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

September 10, 2025

US Information Technology Software Company Conference Presentations 34 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#1

Good morning, everybody. It's day 3 of Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference. Thanks for your support of the conference. This -- since the rebranding and the relaunch of the conference in 2022, this is the fourth year in a row, I think we've had you for fourth year in a row, and attendance is up not by software industry standards, but by our industry standards, it's up very nicely. We crossed 3,000 plus. It feels so busy and the room is full here. On that note, welcome to Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#2

Thank you, Kash. Thanks, It's great to be back. Good to see a lot of friends in the audience here. Also, I'd like to congratulate you, Kash, 31 years in the industry, the last 5 here at Goldman Sachs. You've been a friend to many of us for decades at this point. You've had an incredible career. You've made all of us better. You've been tough at times, but you're always fair. And I just think -- you've done an incredible job helping the software industry as a whole be highlighted as a tech sector that people should really pay attention to in the past and going forward. So how about a round of applause for Kash.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#3

Thank you. That's very kind of you. very kind of you. It's all possible only when you cover great companies, and I've had the pleasure of knowing you for a very, very long time since the VMware IPO. And Carl is one of these -- probably the only CEO that I know who has worn the following hats, COO, CFO CEO, venture capitalist, Board member to have a dozen public companies at some point in time or the other. I cannot think of somebody who has worn all these hats and has multiple roles of experience. And someone that I look up to, he's a great leader and very inspirational and someone who is fun to spend quality time with, which is exactly what we're going to do in the next 30 minutes.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#4

Thank you, Kash. It's been an amazing career. I feel blessed every day I wake up, I pinch myself and wonder how this kid from Pennsylvania have gotten this industry 37 years ago, and here we are. So I'm grateful for sure.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#5

Congratulations.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#6

So give us a bit of assessment since you took over as CEO, what are the milestones the company has been able to accomplish and then we can talk about the go forward.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#7

Okay, sure. Well, it's been an incredible journey, Kash. It's hard to believe in 3 months, it will be 3 years. It feels like just yesterday, I joined Aneel and the Workday team to step in and serve in an operating role and step off the Board. It's been an incredible journey. It's been exciting. It's been everything I expected and then some. When I joined almost 3 years ago, Workday was a company that just did an incredible job in the large enterprise, if you will, crushing the HCM market, specifically in North America. And when I came in, I wanted to leverage that strength and that position as a company. But I also knew there was a tremendous amount of opportunity outside of that. And very quickly, we embarked upon a number of growth initiatives and strategies. In no particular order, we really leaned into our partner ecosystem, Kash. We had partners that deployed our software, but they weren't really driving innovation. They weren't looking as a platform and building solutions on top of us. We now call this the Workday economy. We don't call it an ecosystem almost every 6 months, the number of partners working with us is doubling. So we've leaned into partners. We've leaned into our international opportunity. We think we have a tremendous opportunity to grow our business internationally. We only get 25% of our business. We're almost $10 billion in revenue outside the U.S., which is pretty amazing for someone of our scale. And we're not stopping what we've done in the last 3 years. Most recently, we announced we're entering the India market and putting a platform in a cloud there to offer that, and we're going to be going into many markets. So international has been a big push for us. We've entered the U.S. federal market in an aggressive way. Just about 2 years ago, we brought in a great leader. She's built out that business. We think there's a massive opportunity in the U.S. federal government to really upgrade and transform what I would describe an antiquated infrastructure in the federal government. It's all on-premises. We will move to the cloud. And then most recently, we launched actually the Workday Government subsidiary, a subsidiary of Workday so that we can really target that market. So that's been a really big push for us. I said we crushed the HCM market, and we continue to do so, but also now we've leaned pretty heavily into our financials business. And the financials business, we can sell a financials platform. But really, what it drives is what we describe as a full suite sale into our customer base where they buy both HCM and financials and our accounting center at one time. So that's been a really big push for us and quite frankly, been very, very successful. And then 2 other areas in the last 3 years. I think we've moved from being a company that is an apps company to an apps and a platform company. And there are very few, I think, enterprise software companies that can say they're both an apps company and a platform company at the same time. We can say that. We have one of the most robust platforms in the industry that runs 2 of the industry-leading apps, but people are now consolidating on top of us. And obviously, I'm sure we'll talk about it. I'm sure you have questions, but we're leaning heavily, heavily into AI. And we think we're uniquely positioned compared to most out there to take advantage of our incredible moat that we have around our data and the incumbency of our customers. And last Kash, I'd say, I think I said it here last year, and I'll repeat it because I think it's still the same. We've become an incredible magnet for talent. The talent that we can recruit to bring into Workday is really incredible. We've done it on the go-to-market side. We've done it on the product side. We've done it in different functions across the company. And these people have come in and very quickly engaged with the existing set of executives and drove the company forward. And in the end, 5 years out, I think we will be by far the #1 enterprise AI platform managing our customers, people, money and agents. That's what we'll be 5 years from now.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#8

Yes. I want you to talk a little bit more about that 5-year out 2030, your best prognostication. I know you had a high-level assessment of the money people, et cetera. Talk a little bit more about how you see that playing out.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#9

Yes. I think, Kash, right now, we're incredibly well positioned. I'm surprised you didn't ask this as a first question. There's this whole damn narrative out there, quite frankly.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#10

Oh that's my next question.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#11

I won't answer it. But...

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#12

Every CEO has gotten that question...

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#13

I'm going to wait because I'll jump off the stage and start running around and such a bunch of craft. That being said, I think why we're uniquely positioned and why the next 5-year journey is going to be incredible is, number one, we have a massive installed base of customers. We have more than 11,000 customers with a gross retention rate of 97% to 98%. They're not going away, number one. We have the cleanest and largest set of data around HR and finance in the industry, bar none. We are on the desktop of 73 million users, 73 million users. Think about that. And we have the opportunity to go back and continue to drive innovation into our customers. It's an incredible position we are in. We don't have just the data, though. We have the context of the data. We know why it exists. We know how it interacts with other sets of data. No one else has that. And the last thing is a lot of people come in and their workflows. They have workflows. We're in the workflow, but we have the data and the context of the data. Those 3 things give us a unique advantage. And last, I'd say, we're a system of record. We're a system of engagement. We're a system of action and now, Kash, we're a system of intelligence with AI built into the platform. No one else can claim those 4 things.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#14

That's a neat position. And this kind of line of reasoning as to why a SaaS company is relevant in the AI world is just starting to form this context, data, the workflow, et cetera. What are the things that the company is doing under your leadership to take these advantages and mold them in a very tight tas to make it like solidly bulletproof for that.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#15

Yes, I think there's a few things. So first, we're making sure the core platform continues to be innovated on top of. Very quickly, we all jump and talk about AI, and we're going to do it, and there's no one leaning more into it than us. But we have 6,000 HCM customers and 11,000 customers in total that are using our platform and they expect value from us. So we're innovating on the core. We can't leave the core behind, because what we have with our incumbency with our customers is 20 years of trust. They have trusted us with their most mission-critical data, their people and their money. And that's a privileged position that we're in. And if we innovate on top of the core, continue to drive value into our customers, they will look to us as they are today for their AI partner. And on the AI front, I think it's a stack that gives us differentiation. Number one, we're building first-party agents, our own agents that are very enterprise-focused, domain-specific around HR and finance. We've rolled out a whole bunch of them. We have 13 of them we've announced. We'll showcase them next week at our big user conference here in San Francisco. But we have incredible enterprise agents that drive real business value. When you drop down out of the agent strategy have, we have something we announced earlier this year called an Agent System of Record. And I will tell you, this is something that is resonating not just with our customers, but with the ecosystem or as I described it, the Workday economy. We have people like Microsoft and Google, who have agent builder platforms who say, we need to onboard these agents into the enterprise in a very secure, safe, compliant way. We need to make sure they have access rights just like employees. And they're coming to us and saying, "Hey, we want to partner with you because you own the majority of the enterprise, and we're going to onboard agents in the same way we did humans. We're going to align them to org charts. We're going to align them to management, and then we're actually going to have to manage the total workforce. So the Agent System of Record as the orchestration layer is going to be super powerful. Our partners, Accenture and Deloitte and many others are coming to us and saying, you're the on-ramp. Because today, everyone is talking about agents, and I call it agent sprawl. At some point, the CIOs are waking up and saying, what's going on? Where are these agents coming from? What data are they getting access to? What are the privilege rights? What are the -- like it's changing rather quickly, and you're going to need something to be able to onboard those agents. And then the last thing is because we are a true platform, most recently, we acquired a company called Flowise, which is a low-code open source agent builder platform. So now what we're starting to see is both customers and partners saying they want to build their own first-party agents on top of Workday because they want access to the data, and now we deliver that platform. So it's a stack from our own agents to the agent system of record. And then finally, the low-code, no-code development platform for people to build on top of us. That's what differentiates us. And what do they all get access to? Data, right? AI, one talks about AI, AI, AI, right? Yes. It's super powerful. But I always like to say we don't hallucinate. We're not training off the Internet. We're training off a highly curated set of data.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#16

Yes. So let's talk about seats. It's the easiest conclusion to make. Perhaps it's prematurely wrong, but the conclusion is seats under pressure because of AI. And every SaaS company that has been through the post-pandemic correction has seen seat-based growth come under a lot of pressure. Mark talked about it yesterday, and I'm sure we're going to hear about it from other SaaS companies as well. What is your thought? Is the seat compression just a function of overbuying during the bubble and we're just kind of working through that? Or is there something structural by way of employment? And the employment numbers don't seem to make it very easy. Jobs added was the slowest pace that we've seen in quite some time. What is going on in your customer base from a seats perspective? How -- what is the outlook for seat-based growth?

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#17

Yes. Thanks for the question, Kash. As I said, you're always tough but fair, and this was the very first question you asked me on our earnings call just 3 weeks ago. So first, I fundamentally disagree with this narrative, and I don't know where it started that like SaaS companies and more specifically, seat-based companies are in trouble. They're going away. I just fundamentally don't believe and I think it's completely overblown. And if you go talk to our customers, that's not what they're saying. And for people, Kash, who are rightsizing their organizations are doing a restructuring, right? When you talk to the leaders and I talk to my peers, they're not doing it because of AI. They're doing it because from the pandemic in 2021 through 2024, we overhired. We were zealous. We wanted all these employees, and we're rightsizing the business. Now that being said, we can't be naive. AI will drive further economies of scale and better productivity for all of the employees. So we can't be naive either, right, Kash. And we've been very transparent before AI really started to emerge in the enterprise, we talked about now 1.5 years ago where we saw a moderation of our headcount growth. And even last quarter, our headcount growth in our employee or in our customer base actually accelerated again.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#18

The 74 million, that's great to know.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#19

Yes. It's moderating. It's not growing. And the year-over-year growth isn't as fast because now we got to lap all the hiring people. But the overall headcount in our 11,000 customers actually continues to grow. So it's not like we're going away. And by the way, the other thing I think we need to remember, and it goes back to the earlier conversation, Kash, we're in such a unique position. I think we need to think about it from the context of how much TAM expansion are we seeing because of AI in the enterprise, right? I think that number so much outweighs the moderation in headcount growth that we're thinking about it completely wrong. And this is why I think some SaaS companies maybe will have bigger or more structural challenges than us. But I think we're uniquely positioned. I view it as a tailwind to us. Will we see moderation in headcount growth? Yes. But the opportunity outside of just pure seat-based license.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#20

It's more about it. You sound fired up.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#21

Yes, because you know why -- take this right away and take this -- I mean, I get asked this question all the time. Every day, like you're going to -- what's happening in the Workday. I'm like nothing, we're doing pretty well. Like we have an incredible franchise, Kash. And I just think it's completely overblown. People aren't taking out their employees because of AI or solely because of AI. People are rightsizing their business from overhiring in the past. And now we have the opportunity to go back and leverage AI and actually sell back into our installed base and our installed base is huge Kash. So I just don't see it happening. Yes, I am -- it's a bit irritating. We got to address it. It's our cross to bear, and we'll continue to push the message out there. I mean we are selling -- our AI solutions are doubling year-over-year. Some of them are doubling quarter-to-quarter. So when you have that incumbency in that installed base, it's an incredible opportunity to innovate and drive right back into your customer base to sell them more. So I think that's the opportunity for us. Again, I fundamentally believe AI will transform a lot of jobs. We know what happens in call centers, customer success, maybe marketing, maybe sales and lead development. And obviously, we see the power of it when it comes to software development. So again, it's happening. I'll tell you a quick interesting story. I was talking to a CIO, Kash.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#22

By the way, this is high energy, right? I mean this is...

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#23

I'm fired up...

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#24

I love it all.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#25

I was talking to a CIO, Kash, and they have 10,000 software developers. And I was just asking them, and I'll say a Fortune 10 company to be safe, but it's probably even higher than that. I said, how is AI going? He said it's going incredible. We're getting incredible productivity gains. I said, what are you getting? And he said, we're getting about -- we can quantify 30% productivity gains. And I said, okay, that's great. So what are you going to do with those 3,000 people that might be impacted? He said absolutely nothing. They are moving on to more productive work, taking out the mundane of what they do every day, and they're going to do work they love. They're not getting rid of them, right? So I don't know. I think it's completely overblown. It's our responsibility and my responsibility at Workday to prove the market wrong in this context and show how we're monetizing next week at our Financial Analyst Day. Hopefully, you're there. We're going to do some further disclosures on our AI growth and how we're doing. It's pretty damn impressive.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#26

So Carl, let's talk about the AI agents that are doing so well, they're doubling sequentially, doubling year-over-year. What are these agents exactly? And how are customers getting value from these agents?

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#27

Yes. So we talk about a recruiting agent all the time. This is a company we acquired last year called HiredScore. There's a recruiting agent. You plug this in and you can very easily drive business value in the tune of 50% productivity gain for your recruiters. So right, think about that. And the onboarding, right, of those new employees accelerates by 40% to 50% as well. So it's very quantifiable. We have a contract negotiation agent, right, with a company of Evisort that we acquired, have all these contracts. Now you're going after a new customer and someone's got to sit down in red line, which is a tedious task we all know. Now you can automate all of that because you have all your contracts, what you want in the contracts and you can do that. That's another example. We're rolling out a business process agent, which looks at your workflows of your business and we'll automate it and clean it up so that someone else does you don't need process mining, you can do it, for example, with an agent is another one. We're rolling out a payroll agent. Think about payroll administration. Payroll administration, there's a bunch of people who look at payroll, answer calls, what's going on today. You can automate that. That's another example. So we have 13 of these we're rolling out. We financial audit agent. Like if you look at financial audits, only a little bit of variation changes each and every year, you can automate that. So again, we are -- what we are focused on is enterprise-grade agents, Kash, that drive true business value. And the thing we're focused on, which is different than a lot of our peers out there, we're focused on quality of agents, not quantity. These people come out and say, we've launched 20 or 40 or 100 new agents. They're thin veneers just wrapped around something, it's not true business value. And people aren't really getting that in return when they go to the enterprise to monetize it, they're not getting it back. And we're focused on quality, not quantity and business value outcomes for our customers.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#28

That's great. I can see that there's a lot of innovation. It's a very different discussion than a year back, just in the space of 1 year. And I recall that there are points in time when there is maximum skepticism. And we've been through -- you and I have been through these cycles many times before. And I fondly recollect, maybe not so fondly, but 2016, February 7, Tableau and LinkedIn, these are public companies at one point. They had missed their quarters and the stocks were down 50% that day. And it led to a derating of the sector. And then we had the birth of AWS or at least the scaling of AWS and people said, AWS is going to get into the application space, and they're going to commoditize. You were at VMware at the time. Remember the fighting the fight. [indiscernible] a deal with AWS.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#29

I dealt with AWS, but more importantly, VMware, I remember 6 times we were going to be taken out. We were going out of business. Every open source hypervisor that came out was going to crush us going all the way back to 2002, right, whether it was Zen, KBM, whether it was OpenStack, you don't need this anymore. It doesn't happen.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#30

Yes. And you'll be happy to know that all the good work you did at VMware is showing up in Broadcom, we had Hock Tan yesterday. I mean that business is thriving. It's doing really well.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#31

Yes, I hear it's doing well.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#32

So the point is when there's maximum skepticism, those are times that create fertile ground for a debate. And I think AWS is going to commoditize software debate was one that we lived through, not only that, but AWS is going to commoditize Microsoft and Azure and the whole stack. and actually, what ended up happening was AWS created a platform for Workday to scale its business, Salesforce. And the SaaS universe found a way to scale to an orders of magnitude that was just not possible given their infrastructure. So how do you see this AI thing? So how is Workday working with the cloud ecosystem to help scale your AI footprint?

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#33

Yes. So historically, we've run our own data centers. And even to this day, most of our clients are on our own data centers, but we are migrating to the public cloud. We're migrating to both to AWS and Google, depending on where the customers want to go for obvious competitive reasons. Some of them don't want to go to one or the other. So we are rapidly migrating to the public cloud, leveraging their infrastructure, leveraging their continuity, right, and all of the data centers they have around the world for disaster recovery and making sure you have the right amount of uptime. So we are absolutely leveraging it. There are partners as well. Google has now, as I said earlier, they have an application development framework for building agents, and now they're going to integrate that on top of our agent system of record to how to onboard it, right? They're a customer. So we are absolutely leaning heavily into partnering with all the hyperscalers. Again, we're on AWS and Google. We don't run on Azure at this time, but we do partner with them and Satya and his team are working closely with us to bring their agent platform on top of Workday going forward. So yes, the hyperscalers are going to play a critical role going forward, and we're going to leverage everything they can do for us.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#34

Thomas Kurian was here yesterday, talked about how they're scaling their AI footprint and the tremendous work they're doing with TPUs and the models have come a long way, certainly.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#35

And we use all the models. We can -- they're interchangeable for us from an LLM perspective. We can go and use any of the different models out there.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#36

Do you have a view -- since you mentioned it, there are so many models, right? It was a 1-horse race many years ago, and that became a 2-horse race and then there were 3, then there were 5, there were 6, there are 7.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#37

Listen, I like all my partners. I'm not [indiscernible] going to win. I think they're all going to do well. There's enough opportunity out there for all of them. We use them all. But I don't know if I'm in a position to say who's going to win or lose because someone will hear that Carl said this, and then I'll get a phone call about 20 minutes.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#38

They're all probably worked at customers. So many of them work.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#39

Yes, exactly. That's why I'm not answering.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#40

And it's too early to have a view on these things, right? It's just extremely nascent. I wanted to ask you about your AI monetization strategy. How does your pricing strategy evolve? You could argue that the SaaS industry has gone through a fairly simple pricing, added value, ARPU goes higher, sell more seats. But then all of a sudden, there's this AI thing. How do you value an AI agent? How do you price an AI agent versus a seat? How are you thinking about the pricing model for AI and how that kind of factors into the growth algorithm?

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#41

Yes. It's a great question. I think 2 years, we sat on this stage when we talked about AI monetization and our strategy. And at that time, most people were just basically saying we have some copilots and we have some bots that you can take advantage of. And for that, we're going to raise your pricing or subscription pricing by 20% or 25% per seat. And very quickly, that became the model. We decided not to do that. We believe there are table stakes when it comes to AI that you need to be built into the platform and your customers should get them as part of their subscription fee, and we didn't rush to market and raise prices at all. And I think a lot of people questioned us. I will tell you, fast forward to today, that goodwill has come back in spades for us. People appreciated it. We have so much AI built into the core of the platform that they get as part of the platform. 75% of our customers are using AI that's in the platform today already, 75%. Now that being said, when we have to bring out a new agent that drives true business value, we're going to monetize it. We're going to monetize it in a multipronged way. Sometimes it's seat-based. Sometimes it's consumption-based and sometimes it's volume-based. So we have multiple pricing models. Our pricing model is working. I said, Kash, we're growing our business, our AI business 100% year-over-year. Things like Evisort for contract intelligence and negotiation agents growing 100% quarter-over-quarter. Extend Pro, which allows people to bring in AI agents and bring in other platforms on top of our platform is growing 100% a year. So I think our pricing strategy is working well. We will provide a further -- again, come next week, we'll provide a further update on our AI pricing strategy and monetization strategy going forward. But I'm really pleased we didn't rush to market. Sometimes being first isn't always the best. We got goodwill from our customers. Now our customers pay us for the value, and then we're going to take it one step further that we'll bring to market next week, our price...

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#42

I'm looking forward to it so much and I wonder if you'll go a few steps hard to actually quantify the AI book of business, which is like the next disclosure that companies like the other companies in SaaS space have put a disclosure and a target, not that it's helped tremendously because...

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#43

Come next week.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#44

Okay. So stay tuned for that. I think the key aspect of the confidence building process, at least from the investor community is understanding that your base business has stabilized, first of all. The good news is that Workday is a system of record. The perception is that the space you play in is the least susceptible to AI disruption that may be different than other application spaces. So you've got a solid base of defense you need to establish that your core business is steady. And then when the AI monetization kicks in, you've got a massive installed base. And I don't know if you know Byron Deeter.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#45

I know Byron really well.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#46

You know him really well. I figured he's the guy that came with a rule of 40, 50, 60, whatever. He's such an amazing partner to Goldman Sachs and someone that I worked with 10, 12 years. We had him on stage a couple of days back with Ashim and a couple of other VCs, all of -- that you know from -- in fact, Brady is going to be here, by the way, today. So he said it best. He said, people are so nervous about SaaS, trading at 5x revenue. Some of them are going to go to 3 and some of them are going to go to 10. I thought that was the single most interesting simple takeaway that companies are going through this transition. And remember, Adobe in November 2011 was written off. They were not going to make it. Autodesk was written off. Intuit was written off. And the incumbency is such a powerful thing that when you look through the lens of an old man like me that has lived through these cycles, I would not be...

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#47

Again, this is why you got me all fired up earlier, Kash. We have things that other people don't have. We have incumbency. It's super powerful. I'd look out in this audience, I don't think anyone is taking a byte coded, DC-backed AI start-up and replacing their ERP, whether it's HCM or financials, so they're replacing their GL. I have yet to find one anywhere in the world who's saying that at scale, like it's just not happening. What we have to do is we need to focus deeply focused on driving innovation and leverage that incumbency, that data set, the context, all the things I talked about. If we do that, we're going to be just fine. We're going to wake up years from now at this conference, and we're going to see a plethora of venture-backed companies that dissipate, and you're going to see some of the bigger get bigger, faster, stronger, and I expect us to be one of them.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#48

I expect you to be here in 2030, and I'll be sitting in the audience as a client and watching this unfold. The other thing I want to point out is that I think most people don't -- maybe they do, but you were a venture capitalist. You understand a thing or 2 about disruption and hard startups and how to vet ideas. You looked at probably thousands of business plans. You have an eye for catching the right talent. So if anybody could pick the right tuck-in acquisition that's promising, I would bet that you know how to do that.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#49

I think the team and I, we know how to do that. It's not just me. I have an incredible team that is really good at finding these opportunities. And in the last 1.5 years, we bought now 4 AI companies, some of them really impactful. Most recently, we announced an acquisition of a company called Paradox, which delivers a conversational AI platform, which effectively means mobile for frontline workers and frontline workers work on their mobile phone, right? And we were partnered with Paradox and every one of our customers said, well, why aren't you guys owning this? You guys have the best, if you will, back-office white-collar recruiting platform in the industry through the acquisition of a hired score, go get the front line. And we've done that. Now we have the best, if you will, AI recruiting platform in the industry from frontline to back office and across every type of worker, whether it's full-time contingent or gig workers. So we're buying those. We're buying Flowise, which is an agent building platform. We bought Evisort, and we bought HiredScore. So we are absolutely inquisitive. We'll continue to be inquisitive. We'll continue to find these AI companies. We'll integrate them and then they get to take advantage of our massive distribution channel to really scale the business. So we're aggressively pursuing.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#50

And you have such great goodwill with your customers. I mean when we go to Rising, it's like -- it's a cultish thing in a good way, which is...

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#51

No. I think the numbers, I was -- we had a session yes.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#52

How many people do you have signed up for?

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#53

We'll have -- for the opening day, we'll have 25,000 live, something like that right here at the Moscone Center. So once we get through today and a Board meeting tomorrow, we have 3 days to focus on this little user conference we have. And people are rabbit. And I go back and I talk a lot about trust. It's one of the most trustworthy companies I've ever seen and ever been part of. Our customers love us. They trust us. They're looking to lean into us, lean into the platform and consolidate on it. They're not looking for all these point solutions that exist out there today.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#54

On that note, we have -- this has gone so quickly, and I've enjoyed it that I forgot to check in with our clients to see if you have any questions in the minute and 26 seconds that we have. Yes, go ahead.

Unknown Analyst

Analysts
#55

[indiscernible] start with the open source model because they may be our research labs, integrating them part of Workday, how do you expect to deal with that governance conflict? Or is there a conflict?

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#56

Yes. Actually, there is no conflict. And Flowise is the first, if you will, open source company that we've acquired, which is the agent building platform. So we'll keep it going. If you look at how many GitHub stars they have, it's pretty viral out there already, which is what gets us excited. And now we're going to integrate that on top of Workday and Workday Extend for everyone to build their agents on top of us. But we'll keep the open source community live and well, I think about as lead generation for us. And then we're going to make sure we have the security compliance and controls around it because, as you know, we have people's money in their HR data, and it's super important that we stay highly regulated and focused on security, too. So we'll do that with Flowise's, but we are going to keep an open source platform.

Kasthuri Rangan

Analysts
#57

Carl, on that note, it's been a couple of decades since we got to know each other. I wish you well in the next decade and beyond. Thank you so much for your support of Goldman Sachs. We really appreciate it. Let's go a round of applause for Carl Eschenbach.

Carl Eschenbach

Executives
#58

Thank you so much.

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