Inside Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri's second act

Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri is in what Fortune frames as a second act, and this profile opens at the annual customer conference for Sana, the Swedish agentic AI startup Workday acquired six months earlier for more than $1 billion. Bhusri, who cofounded Workday with David Duffield in 2005, is described as not keen on the limelight and inclined to deflect it to one of his young mentees, but happy to be at the event.

The excerpt gives only a sliver of the full piece. It recalls that fifteen years ago Workday was a rebellious, HR-focused upstart from the San Francisco Bay Area whose cloud-based service threatened the established players of the time. The text is cut off at that point, so the rest of that comparison is not available.

The one extended quote comes from Hellermark, who tells Fortune about first meeting Bhusri in Stockholm. Hellermark says it was very clear that Bhusri was deeply committed to winning the current AI era, and describes seeing "the sort of fire in his eyes," the founder mentality of running through walls to build the best products and bring them to the world.

The takeaway is that Workday's leadership is betting heavily on agentic AI, and that the company's cofounder is personally involved in the push. The Sana deal, worth more than $1 billion, shows how much Workday is willing to spend to compete in that area. It also puts a Stockholm-based startup at the center of a major US enterprise software company's AI strategy. The excerpt does not cover what Sana's technology does, how it is being integrated into Workday, or any financial results.