areas I want you to keep in mind. We are focused on delivery of gen AI and AI in general, plain old machine learning from last year in the product, base product or additional SKUs, that was an ML joke, but with a continued focus on human-centered responsible AI. We will be incorporating gen AI internally at Workday to drive leverage and continued reduction of R&D as a percentage of revenue. We will be focused on expansion of the ecosystem to take advantage of all this vibrancy, all this innovation and investment across the technology landscape. And our continued engagement with customers, regulatory agencies and other key stakeholders to make sure that this technology is being delivered in a way that maximizes value but mitigates risk. We believe that these focus areas will positively impact revenue, will increase competitive win rate and will allow our net revenue retention to remain extremely high. It will impact cost. We will decrease R&D as a percentage of revenue over time even as we make substantial investments into gen AI. I know the section is called where we're headed, but I think it's useful to remember that we're actually delivering gen AI today in our products right now. And so I'm going to finish talking about it, and I'm going to ask Aashna Kircher to come on stage and show you what we're building for customers.

Aashna Kircher

executive
#36

Thanks, Sayan. Hi, everybody. My name is Aashna Kircher. I'm our General Manager for our Talent Products here at Workday. I actually joined Workday in January of 2014, the same month that we made our first acquisition in the AI space. And I've been working on embedding AI in our products ever since. Today, I've got the pleasure of showing you how the investments that we're making in generative AI are manifesting and coming to life in our products. At the core of these investments are the 3 design principles that you see here. The first is designing for simplicity. We truly believe that AI should reduce complexity and not increase it. The second is building trust through transparency. We know from our research that explainability is key in reducing bias and building trust with users. And the third and perhaps most important one is keeping the user in control. We're in the business of fostering collaboration between humans and machines. We know that AI provides ample opportunity to automate business processes but our emphasis remains on augmenting and not replacing people. So let's take a look at how these principles are showing up in a handful of generative AI use cases. You may have seen 1 or 2 of these in the keynote this morning but we're going to go a little deeper. Please roll the demo. We'll start in the office of the CHRO, where talent retention, growth and development are permanently top of mind for HR leaders. We know from our customers that managers are at the nexus of so much of the change that their organizations are experiencing. And their #1 priority is developing their people. As a single source of truth for people data, Workday is uniquely suited to support and supercharge this development. As a manager, I'm going to go ahead and start in our newly released Manager Insights hub, my one-stop shop for all things related to developing my team. I'm going to select Create Growth Plan, where I now see Workday AI ingest performance reviews, peer feedback and other structured and unstructured performance data to generate a personalized and tailored summary of an employee's strengths and areas of growth. I can also choose to regenerate this summary employee's needs, here selecting a future job profile of interest. At every step of the way, we keep transparency at the forefront and I can make changes as I'm the ultimate decision maker. Here, we surface those inputs as the new plan is processing. And once we have our new growth summary, I can view sources at any point in time to pinpoint the data underlying the AI's recommendations, so that I can better understand what data exactly is contributing to the strengths and growth opportunities presented to me for my employee. Workday AI then goes a step further in recommending actions that my employee can take to build on this growth plan. Here, you can see those recommended actions, all next steps that they can take in Workday, including meeting a mentor, completing a piece of learning or even joining a stretch project or a flex team. And ultimately, in the same spirit of transparency, our manager can share that growth plan directly with the employee. So you can see how Workday AI is saving managers hours of time in summarizing and synthesizing information if they were doing it at all, but more importantly, elevating the quality of the conversation with employees around growth. Let's now take a look at how generative AI can impact the office of the CFO. Consider contract analysis. Once contracts are executed, they must be ingested into Workday. Then finance teams spend lots and lots of time reviewing and ensuring that the data is accurate. Frankly, this is boring, and it can take a couple of hours per contract. But now with generative AI, we can ingest and analyze contracts within a matter of seconds, allowing you to minimize downstream disruption. Our contract admin receives a proactive notification through Slack that lets them know that the terms of the contract in Workday don't match the terms of the signed contract. Specifically, it highlights that the end date is mismatched. I'm going to decide to dig a bit deeper and I go ahead and select Investigate, which brings me into Workday where Workday AI is already active along the side. Here, I can see a summary in the side panel of my key terms and dates, a summary of the contract and a clear call to action around the data discrepancy that was just flagged. With 1 click, I can pinpoint the source of that data discrepancy. I can see a comparison of the signed contract and the data in Workday with the mismatched data highlighted for ease of use. Workday AI then goes a step forward in recommending actions and resolutions. But before I accept this offer, I decide to check for an early termination clause. Here, I can use the contextual question prompts provided to me by Workday AI or type of free-form question and use auto-complete as you see here. Workday AI, having read the contract, replies that there was indeed a termination clause but that it has ended. For my contract admin, this is great news, and I'm now comfortable and ready to move forward with the original proposed changes. But Workday AI first surfaces to me clearly documenting before and after changes to the data and clear next steps so that I understand and can make changes or adjustments at any point in the way to what's going to happen next. In this case, I'm fine with it and I tell Workday AI to go ahead and resolve the issue. My contract admin has been saved hours of time, and she and her team now are freed up to work on more strategic imperatives to drive the business forward. But generative AI's impact isn't just limited to Workday's applications. It's also transforming the Workday platform and the office of the CIO. Workday Extend allows our customers and partners to build bespoke people and money applications on the Workday platform. We now have over 600 customers and thousands of developers that have deployed over 1,300 applications on Workday Extend, up more than 70% relative to last year. Customers and partners are drawn to the ability to seamlessly access Workday data through a consistent UI, object model, security model and, of course, with the comfort of running inside the Workday Cloud. As you heard Sayan just share, we expect continued momentum with both customers and partners in using Workday Extend moving forward. So let's take a look at how generative AI is impacting the Workday developer ecosystem, upskilling them and making them exponentially more productive. As a developer from my app builder page, I see a new icon called Workday Developer Copilot, my partner for every step of the building journey. It serves as a guide from design to deploy and provides seamless text to code generation. In this example, I'm building a volunteer certification app. And I decide to ask Workday Developer Copilot for help. I'm going to ask it to generate a graph API query for me. And sure enough, it pulls a query with the exact volunteer and worker data that I was looking for. Copilot is context-aware. It knows our code and it knows our app. In this example, volunteer is an object that I've specifically built for this application. It's not data in Workday. We have turned natural language into a fully functioning GraftQL query. And it even goes a step further, providing prompts like add to app to help guide me through the next actions I can take. But before I do that, I decide that I'm going to update this code, and I ask it, in this example, to add an expiration date to that query. Once it updates the code and I'm comfortable and have reviewed this, I decide to go ahead and add this code directly to my application. But Copilot doesn't stop there. It knows that I'm likely to build a page and offers to build this page for me. Again, once I review the proposal with 1 click, I can now view my AI-generated page live in app builder, all done within a minute or so that we've been talking here. You can see how Workday Developer Copilot will transform the way that customers, partners, and even our own Workday developers, as Sayan just talked about leverage, can deliver value at a pace previously thought impossible. These are just 3 select use cases that highlight the breadth and impact that generative AI can have across Workday's platform. And teams in every function are thoughtfully experimenting with dozens more generative AI use cases, validating them with customers and with users. And many of these, we're showing at Rising here this week. At the end of the day, our goal is to amplify human performance across all user types, managers, employees, professional users and even developers. In doing so, we empower our customers to make quick and informed decisions so they can focus on solving their critical and ever-changing business problems. And with that, I'd love to welcome our co-President, Doug Robinson, to the stage. Thanks.

Doug Robinson

executive
#37

Good afternoon. Think of the lengths that our competitors will go cutting our mics. Take that as the sign of desperation that it is, analysts, please? All right. So I'm Doug Robinson, Workday co-President. I have the enviable job of bringing all that innovation that you heard from Sayan and Aashna to market, so that's what I'm going to talk to you about. A fun fact for you, one of Workday's 2 co-Presidents qualified for Jeopardy. I'll let you come to your own conclusion about which one of us that was, but I'll give you a hint. He has advanced degrees from MIT. Wasn't me. Okay, all right. So there are lots of ways that we dimensionalize our go-to-market. Certainly, you are aware but we go by certainly geography, solution center or buying center, so OC FO, OC HRO. We look at large enterprise, we look at medium enterprise, but we thought a really good way to walk you through it today was to focus and bring this to life for you around this notion of net new and customer base. Carl mentioned some of this in his comments at the beginning whereas we like to call it land and expand motion. So we'll step through both of those, and then I'll provide you some context on where are the big bets that we're making from a go-to-market perspective that cut across all of these different dimensions that I just mentioned to you. All right. So let's get started with the land motion, which really remains the lifeblood of Workday. And even at our scale, you can still see we drive roughly half of our new business from new logos. And I think it's important to note this fact that 18 years in, we still have a sales culture of focusing on net new opportunities, bringing net new core customers to the business. And as you heard at our last earnings call, I believe we've disclosed this, we now have over 5,000 core customers, so core meaning HCM or Financials or both. But now you put that against the backdrop of what we believe our addressable market to be, which is 40,000 in this addressable market. And so it's still very early going against this broad opportunity set, which is why we have that focus on that land motion. We also have over 50% of the Fortune 500 and 25%-plus of the Global 2000. But if you -- if you put that on the other side, it means we still have another 50%, as Aneel likes to remind me, 50% more to go of the Fortune 500 and this massive opportunity with the Global 2000, which is, generally speaking, all of the international sort of large enterprise gets swept into that which is, again, part of our focus on the international expansion and land motion for our business. I think it's also important to not underestimate our opportunity in the large enterprise, so that Fortune 500. When you consider that accounts in 3 of our strongest verticals, not the only 3 verticals we focus on, but 3 really strong ones, don't show up in the Fortune 500 other than maybe 9 or so health care providers that are for-profit, all of these large enterprises within government, education, health care, a lot of them fit into that large enterprise space for us, and we have dedicated sellers going against each of these industries in the land opportunity. So we're focused on the big ones, the large enterprise and the Global 2000, Fortune 500, but we also have this really strong motion and a vibrant opportunity within medium enterprise. Over half of our new land dollars in the U.S. came from the ME market in the trailing 12 months, which we define as less than 3,500 employees. An important development, and one we'll get into here in a little bit when I talk about that investment area of where we're placing our bets for the fiscal year, is taking that same playbook that we've now sold 2,500 medium enterprise customers in the U.S., taking it into some of our really important international markets. And so again, we'll hit on that a bit more later. You also can't talk about our land opportunity without sort of striping our business by industry. And as we've recently disclosed, we now have 2 industries that are over $1 billion in ARR for Workday financial services and retail and hospitality. And what we see in these industries, particularly the ones highlighted here, is that we tend to land larger. We tend to land with this industry focus with HCM and Financials, and I'll give you some sort of further disclosure about what we're seeing in that space. But it's also important to note, every single one of these industries has an opportunity to reach that same scale as I just highlighted, that $1 billion-plus across -- $1 billion-plus ARR over time. Okay. That's the land business. And I want to now transition to the expand business, which has actually been growing faster than our land in recent years and arguably even earlier days for us. So as we've talked about, our value proposition is only getting stronger as a true platform. I think Sayan and Aashna and the keynotes this morning have highlighted that particular strength, and that's driving meaningful momentum across our broader solution portfolio. So the expand motion would be the other 50% roughly, has been a big source of investment over the last few years. In fact, many of you who spent time with us on a quarterly basis know that we really made this pivot to customer-based focus at the beginning of COVID, and that continues to be the case for us that we're investing further in it. So at the same time, the product portfolio has actually expanded significantly in this time period. So we're driving this expand motion overall to be a much more meaningful growth driver for us, especially compared to just a few short years ago. Okay. So we built this compelling loyal customer base. We highlighted sort of the Fortune 500, Global 2000 aspects of it. We wanted to give you a sense of the breakout of what you see within those 5,000 core customers. You see we've highlighted for you there, financials customers, core financials, core HCM. We have some that are just core financials, which is why you would see the math not tie. You'll have dedicated just core FINS or just core HCM customers and then certainly Venn diagram of overlap. But this rich loyal customer base provides us this really rich opportunity. Now this slide, we've shared with you, I think, at least the last 2 Financial Analyst Days. And I always get good feedback from this is really getting a good sense of where -- which particular solutions are we seeing momentum again. So if you were to go back and pull those from previous years, you would see that everything has moved to the right as it should over time. But it's important to remember, this is all the while we're increasing that denominator. As you saw, we're still doing 50% of our business is net new logos, adding to the addressable market for us to then go drive this attach rate. And the attach rate, just for clarity, is against either core HCM or core financials. That's what we would consider the core customer. So I'll call out one in particular, Talent Optimization. This time last year when we met with you, it was at 35% attach. In just 12 months, 45% attach within our customer base and continuing to grow. But on the other hand, we have so much opportunity with solutions less than 20%, if you look -- or even less than 10% penetration at this point. And this is what's driving so much momentum within our customer base motion, a desire by our customers to standardize on our platform and adopt more of these solutions over time with us. Okay. Here's another way of thinking about the expand opportunity and I want to give you just a little bit more insight into the business. What you see here on this bar is pictured our top 100 customers, which is close to approaching $1 billion in ARR, so top 100 customers approaching $1 billion in ARR. But at the same time, you see, and that's the shaded area on the left, pretty obvious. And then on the right is the what we believe to be the addressable market just within those 100 customers, another $2 billion of opportunity for us in ARR to go capture. And this isn't a theoretical number. This is us putting it through the paces of product market fit within these 100 customers' addressable market and then also looking at sort of normal commercial transactions. In other words, we didn't just throw list prices up here and say we got $2 billion more to sell to them. This is what we could realize within these 100 customers. And it's a big focus of ours. This year alone, we've dedicated a team, new development this year of dedicated key account managers, a key accounts program, a proper key accounts program that really drives the momentum within this space. And these large customers, again similar talk track that or feedback that we get are looking to consolidate, certainly simplify their IT landscape and build off of the Workday platform. The last 3 or 4 quarters, there's been talk of what is -- how do these early renewals operate. And I would point out that these top 100 customers are emblematic of that. So where you have close to $1 billion ARR, I want to be precise, and you have an opportunity for another $2 billion, it's within this segment where we've seen a lot of customers say, let's now cast a new strategic plan where we can adopt more of your solutions, the slide you saw 2 ago over time with Workday and kick out other more point solutions and look to get some real operating leverage from it. So onward. While we're focused on those top 100 customers, we're also really focused on driving the what we call sort of the create and closed motion. You've heard us talk about this on quarterly earnings calls. Sometimes, we refer to them as speed SKUs. But essentially, what these solutions represent are really quick time to value, really quick deployments. And we have the ability to create those opportunities in a beginning of a quarter and close it within that same quarter. And so we have this digital account executive team that we spun up actually last year was where we made the big investment, but continued that investment this year. That team is solely focused on the solutions you see here and driving those speed SKUs or that create and close motion. Earlier, Carl talked about what we're seeing by way of talent. And while it's true that we're getting some great enterprise talent coming into the company, we also think it's really important to build our own talent pool. And I would point out that these digital account executives are a tremendous source of talent for Workday. They come through the Workday training curriculum program, learn to get some experience and then they get deployed into the field, and we're seeing really great results out of that particular team. Okay. So we covered the land, the net new business. We covered the opportunity, the very large opportunity still within our customer base, our expand opportunity. Now let's move on to those go-to-market bets that we're looking to drive and invest in over the next several years. And I'll highlight 3 for you. So I'll call out the first one, but again, there's going to be 3, core financials. You have to start there. As Carl mentioned, we believe only about 20% to 25% of our addressable market has moved to the cloud for financials. And in many ways, this segment is behaving sort of similar to the early cloud HCM market in that you see stitched together systems, some cloud, some on-prem, but really at the core sort of on-prem solutions. So we're just getting started there. If, in fact, 20% to 25%, we believe it's a matter of if -- I'm sorry, it's a matter of when, not if, this particular segment moves in entirety to the cloud within financials. And I want to paint a little bit more clearer picture, I'll put some numbers to arrows so it's more instructive than just giving you 3 arrows to look at. So first, Carl mentioned this, the largest go-to-market investment we've made this year were these dedicated OCFO sellers. So these are salespeople who -- sales professionals, who wake up every day and they only are incented to sell core financials. And it should be really important to understand that this is a global team. It's not like we just put them in U.S. large enterprise or US ME. It cuts across the teams globally. This investment, we put them in medium enterprise and large enterprise. We put them in the land motion. We put them in the expand motion. And we put them across industries, even those industries where I highlighted before, we tend to do really well attaching financials or sort of full platform from the start. We still think there's opportunity there to get even more. So we're making the investments there. Again, back to that point of we're having a moment in the market by way of recruiting. This has been a tremendous -- we've found a tremendous set of external sort of really high-level ERP sellers globally, who have a desire to be part of Workday. All right. So now let me sort of give you a little bit more as it relates to the arrows that you see. So first 1 on the left, what you're seeing there is purely pipeline. The next 2 will be talking about results, in other words, booked ACV and feeding our AR engine. So from a -- purely from a pipeline perspective, our build year-to-date is up meaningfully in the last year. And if you now look at the FINS unit growth, so that's closed new Financials customers, we've added in the previous trailing 12 months rolling fourth quarter, 30% more FINS units than the prior period, so again, 30% more units of core financials, more customers than in the previous period, similar period or compare period. And even in Q2, which, as you know, we just recently wrapped up and shared with you, that growth rate was even faster than the 30%. So we're also seeing a higher percentage of deals closing full platform. So in the rolling 4 quarter, roughly 1/3, 1 out of 3 of our land deals, so new customers to Workday were full platform, meaning they bought HCM and financials at the same time. And to give you some compare, that was up roughly from 1/4 or 25% in the same period last year. Okay. So we're seeing some signals there that we like, and our overall confidence in this market is high. And so this is why we're going to continue to invest. We've added these sellers. It takes time to ramp new people into Workday. But we're seeing really good results, and we're -- we find it promising, at least by way of early returns. All right. Second area I want to focus on. So first was financials. The second is around international expansion. This has been shared widely, so no need to spend a tremendous amount of time on this. But it is actually greater than 50% of our TAM is outside of the U.S. And so we're focused on driving acceleration in this particular space. And we've had -- we've been blessed with a strong presence in the U.S. in performance, and we intend to bring this same kind of performance into our Tier 1 markets. And so for us, that certainly includes U.K., Australia, Germany and France and Japan. We'll come back to Japan. And we've also evolved our go-to-market structures within some of these international markets to best align to what these local markets need. And we're going after the, as I mentioned before, the very best talent that we can find and bring into our business. So let's start with that. I mean, go-to-market starts and stops with great leadership, field leadership. And we're coming up on a year now that Angelique De Vries has joined us, and she's done a phenomenal job for us in Europe. And she, of course, brought scale to the role and some experience with scale, but also a real GM and global mindset that frankly has been good for our company and for all of us back in California about how we approach and go after these markets and what it takes to be successful. But she's also a really good recruiter. So case in point, Dan Pell has joined us this year to lead our UKI business and really impressive background with Dan. He was at Salesforce before he came to Workday, and most recently, he led Tableau sales for all of EMEA. Partnered with Dan is Chris Knoerr, also new to Workday, coming up on a year as well, who leads our DACH region and came to us from SAP. He was on a rocket ride of a career. Again, he's based in Germany on a rocket ride of a career at SAP, but decided to come be a part of the Workday journey and bring in some talent with him as well. So really strong leaders from the outside, again, experience at scale, a desire to be part of Workday and what we're doing here. But also in other key markets like Northern Europe, we've tapped into our internal talent pool to drive us forward. And so as we brought in this great talent, I think you probably hear it in our tone and narrative around the really consistent execution that we've seen in EMEA over the last year. And it shows up in ACV in book deals. And it also shows up in the pipeline build, the rigor with which the team is approaching building pipeline for FY '25 and beyond. Okay. I mentioned I'd bring up Japan again, so we'll go to APJ. And I mentioned we're making some structural adjustments as well as appropriate. And so to that end, we've recently elevated Japan to a Tier 1 country. That means something, in Workday parlance, it essentially means there's company-wide investments around product, CX customer experience and our go-to-market teams and it's a massive market. We already have some flagship customers in that market. But if there's anything we've learned, it requires a higher level of upfront investment. You have to approach the market very differently than I would say we have historically. But there's opportunity there. And so we're also moving Japan out of the APJ construct. And as I mentioned, moving it to Tier 1 means it's now on the same footing. It reports directly into Patrick Blair, our President of Global Sales. And so Japan now reports are on the same footing in terms of resourcing and focus as North America, as EMEA, as the remaining APAC region. And so I'm also pleased to announce that we have a new leader for that newly-formed APAC region. So starting November 1, Simon Tate is going to join us to lead our Asia Pacific team. Simon comes to us from holding a similar role. He was President of Asia Pacific for Adobe for the last 3.5 years and so brings a ton of experience. He was at Salesforce previously, SAP and EMC, and we're really excited about what Simon will bring to the teams within the APAC region. So 1 part of international growth, I sort of anchored in on, it's important to get the right talent and the right leadership. It's everything in this business. But the other area where we see real opportunity internationally is around bringing this U.S. medium enterprise playbook to the markets in the other Tier 1 markets. And there's a couple of questions you have to answer to be able to successfully do that. The first of which is in our experience in the U.S. market, you have to answer -- you have to have an end-to-end solution. It's -- we have the good fortune and benefit in the U.S. market to have U.S. payroll. Medium enterprise attaches payroll at a really high rate within the U.S. market. And that's a challenge or has been previously a challenge. This is why we went and developed this partnership with Alight. And you see a circle there with partner, TBA. Stay tuned for the next 24-ish hours. We're going to do more on this front where we have really sort of deep integrations with Sayan's team and the payroll providers in country. So we now go with a complete solution for our customers. And I would add a complete seamless solution from onboarding all the way through to the gross to net and the payroll and the local statutory and tax reporting that's required there and all with the ability to manage it centrally from Workday. So that's one important part of what we got right in the U.S. market that we know is important in some of the Western European countries, but also important in Singapore, Philippines and some of these other markets we're in. And so you now take that and you partner, particularly in Australia and the U.K. where we already have our own built payroll offering. We think there's a lot of opportunity in the medium enterprise market. So I said there were sort of 2 things we had to do there. The other is this notion of a launch business model. We don't talk about it a whole lot externally. But essentially, we have come up with very defined fixed fee, fixed duration, low-risk deployments in the U.S. medium enterprise market. And we did so based off of learnings from our 2,500 customers. We didn't define best practices by industry. As Sayan talks about, our technology, it's an object graph and it lights up how these 2,500 customers use our software. And from there, you can say, how have the 400 midsized banking customers or FSI customers use the software? And then you can come up with deployment plans and also packaging and pricing that meet those requirements. So we're taking those learnings. We're off this fantastic foundation that we can then take this deployment approach, this launch methodology into the international markets. Okay. I said there were 3. This is the third and final one, which is our partner transformation. So globally, it's quite impressive. It's a vibrant economy, a multibillion-dollar economy all to itself of 19,500 certified consultants and has been critical to our success in our customer satisfaction that hopefully, you're picking up on here as you interact with our great customers. And so it's been an important part of our success. This ecosystem in the last 12 months has deployed 95% of projects on time and on budget, which is -- I'm pausing for effect because that's in my 30 years of experience, rather unheard of in ERP and HR deployments. So that's great. However, we think there's a real opportunity for this same ecosystem to not just give great customer sat and deployments but also help us drive the market from the top, the top of funnel and become a much bigger driver of opportunities for Workday. And so today, less than 3% of our ACV is sourced from the channel. Not a badge of honor. There's an opportunity here is how I hope you take that. And at the same time, less than 25% partner impacted, which really means really influenced by the partner. And so that's a great opportunity for us, which is why we decided when Carl came in and we all sat down and said, what are we doing with partners. This is why we're driving this partner transformation. We think it's -- I think Carl used the phrase operating leverage. We see tremendous opportunity to get operating leverage from this partner ecosystem of almost 20,000. And so we've really divided that into 3 tracks: sales partners, innovation partners and services partners. And many partners like an Accenture or Deloitte cut across all 3 of these. But these are sort of specific swim lanes where we have specific value in ways in which we're going to market together and finding alternative routes to market. So I'll go through each of these really quick. We set up really clear incentive structures. This is only 4 or 5 months old, but they're now in place. And in that 4 or 5 months, we signed up 80 referral partners where the incentives are in place and then another 15 of these co-sell partners, which is usually, we're selling in most cases, selling side-by-side, but then taking that all the way through delivery into the project outcome. And we're seeing really good early signs of that. Already with the AWS announcement that we did earlier this year, we've seen $70 million of total contract value created and closed so far with this partnership and the pipeline is building. Okay. Second track within the partner transformation is the innovation partners. And I think a lot of this touches on what Sayan and Aashna were talking about. But over time, over the longer term, we think we have an opportunity to nurture an ecosystem of software partners that are building entire businesses on the Workday platform. And one important step here, we recently launched this week, our innovation partner program for the software ecosystem in the new solution marketplace, I believe, went out today. And really what that's all about is matching these 300 partners. We think there will be significantly more over time. You should expect that from us. But matching these partners and their solutions to our customers with demand and then providing that to our existing customer base. All right. Last one I'm going to cover for you is around services partners. And these are the ones you traditionally would think of when you think of Workday's ecosystem, which is the large global GSIs and some of the boutique partners that have really dedicated practices around deploying Workday. And for this, and as you've seen today, extends a really major investment area for us here. And it has implications for our partners, too. I've had a number of one-on-ones just this -- even this morning with some of these partners that you see referenced, and there's great opportunity to co-innovate together. And the way we're thinking about it and these 4 partners are thinking about it and others, but these are certainly notional. And for example, is what industry expertise can these partners bring? What IP can they bring to the table and then marry that up through Extend to expand the usage and the use cases that Workday can solve for by industry. That's a tremendous benefit to our financial sellers, who go out to solve a lot of corner cases with our customers. And when you do full financials and HCM, you can't leave capabilities behind. You have to be able to solve for all. A great example of this, by the way, is Accenture. They just recently developed industry accelerators for retail and hospitality. They built out a market architecture, deeper integrations, and we're really going to market with them in that vertical. They've also done the same thing with media and technology companies as well. But there'll be much more to come on this front. We mentioned -- Sayan mentioned co-sell, resell. There's revenue share opportunities that we're looking to take advantage of. Some of them take time to develop, but they're pretty magical when you can tap into them and go to market together with the power of some of these companies. Okay. As I hope you can see, we're pretty fired up. I mean, we got -- I know break is the next slide. We got a lot of reasons to be excited about the break. Thank you. We got a lot of opportunity and I'm fired up for it. And hopefully, you get a chance as you mix it up a little bit, but talk to some of the people in our field organization, some of our sellers. I think you get some really good intelligence and insight on what they're seeing in the field. But I think you'll see that they share that same positive attitude that I've got about our opportunity ahead of us. So thanks for your time. We're going to take a break now and make sure the mics are protected from our competitors. So we'll take a short break and then next up will be Workday's Chief Financial Officer, Zane Rowe. Thanks for your time.

Operator

operator
#38

We will take a 5-minute break. Please be back for the rest of our program in 5 minutes. Thank you. [Break]

Operator

operator
#39

Please take your seats. Our program is about to begin. Please welcome Chief Financial Officer, Zane Rowe.

Zane Rowe

executive
#40

All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I see everyone's recaffeinated. I noticed there is a bar outside. I'm just glad to see I didn't notice too many people around that. Justin mentioned earlier, you'll see some new and familiar faces. And I think for many, if not most of you in the audience here, you've seen both new for Workday and familiar face. So thrilled to be here. Obviously got a lot to talk about. I'm going to be covering our durable financial model, value creation framework. A lot of it you've heard with all the guest speakers that you've just heard, so a lot of us will just be capturing what you've heard, talk about the next 3 years and our modeling out for the next 3 years, and then we'll have an opportunity to talk about the investments and then, of course, answer some questions, which I know you're all eager. You're never shy about questions. I know we should expect a fair amount of those coming. So there are 3 elements here that I'll be discussing. The durable platform that we've built for scale. Again, you'll hear a lot of the same themes that you've heard throughout the day. And if you've been at the Rising conference, you've heard throughout the keynotes as well. So very excited about this. One of the reasons I'm here. It's been just over 3 months, and I couldn't tell you how excited I am about the opportunity that lies ahead. With that, I'll be laying out the value creation framework. I'll be talking about the next 3-plus years, we'll go through FY '27 and talk about how we're going to grow our revenues and, of course, increase our margins at the same time. And then I'll cover the investments at a fairly quick pace. A lot of the information you've heard throughout the day that at least cover some of those investments and then be ready for some questions and answers. So with that, what's exciting about this business is, of course, the awesome scale and the ability that we have to address one of the largest markets in enterprise software. $142 billion in TAM. Obviously, for those of you who've been at other Risings, you'll notice that this number just keeps growing. So $142 billion. We believe the HCM part of this is $58 billion, so tremendous opportunity there. We obviously already have a strong leadership position in HCM. And then our FINS market opportunity, Doug touched on this as well, well over $80 billion of TAM there for us to capture. And if you think about areas like analytics and Workday Extend, these are opportunities for us to utilize that platform and really leverage that platform to capture parts of both of those markets. And that's a lot of the momentum you've seen us talk about over the last number of quarters. With that, this is not only a big TAM, but it's a large and growing TAM. So not only are our core markets growing, but obviously, whether it's innovation, a lot of what we're building internally and then a lot of what we've acquired over the last number of years, has allowed us to continue to grow and bolster that growth of those markets and really put us in a great position to capture that TAM. And as I pointed out and as you think about AI and you think about what we represent with our platform, there's even a bigger opportunity to really go after an outsized portion of that. So with that, we already are the leader in the cloud. So with 21% and growing, we have a tremendous opportunity here. We're well ahead of our competitors. And of course, with Financials, Doug mentioned our financials is mostly on-prem still and still has an opportunity to move to the cloud. So with that, we expect to see this pie grow and, of course, our share of the pie grows as well. So very pleased to see our performance over just the last year. And as you would expect, we continue to see growth in this area as well. And with that, we break down our 2 businesses. HCM, obviously, we're helping people provide the skills and management and really what's the company's most important resource, their people, and we're obviously a big contributor of that. You see how subscription growth over the last number of years has had a 20% CAGR. And just over the last year, you see 19% growth, so establishing a really large presence in that marketplace. It's about $4.5 billion for us on a subscription basis, so really pleased with the growth we've seen there, probably higher than a lot of you have expected. And the durability of that growth has just been tremendous over the last number of years. Then if we shift over to FINS, you can tell what Carl mentioned earlier today, we have just an unbelievable opportunity here. We've been investing in this product for many, many years. And of course, we've seen good growth here on a year-over-year basis of 24% and our CAGR has been 26%. So this is an area as good as this is, it's just over $1.5 billion of subscription revenue for us. We believe we can continue to grow it and obviously spend even more resources on that and see that trajectory increase over the next number of years. So very excited about the opportunity there. So this is a slide unless you took a longer break, this is a slide that you saw with Doug. We're very pleased with both our land and expand motion and our ability to continue to grow our business. So you see a good balance here. Not only we focused on both elements, but of course, that pie is growing, so we feel great about the market opportunity and what you've heard today, these motions are really important to us on both sides. So if we take a look at the land opportunity, we have 5,000 core customers, including 50% of the Fortune 500, and we have considerable presence in large enterprise, which all of you know about and, of course, a growing presence just across medium enterprise. So if you take a look at this opportunity, it really highlights proportionally the white space that we see. So not only do we still have tremendous opportunity in landing large enterprise, but we've also got good opportunity on the medium and enterprise side. We've got 40,000, we believe, opportunities to grow into that base. And obviously, what you see here is tremendous white space and just a lot of opportunity in what gets a good chunk of Doug's sellers engaged and excited about as we think about our future here. And then shifting over to the immense expand opportunity. So what I've done here is highlighted both the large enterprise customer base penetration and our medium enterprise customer base penetration. So you see here what we've taken is an industry-by-industry look and the customer-by-customer look at what is that opportunity to actually grow within that customer base? And you see here we've got tremendous opportunities. Doug talked about a $2 billion opportunity with our largest 100 customers. So if you step back a little bit and look at the customer base that we've already penetrated, you see a great, great opportunity to grow into that white space. We have just over 40% penetration in our large enterprise markets, so we've got a little bit over 50% there and a little bit less when you look at our medium enterprise customer base, but just a tremendous opportunity on both the land side and, of course, here the expand side. And with that, for those of you who have been around at Rising, one area that you can tell we're passionate about and are very excited as you talk to 15,000 of our customers and partners throughout the week, you'll see our retention rates are just really off the charts. We have in excess of 100% on net retention rate. And then I think even more impressive, if you go look over the last 5 years, you can see our average gross retention rate at 98%. And when you're out on the floor and you see the long lines at our merchandise boutique, to get paraphernalia with all the Workday logos around, you really see that excitement with our customer base in really growing and engaging with us. And that's the excitement that we leverage off as we think about our opportunity in the future. So with that high retention rate, we've been talking a lot about the backlog. And I know over the last number of earnings calls, you've heard us talk about the growing backlog. I wanted to give you a little bit of an opportunity to understand some of the dynamics there and how this high retention rate has been such a great momentum builder for our backlog. So of course, when we start out with new customers, it's a lot of the people. If you're here for the first day with the keynote, you'll see a lot of people standing up at their first time at Rising. And it's those customers that really help us land even more customers. We've got a lot of prospects here. We've got a lot of existing customers. And any time somebody takes on something like an ERP, you really see that customer engagement and you see that engagement with us. So this is where our retention rates and our focus -- our ultimate focus on the customer really pays off. So obviously, we're excited about the opportunity on landing new customers. And then what we do is expand. So obviously, with our expand motion, we've done a lot to continue to grow within that portfolio, both organically and inorganically. And of course, we see a lot of expansion opportunities with those customers. And what you have seen over this period of time is our customers want to go longer with us, so they want to extend their duration. Our average contract length has been extending. And we've also been getting into businesses that are more closely aligned with longer contracts and longer duration, things like education and government, where you see those contracts tend to extend for a longer period of time. Now in addition to that, we obviously have tremendous renewal opportunities. So we have our traditional renewals and then what you've heard us talk about over the last number of quarters are some of these early renewals. So I thought what I'd do is spend just a few minutes walking through a framework for an early renewal, because a number of questions that you've had for us is around the early renewals and what this has meant for both subscription revenue and then, of course, as well as backlog. So we're focused primarily on subscription revenue, as you would expect. And along with these expansion opportunities and the engagement with the customer is that opportunity to bring that renewal in early. And we typically have a framework that we work around. So a hypothetical example that I'm sharing with you here is $1 million ARR contract. It has 9 months remaining. And we have an early 3-year renewal with a $0.25 million expansion. So if you think about it from a revenue perspective and from a subscription revenue perspective, that's 25% growth. And then when you look at the backlog, you can see it's 40% growth. So of course, the backlog accelerates as you bring that renewal in. And then, of course, it has -- it doesn't have a large impact once you renew after a year's period, you get back to the anniversary date and then you don't have that increase in backlog. But what we've seen over the last number of quarters is an acceleration of that backlog in part due to this renewal activity that we've seen with our customers. Again, it's a tremendous customer base. These are sticky products, and we've been growing with our portfolio, but this has been driving some of that. I called out in the second quarter, for instance, we had about 1.5 points in our 24-month backlog. And as you think about it, this has also contributed to the large total backlog. Our total backlog is approximately $18 billion and has grown 30%. So the dynamic with those customers that are moving to longer duration and, of course, some of these early renewals has had an impact on total backlog as well. So now when I double-click on that, one of the questions I've got over my 3 months is when are you going to start sharing 12 months backlog? Well, today is the day. So here you have it. It's 12 months backlog. Thanks for the applause. I'm concerned about what you're going to ask for next year. But we'll start with 1 year at a time. We've got our 12-month backlog here. So highlighting, as I mentioned, the 24-month backlog. In the second quarter, it was 23% increase on a year-over-year basis to $10.3 billion. Our 12-month backlog is $5.85 billion. Now it's up 21%. So obviously, as you would expect, that early renewal activity has a more pronounced effect on the 24-month backlog than it does on the 12-month backlog. But you can see the impact here. I will call out for the second quarter, that 21% was impacted by roughly 1 point in early renewals. So that's the driver there on the 12-month backlog. So with that, thought we'd transition to our value creation framework. So as we look at this business and we think about this framework, instead of looking at just the $10 billion segment, we're looking over a 3-year period. So we estimate over the next 3 years, given the fact that the current macro and looking at our current forecast, which is 18% for the year, we believe we will target an annual subscription revenue growth rate of between 17% and 19% growth. And of course, this incorporates all of the land and expand motion and a number of the investments that I'll cover with you in a few minutes here, too. So this is all incorporated into our top line target. We believe we'll maintain this target over the 3-year period and obviously be well set up for beyond FY '27 as well. At the same time, while we do this, we'll be growing our non-GAAP operating margin to an excess of 25%. So with these investments that we've been talking about and I'll highlight 5 of them, we believe we can continue to grow the top line and then make these investments for what will be not only contributing to the top line in this period, but obviously contributing to the top line in future periods as well. So we feel very good about our opportunity. Sayan mentioned on the R&D side, we'll obviously grow efficiently. We'll take advantage of our AI and ML opportunities, but also continue to invest heavily in our R&D. And then, of course, Doug covered a lot of the go-to-market efforts that we have on the international side and on the FINS side. So we'll be establishing a fair amount of investment for those areas which we believe will have tremendous ROI and grow revenue for many, many years to come. So we feel confident on that part. And at the same time, we'll recognize efficiencies in the business and focus on systems and automation to grow that scale and efficiency for the long term. So we feel very good about what we're able to drive here on the operating margin side. And then as you would expect, that transitions over to operating cash flow. We have strong operating cash flow in this business. We're also relatively capital-light, so it drops down to free cash flow. I'll point out that this includes our expected industry mix. So if you think about government and education, you tend to have this longer duration and a slightly different payment schedule. So this forecast here includes our expectation for a lot more of that business going forward. So we feel good about where we're heading on the top line and bottom line growth. And another topic I know we get asked about periodically is about SBC. Obviously, we believe that SBC aligns with our employee interest. It's a strong part and an important part of what we do for value creation with our employees. All that being said, we're going to be more specific in how we target equity and think about how we allocate equity. So from roughly 20% that you see today, we would expect over the same period of time in FY '27 to target roughly 15% as a percent with stock-based compensation as a percent of revenue, and that would be expecting to decline over this period of time and then obviously focus on it beyond that. It's not only looking at the percent as a percent of revenue, but also looking at dilutive effect of that as well. So we're focused on both sides of that and delivering in excess of a 100 basis point improvement over the next number of years. So in a nutshell, we believe strongly that we can continue to grow this business. I'll talk a lot about these investments that we're thinking about and working on and the impact that, that will have on that top line growth. We do believe that these investments have the possibility to truly drive some outsized opportunities and some value that may or may not have been incorporated completely in a lot of this. So we'll talk a little bit about that as well as we think about the forecast here for the next number of years. So with that, our growth levers. We have 5 growth levers that shouldn't be a surprise. Carl mentioned to you earlier today, starting with the international partners, our focus on FINS, AI and ML and then, of course, M&A. So I'll just spend a few minutes on each. As we mentioned, the international opportunity for us is tremendous. We've got a TAM opportunity of in excess of $80 billion. It's only 25% of our revenue and obviously 50% of our TAM. So we're excited about the momentum and the opportunity to do a lot more on the international side. As you heard Doug talk about, we'll be focused on those Tier 1 opportunities. We've already been investing into those Tier 1 markets and opportunities, but we're doubling down on those investments over time and continuing to invest there, where we believe we can get outsized revenue growth. And that would include areas like localization on the product side, strategic partnerships and, of course, go-to-market resources. So we're excited about that opportunity on international. We talk about the partner ecosystem. Starts with what really is a very good business on the service partners. We'll be actually deploying more and giving more of our service partners an opportunity to participate and grow that ecosystem, so we'll continue to diversify our operatings there. And then on the innovation side, we're accelerating our co-innovation on the platform. You heard a lot of that from both Sayan and I know Doug has been working in a lot of areas with strategic partners. We've got Accenture, AWS, ADP and Alight, just to name a few and a lot of opportunity not only on co-developing, but also co-selling. And that's where we're targeting 100-plus referral partners. I know we're well on our way to getting there. We have over 80 today and of course, 15 co-sell partners that we expect by year-end. So a lot of opportunity. I think this was a topic that you heard, Carl talk about day 1 when he joined the company, and there's a lot of energy behind the partnership opportunity here. And together with that partner opportunity, we believe we can do a lot more with FINS. So this is just a highlight with the over 10 years of investments that we've been making in FINS, if you really think about our opportunities and our success that we've seen both across industries and segments in both ME and LE stretching from education with a recent win with the University of Florida all the way down to LE with technology and media with Salesforce. So tremendous opportunity here. We've already seen some great success and, of course, excited about what more investment in FINS will produce for us as well. And with that, you can see 35% of our core deployments are actually landed with FINS. So we're very excited about the percent that we see today. In the second quarter, you heard us talk about our unit growth in FINS. We believe we're at an opportunity with tremendous momentum with this particular product. And of course, with what we're doing with Workday Accounting Center, Workday CPQ, so we're not only able to grow the product, but we're also able to increase in TAM, just those 2 product offerings, increase our TAM by about $2 billion. So we're able to do a lot more with our TAM and with our investments in this particular area. Including with that, as you saw, Aneel has been talking about a lot of our platinum partners and a lot of our great partners that we've shared time with on stage, and that's including partners like Accenture. We will be going to market even more with this opportunity and leaning into the partner opportunity with FINS as well. And as well as areas like with our planning software, we're able to move those customers over to FINS. So we see 40-plus percent increase in those customers moving over to FINS as well. So a lot of opportunities for us to lean in and sell more with that, notwithstanding the fact that we're simply going to be putting more feet on the street. I had an opportunity to talk to a class of new FINS sellers, and I can tell you they've got a great backgrounds and they're incredibly motivated to be selling this product. So it's an exciting time for them to be joining the company and selling a product that's growing so fast. No shortage of conversation today on the AI/ML topic. I'm going to keep it light here. I highlight the Talent Optimization SKU that Doug talked about, that it has a really strong attach rate. It also has an ARR with over 80% growth rates in Talent Optimization. So very excited about just highlighting one of the SKUs. Obviously, there are a number of ways that we go to market and embed AI and ML into our products and into our product offering. So we're excited about that. As Aneel mentioned in this morning's keynote, we have 65-plus million users under contract, and that enables us to truly differentiate and target our LLM. So we feel really good about the opportunity there. And then for those of you who obviously had a chance to see some here, we have many, many use cases that we're actively working on. We have 40-plus ML cases that are in production. And then, of course, gen AI cases that we announced earlier today as well with 12 of those and counting. So a lot of activity and a lot of enthusiasm around the AI and ML efforts there too. And then Aneel mentioned our thoughts and our opportunities around M&A have not changed. We have a successful history here of M&A that have augmented our portfolio really nicely. Obviously, we use it for that as well as for talent tuck-ins. So we feel very good on both the HCM side of things as well as the FINS side of things to continue to grow our business through M&A. As we look out to the future, this has obviously helped augment our portfolio. It will be a focus and an opportunity for us to both accelerate and enhance our market positioning. And we feel good about the tuck-ins and what we've been able to already achieve out of the talent opportunity with M&A. We have companies from GridCraft and [ Rally Teams ] that have added talent like Sayan and David Somers, who is on stage earlier today as well. So we feel good about that. The Workday Ventures team is also out there, working with a lot of startups and really understanding where the market is going and getting great insight across our portfolio. So with those investments, we've got a strong foundation. We're targeting both durable and long-term growth. We'll continue to invest where we believe we can drive incremental value. We'll be focused on that, and you'll hear a lot more of that, I'm sure, in Q&A. And with that, we'll continue to scale and grow the platform. So with that, I'd like to invite my workmates up on stage with me, and we'll be happy to answer any and all questions you have. So thank you.

Justin Furby

executive
#41

Thank you. While they're getting set up, we're just going to -- for those of you in the room who want to ask a question, just raise your hand, we'll do our best. There's 120, 130 of you in here, so I won't hit all of you, but we will try. And try to do one question, please, because that also will be helpful. Go ahead. Michael.

Mark Murphy

analyst
#42

Thank you. Sabotaged again by the -- so desperate, so desperate. Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. How much quota capacity have you brought on with the FINS-dedicated sales reps? Because -- so we've heard these numbers, possibly 100 of them have been hired, possibly 150. We don't know what's true. I would think that the quota is somewhere in low 7 figures for that profile of a person. So it could add up to quite a bit of capacity. And just if you can help remind us, why is the time right now to be kind of upping the ante, as you said, doubling down on FINS sellers? Does it relate to the SAP 2027 deadline? Does it relate to sort of Oracle kicking customers harder to move to the cloud with them?

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#43

Maybe I'll start, Doug, and then please chime in. So I think the reason we're doubling down is because of some of the statistics you saw today, Mark. The fact that 20% to 25% of workloads on financials are in the cloud, that means there's a huge opportunity, number one. Number two, 2 of the best marketing advocates we have out there is SAP and Oracle as they course our customers off of an on-premise solution to the cloud. Any time that happens, it opens us up for an opportunity to have a conversation that probably didn't exist in the past. So that all led us to the discussion that we had earlier this year at a strategic offsite that [indiscernible] and I hosted, where we decided to double down on building out our go-to-market capacity for financials. Unfortunately, I didn't get your question, we're not going to share the details of how many people or what the quota capacity is. But we are indeed continuing to build that out. And in fact, a couple of weeks ago after doing second half planning, Zane and I [ released more ] headcount to Doug and Patrick and team to continue to build out on the financials. And maybe, Doug, you can just talk about some of the early indications we're seeing there of that build-out.

Doug Robinson

executive
#44

Yes. One early market signal that gave us confidence, Mark, was conversations with our partners and the prevalence of Workday being asked to be part of evaluation. So we see the market responding and gave us further confidence that now is the right time. For years, we've seen that in health care. We've seen that in the higher ed. We've seen that in the public sector, FSI. But we're starting to -- we started to see signals of that end of last year, beginning of this year from our partners where it was going into what we call DI, diversified industries. And so we're seeing the demand there, and we thought it was the right time to make the bet at the offsite.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#45

Yes. And I would just add, product-wise, we're ready for prime time. And if you believe, and I think we all see what's happening with AI, there's no way to really leverage AI against those legacy platforms in any meaningful way. And so it does force the decision into the cloud. Anytime it goes into the cloud, I think we have a better than -- a better chance to win than anybody else.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#46

And last thing, Mark, is some of the statistics that we're showing up here today, while we're building a salesforce out for FINS and their FINS-only seller, it's actually driving full platform sales because they're engaging with our core reps, and you see that more than 1/3 of our new customers are coming from a full platform approach, including FINS. So there's early evidence that this is working, which is why we're doubling down on the go-to-market side and the number of people we're adding.

S. Kirk Materne

analyst
#47

Kirk Materne with Evercore. I guess when I think about the growth levers you guys have laid out relative to your revenue guidance that you gave out over the next 3 years, can you just talk about how much success is embedded in that growth target from those levers? Meaning if FINS hits, is there opportunities for upside? I'm just trying to get a sense on how conservative you've been around those levers and sort of what's embedded in that relative to those.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#48

Yes. Maybe I'll start, Zane, and then turn it over to you.

Zane Rowe

executive
#49

Sure.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#50

So listen, we laid out a 3-year framework. It's a durable framework, high-teens growth rate and the top line around subscription. We're expanding operating margins. We have solid free cash flow. And we think it's a really good business model. And it does take into account some of the investments we made. Now, if some of these investments really turn into a [ deal ], maybe something more than we anticipate, maybe those numbers do go up. But we want to just be honest, transparent and clear about where we're at, what we see in the upcoming 3 years, and then we're backing that up with all these investments. And we feel really good about. We're confident in our business. We're confident where we're at with our competition. We're confident in the markets we're serving. We're innovating, bringing great people to the company, and we feel really good about this durable framework that Zane laid out. So some of it is incorporated in that 17% to 19%. And if some of them take off faster, maybe there's upside. But right now, we're sharing with you exactly where we think we are and what we're confident in the growth rate over the next 3 years.

Zane Rowe

executive
#51

Yes, I would just reiterate that it's not just for FY '27 that we're solving for, it's long term. And to your point, the trajectory and the investment, that profile may change, and that opportunity could grow at different points. And candidly, where we are today, you don't know sort of what markets you're dealing with and what the macro is with some of those. So I believe we've taken a really thoughtful approach to it. Obviously, if some of them don't work out as well as others, there's always opportunity then for margin. But we've struck that balance, I think, quite well and thought about the durability in that long-term growth rate, but not just through FY '27, we're solving for many, many years to come.

Kasthuri Rangan

analyst
#52

This is Kash Rangan from Goldman Sachs. It's a question that's a variant of what Kirk asked. So you put up pretty close to that kind of growth rate during a pretty tough time, and most people in software industry are going through massive deceleration. So you were a defensive business model during a very tough time. So if things do open up and are more conducive to better growth, what prevents the company from growing faster? Because you do have these big unlocks, you've got AI, you've got a big TAM, your FINS is starting to really open up. So why couldn't you grow faster? And also, I was curious, when you talked about the replacement of cloud opportunity, replacement of cloud legacy companies, how real is that? How big is that?

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#53

Yes. Maybe I'll start, I guess, a follow-on to the question here, Kash. Again, based on the outlook where we're at today and based on the macro we're dealing with, listen, nothing's really changed in the last 12 months. I think we're all dealing with the same type of selling environment. It's just that Doug and team are really good selling into this environment. And it also shows the strength, quite frankly, of our value proposition. As I said earlier, when I was up here with Aneel and Emma, it's a very durable business model. It provides value in time to tailwind and headwind. People are consolidating on our platform. That being said, we are making all of these investments at the time of expanding operating margin. And if some of these investments hit faster than we anticipate, like the partners and the ecosystem we're focused on, the build-out of the FINS go-to-market, some of the AI/ML stuff, can we do better? Potentially. But we're not going to sit here and tell you, "Yes. Today, we're going to do better, Kash." I know it's what you all want to hear, but we're just trying to be transparent. We're being straightforward. We're telling you what we see in the future, and we're going to deliver against what we're guiding today.

Doug Robinson

executive
#54

Kash, I'd just add that we're fairly nimble in how we think about that. So the opportunity to invest more in areas isn't something that we feel constrained around because candidly, we would just tell you. Now, I will also point out that as you think about subscription revenue, as you well know as well as anybody in this room, a lot of those investments you make, those tend to show up in revenue a little bit on a delayed basis if you think about just getting feet on the street and then assigning contracts and then ultimately generating revenue out of that. So we feel good about all 5 of those opportunities and what that could mean for growth. Obviously, the asterisk is around M&A because with M&A, I'm sure Aneel is very active in thinking through M&A, that could be a contributor for increased growth beyond the framework that we highlighted earlier.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#55

And on the second part of your question, I truly believe that if done right, and I know Sayan is going to do it right because he always does, that the way we built AI is native to the cloud. It's not an add-on. That if we can prove out real competitive advantage for the customers that have our product versus those that don't, I think people will shift. It's a huge disadvantage of you're up against a company that has massive advantages from AI, and you're on a platform that doesn't. And I think we'll see that over time, productivity, better insights, leveraging massive amounts of data. There are things that we're going to be able to show and do that help our customers become a lot more competitive with their competitors, and I think that will cause people to think about switching. But we have to prove that out.

Bradley Sills

analyst
#56

Brad Sills from BofA Securities. One of the things that was encouraging for me was that slide that showed a real long tail of some of the add-ons that are less than 20% penetration, a lot of that were under 10, in particular accounting center, which, to me, seems like a real strategic offering. So surprised to see it as low as it is. I guess the question is, where do you see the opportunity for some of these that are -- have low attach? Is it a combination of all those things? Are there any 1 or 2 that you think we could see momentum here? And then any commentary on accounting center in particular?

Doug Robinson

executive
#57

Mind if I go?

Unknown Executive

executive
#58

Doug, yes, please.

Doug Robinson

executive
#59

So there's 3 that stick out to me, workforce planning, financial planning and accounting center that you just touched on. I think all 3 of those have the opportunity within our core FINS base to grow significantly. Workforce planning, of course, applies to those HCM core customers. Those are the 3 that I think have the opportunity to really ratchet up to the right on that curve, getting up above the 20% over time. Anything you'd add?

Unknown Executive

executive
#60

No, I think they are the 3 we're focused on.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#61

Yes. I would just say on accounting center, it's still a relatively young product, and it's one that is very specific, industry-by-industry. We made progress in financial services. We just got to keep knocking down the different industries. And I think that, that percentage will continue to grow.

Doug Robinson

executive
#62

I left one out, Extend.

Unknown Executive

executive
#63

Yes.

Doug Robinson

executive
#64

600 customers, but every customer should have it. There's value for every customer. And as you've heard from this -- so far this week, it's foundational. It's a basis from which we're doing a lot of innovation off of. So I was remissed to forget that one.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#65

I'm really excited about [ talent ] engagement. We have such a high penetration rate with recruiting a very high attach rate product, and engagement layers over top of recruiting. And so it's attached to an attach, and it really provides customers with a way to communicate with the new generation of the workforce that wants to talk to you over text, not over e-mail. And it has been incredibly popular already out of the gate. And so I see that it's not just about attach, it's about attach to attach in some of these cases.

Aleksandr Zukin

analyst
#66

Alex Zukin here, Wolfe Research. I guess, maybe if you look at the modulation of the growth framework, right, from 20-plus percent subscription revenue growth to 17% and 19%, it seemed -- I think what would be helpful to understand is how much of that is macro, how much of that is AI, right? Meaning the headwind from the macro, the tailwind from potential AI monetization that you guys laid out before. And I ask that because it seems like on financial specifically, obviously, an enormous opportunity. And you guys have clearly gotten to almost functional parity with the other solutions. But the macro seems to be making it a much harder decision for the buyer to make -- to actually make that move and make that switch. So maybe just walk us through how that layers in and factors in. Is that 17 to 19, is that like this, is that like this, is that like this from a linearity perspective?

Unknown Executive

executive
#67

Yes. So Doug, why don't you start on what you're seeing in the selling environment macro, and then I'll address the 17% to 19% as a percentage of that.

Doug Robinson

executive
#68

Yes, I feel like I'll give you an unoriginal answer, so I'll try to use different words, but it is we're still seeing this extra round trips, and there's more eyes and scrutiny on every bit of spend. And there are certain industries where we see more of that medium enterprise tech sector, tons of scrutiny on it; regional banks, tons of scrutiny right now because they've got OCC and SEC auditors in there every day, and it's a distraction to the business. So it's sort of -- that still is the headwind that we battle with just the velocity and volume of what we think, what we know the market potential and opportunity to be.

Unknown Executive

executive
#69

Yes. And to answer your question, like we understand what the headwinds are, and we have taken that into account in our guidance. If things change dramatically, I think maybe our guidance will change. But we're dealing with the current state of an environment, for 18 months, we've been talking about going into a recession. For 18 months, we've been talking about a soft landing or hard landing. We've been talking about all these macro challenges, and we're taking that into account because we don't see that changing in the near future. And when deals right now for Doug and Patrick around the world get pushed or paused on these big digital transformations, whether it's HR or it's finance, they don't leave our pipeline. It's important to remember, if someone is thinking about doing this, it's not if it's when. They may pause it, but they're still in our pipeline. Our pipeline is not decreasing like projects are going away. It's just moving out 1 or 2 quarters. So it's baked into our framework. We have to recognize it. I will say I couldn't be more proud of what the team has achieved so far this year. We've been dealing with these headwinds. We've raised our guidance for the second half of the year, both on the top line and operating margin. So we're becoming accustomed to operating in the world that we live today, and the teams really know how to sell, and it comes back to the value of our platform.

Zane Rowe

executive
#70

Alex, just from a timing perspective for the next quarter, in addition to 12-month backlog, which we'll be providing, we'll also give you some insight into how we're thinking about our next fiscal year. So obviously, we've already given you insight into the 18% for this year. And then as we've done in the past for our third quarter earnings, I'll give you some thought around narrowing that framework into next year.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#71

Yes. When you think the economy is going to improve, let us know, right? I mean we've got a UAW strike. We've got -- I think Goldman Sachs came out with a 90% likelihood of a government shutdown. I mean these just keep popping up, and we just keep battling through them. But at some point, we'll get through it, and I do think growth will return to the economy.

Keith Weiss

analyst
#72

Keith Weiss here from Morgan Stanley. I understand sort of the top line, there's a lot of macro factors that you guys can't control, but what you can control is the OpEx side of the equation. And I think given that we're no longer talking about 20% plus growth, we've taken down the growth profile. We've talked a lot about operating efficiencies. No change in the operating margin target, the long-term operating margin targets, and the perspective of just like 50 basis points of expansion over the next 3 years on an annual basis, it seems kind of anemic, frankly. So has something changed in the investment kind of philosophy? Are you guys leaning more into investment right now because of the opportunity? Because it's a little striking to us so that -- like we didn't see more on the operating margin side. And then on the operating cash flow side of the equation, I think we lost about 500 basis points of operating cash flow target on a go-forward basis. Could you talk to us a little bit about what happened there? Where did that operating cash flow margin go?

Zane Rowe

executive
#73

Yes. Keith, I'm happy to start, and then Carl can jump in after. As it relates to the operating margin and those investments, each of those investments are discrete priorities that we're focusing on. Now, as you saw with this year, if we don't see those returns, and I've looked at these closely and there's significant returns that we would expect to achieve over the course of time, and we believe they will be accretive. Obviously, we've given a range that we think is a range that we can get behind. But to your point on the 20%, we also believe that if we do it right, in a few cases, we could see outsized benefits and outsized rewards, and those we want to make sure that we're not underinvesting into. Now, when we see that opportunity to play out and we see the scale, we'll have tremendous opportunity to continue to increase operating margin, as you would expect, potentially through but otherwise beyond the 25% period. So we're confident leaning in that each of those investments that we highlighted are investments that you want us to make because the potential upside is significant and the opportunity is significant, maybe not just within this framework, but well beyond that, we believe we'll be very well positioned beyond FY '27. And then as it relates to the OCF, the operating cash flow, I'd say, nothing significant on the modeling change. There's a slight dynamic change in the shift, which is a good news story into education and government markets that just have a slightly different payment profile. We've also candidly achieved GAAP profitability a little sooner than otherwise expected. So we feel good about that. But there's nothing fundamental about the model that hasn't changed as far as the ability to drive strong cash flow with the earnings that we prepared.

Brent Thill

analyst
#74

It's Brent Thill, Jefferies. Just on international, it has been undergrowing the core business in the U.S., and thanks for all the color about the steps and initiatives you're putting in, but when do you believe that starts to really fire and execute and start to see that acceleration of growth? Are we a couple of quarters away? Are we a year away? How would you characterize that build? And Aneel, we have a marketing -- this side of the [ room ] came out with the new marketing [ ploy ] for you. If you want to hear about it, we can talk about it later.

Unknown Executive

executive
#75

I would love that, for sure.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#76

Selling my hoodies, yes.

Brent Thill

analyst
#77

Okay. You hired Billy Idol. So you said financials is prime time. Are you hiring the University of Colorado?

Doug Robinson

executive
#78

Very on brand. You want to go first?

Unknown Executive

executive
#79

Go ahead.

Doug Robinson

executive
#80

So I would say we're already seeing it in EMEA. I mean, I think I tried to highlight that in my prepared remarks, is that we're seeing really good execution there. So we expect really solid growth from them this year. And I think APJ will get there, too. I won't give you a specific quarter because as you see, we're making some fundamental shifts within that market, elevating Japan, of course, and then APAC with brand-new leader, who we think will really accelerate the business. But it will take some time for [ Simon ] to land and for all the investments in Japan to pay off. I do think the partner investments are a really key part of that in the APJ market, in particular. We've already spent a lot of time. In fact, I'll leave next week and be there for another 16 days across Japan and Australia. But spending time with partners, getting these resell and co-sell agreements in place that we think can accelerate that timeline to being accretive to growth.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#81

Yes. No, I would agree, Doug. I think we're seeing consistent and repeatable results out of EMEA with all the changes you saw in the leadership team. I think that's doing quite well. We just made an announcement today, right here, for the first time, about APJ and the leadership team there and the structural difference that were taken in APJ, pulling Japan out to report directly to Patrick, our Chief Sales Officer, because we have to focus on that market. So I think all of these will start to pay dividends for us, even in the second half of this year, if we can start to see APJ pick up, right? Right now, it's not material to our growth or our business, quite frankly, but it will be going forward with all these changes. And EMEA, we think, is performing quite well. That being said, we put a challenge out there to our Americas team, and we say, "Hey, if you can maintain 75% of our revenue and consistently grow like you are, let's do a little internal race to see if we can go faster between the U.S. and EMEA and APJ." So we're okay with that model, too.

Karl Keirstead

analyst
#82

Karl Keirstead at UBS here. Let me -- I'll direct this one to Zane. Zane, we've always had trouble correlating your backlog growth today with revenue growth tomorrow just because you were using that 24-month backlog number. So you've given us a cleaner CRPO number. So thank you for that. And it's actually, in my judgment anyway, pretty solid at 20%, 21%, which makes the low end of that 17% to 19% guide for next year at least feel pretty conservative. And I just wanted to test that thesis.

Zane Rowe

executive
#83

Well, you're welcome with the CRPO. No, I mean the one point I would make is, obviously, as I mentioned, we've got 18% this year. We'll be giving an insight into next year in the next quarter. That framework, candidly, is one that we see sort of over the medium term. So it's not necessarily just looking into FY '25. And we feel good about the business. I mean as Carl said, we believe it's a realistic range. We feel really good about our investments that we're making, but we just want to be transparent with where we are, given the macro and given all of our -- sort of the backdrop here and what we're seeing. So I wouldn't go as far as saying any -- going -- narrowing it down to any point of that range, but obviously, we feel good about the business, overall.

Brad Zelnick

analyst
#84

Brad Zelnick, Deutsche Bank, over here to Karl's left.

Zane Rowe

executive
#85

Sorry.

Brad Zelnick

analyst
#86

No worries.

Zane Rowe

executive
#87

We're not all blind. There are just lights on, very much was looking [ for help ].

Brad Zelnick

analyst
#88

I particularly like Doug's slide where he showed the top 100 accounts, slightly less than $1 billion, and yet $2 billion plus in white space opportunity. I got to imagine if we look at that for the entire company all the way down through ME, that's got to be even more white space compared to what they're paying you today. Can you maybe help frame for us where is the low-hanging fruit within that? And perhaps even by industry or even by core product, how do you align the company best to go out and capture that low-hanging fruit that's right ahead of you?

Doug Robinson

executive
#89

Yes. I think it's -- I'll go first. I think it's fair to say our rich CHRO customer base, so HCM customers and going and selling financials because financial drags with it a broader solution set of SKUs. So you sell financials back into our customer base of an HCM customer, you're pulling another 6 to 8 solutions or SKUs with it. And the ACV on those get really interesting, really quick. So I'd point you to that as sort of where I see a motion of low-hanging fruit and great opportunity. By industry, industries behave differently. I highlighted that in the last year, we've seen 1 out of 3 land customers coming to us as a full platform. It's much higher than that in certain industries, health care, higher education and the government segment as well. So you could think then, therefore, about all the other industries that we're selling into, have an opportunity to expand pretty significantly across that bar -- stack bars of attach.

Stefan Slowinski

analyst
#90

Just here up front. Stefan Slowinski from BNP Paribas. Question for you, Aneel. You talked about a few different ways of monetizing gen AI, including in the pricing, new SKUs. Others are talking about more consumption-based pricing. Where do you think this all ends up over time for Workday and for the industry, especially with the cost of delivery coming down?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#91

Well, I don't think the cost of delivery is going to come down that dramatically on gen -- gen AI is expensive. I'm going to ask Sayan to weigh in on that. Honestly, I don't think anybody knows exactly how the value is going to attribute. I think number one, it's going to be higher win rates, and that's important. I think it'll be lower discount rates because our product will be viewed as a lot stronger than our competitors. There will be products like Skills Cloud that will be brand new SKUs. I think you'll see from Workday more SKUs that could not exist without AI, that exist and that we charge for that. And Skills Cloud is a great example of that. Some of the -- all of these copilots, I've gotten quite a bit of negative feedback from customers that I don't want to buy these copilots from some of the other vendors. So I'm -- I think the jury is still out on all those copilots. I think there are lots of other ways to monetize it. Consumption's another way, but I'd be curious what you think, Sayan.

Sayan Chakraborty

executive
#92

Well, I think like I do think that continued investment will bring expense down. This is a very expensive thing to run. I think a bigger lever for expense, long term, is using gen AI with what it does well, which it has, human-beyond-language capability, that's the thing that it is exceptional at. But good old-fashioned now like k-means clustering is probably a better classifier, quite frankly. And so building on [ ensemble ] models, some of which are much, much cheaper to run, and using the human interaction, the language interaction skill set of generative allows you to deliver actually a higher-quality experience net at a lower cost. And so I think there's a lot of room to run on the algorithmic side. I think we're at the very, very beginning of this innovation. We're not in the middle yet. So I think that's one aspect. Given that, I think that inevitably, this is going to be a price of entry, this is not going to be sustainable, long term, as this feature that you can charge a 30% uplift or 40% uplift on top of the base product, in the same sense that none of us are going to buy an AirPod with machine-learning noise canceling for more than the one that doesn't have machine-learning noise canceling. It's just going to be part of the product, and it's going to be an expectation to be competitive in the marketplace. And so we are actually building with that destination in mind. Yes, we have to protect the business model on a usage standpoint because these -- especially when we're using third-party models that are very expensive. And we will do that to protect the business, but we are also building the business in such a way to kind of go where the puck is going, which is this is going to be built in.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#93

Over time, all technology areas get commoditized. And I think AI is this opportunity to uncommoditize enterprise applications, where the products are so highly differentiated and you're -- just like it was for many of the early years at Workday, people jumped, and they had a massive competitive advantage versus their competitors who are running SAP and Oracle. And I think that same opportunity exists with AI. We all see this as a way to make our customers more successful and productive, and I think they'll pay for that. How it gets monetized, I think it's still up in the air.

Sayan Chakraborty

executive
#94

It's a little bit of the [indiscernible] system of record, right? I mean, like you get "Oh, you have this back office thing. And all you're doing is collecting data." Well, it turns out that we have this technology that really, really want access to that data, not just kind of core HCM and financials, but accounting center, which is collecting massive amounts of data and identification of interesting patterns, like an accounting center data is a huge opportunity for us.

Justin Furby

executive
#95

Okay. We're going to do two more questions. I'm going to go right here to Derrick, who's right next to me.

James Wood

analyst
#96

Great. Derrick Wood at TD Cowen. Zane, a couple of questions for you on the model. First of all, to this point on generative AI, do you anticipate any headwinds to gross margins over the next few years? And then last year, when we saw the margin framework, it was broken down by lines. And sales and marketing was kind of expected to go up; R&D, a little bit more leverage. Is that still the right way to think about the model in the medium term?

Zane Rowe

executive
#97

Yes, that's right. That's the right way to think about it. And I would say, I mean, obviously, there's some latitude on our gross margins. We believe we'll be able to improve them in some respects. And obviously, gen AI will counter that to some extent as well. But we believe it will be consistent with where it is today, at least over the medium term. And then the model that we've talked about previously with incremental spend on the sales and marketing side and recognizing some efficiencies on the R&D side is still consistent with where we are.

Brent Bracelin

analyst
#98

Brent Bracelin, Piper Sandler here. While there's a lot of focus on prime time. As an Oregon Ducks fan, sometimes wins are bigger than clicks. So just weighing in there. No seriously, one of the things that stood out to me was less than 3% of ACV are sourced through partners. If I look at the floor today, there are some really big partners you have today. So my question is really around how quickly can we convert partners from assistants to new sources of revenue? And as we think about that transition, is that going to be incremental to your direct sales efforts? Or does it really become an environment to hire less direct sales people, and it's really about margin leverage? Just trying to understand the logic and how you're going to frame that partner opportunity.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#99

I'm going to let Doug answer this question because I think my team is tired of me answering this and pushing them hard on partners. But those statistics are real statistics, and I'm going to let Doug answer why, to be honest, in the last 5 months, you -- we were just in the back, you could just tell me how fired up he is. Being at this conference, talking to our biggest partners saying, how excited they are not just to deploy us, but actually take us to market in some of the biggest SIs in the world, we're saying, we want to resell you. We have opportunities, but we've never been capable of doing that. So Doug, why don't you share your excitement because obviously mine is pretty obvious?

Doug Robinson

executive
#100

Yes. I like how Carl answered the question for me and then said, "Doug, the floor is yours."

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#101

I just want to make sure he's on this journey with me.

Doug Robinson

executive
#102

Thank you, Carl. I don't think this -- first of all, I don't think this impacts our sales capacity hiring. What I think it totally changes is our pipeline development. It's the top-of-funnel growth that we can drive more and better qualified. When you go arm and arm with these partners into accounts, it's very different. And you're talking value from the start, you're talking the company's strategic objectives and how together, and again, you saw the partners who were listed there, us plus the partner can bring that value to our customers. So I don't think that changes our sales capacity modeling. I think it changes our throughput, our volume and the amount of business, so you could -- that will show up in productivity -- account executive productivity.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#103

And I would just really credit Carl for coming in and recognizing that we were under leveraging the partners, and I'll take some of the blame there. In the many early years at Workday, the large partners didn't really want to work with Workday because they made a lot more money on the other vendors. So we kind of went on our own. And then over time, as we started building partnerships with them, it was really just about integration and implementation, not about actually selling together. So it's a new motion for us. And I'm seeing firsthand just the change in their mindset because they now feel like a real partner, not just a back-end implementation partner.

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#104

And we [ even ] talked about it, to your point, Aneel, just selling to the AWS marketplace, just started 6 months ago. Doug put some statistics up there, and you saw what's happening so quickly. There's a lot of unspent capacity and credits with AWS that people can now use to get access to the Workday technology, and we can deploy on top of their platform very easily around the world.

Justin Furby

executive
#105

Okay. We're going to wrap it there. I'm going to have Carl just kind of close this down just with a few final thoughts. And then, for all of you in the room here, we're going to have happy-hour cocktails just outside these doors. And so a lot of the folks here will mingle over there as well. So Carl, any last thoughts before we wrap?

Carl Eschenbach

executive
#106

Well, first, we all want to thank you for coming and spending your afternoon with us here at [ Rising ]. We hope you spend more time than just this afternoon, you get to go out and have time with our customers, our partners and get a sense from them what they're seeing from Workday, and why we sit up here so excited about the durable opportunity we have going forward. We're going to grow in the high teens, we're proud of that. We're going to expand operating margins at the same time while investing heavily across all functions in the business. And we're going to continue to share with you where we think the business will go, both short term and long term. And we're going to deliver against those guidance numbers. We're confident. We're proud of our business, it's durable, it's resilient. And we're going to continue to prove that to you year after year. So thank you for coming, and we'll see you at the happy hour outside.

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