Aneel Bhusri: Workday's Reluctant and Remarkable CEO

**Bob Evans** (0:00)
Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. I want to talk a little bit today about a change at the top of Workday. You've probably heard about it a week or so ago, but I wanted to offer my perspectives on why I think this is so significant right now. And I want to point out somebody who's been a real superstar in this business and in the Cloud Wars Top 10 for a long time, and why I think he deserves extra credit for what he's doing right now. That's Workday co-founder, former co-CEO, former CEO, Chairman, Executive Chairman, resigned as CEO. Now back in as CEO, Aneel Bhusri. I call him Workday's reluctant and remarkable CEO.
A couple of things here, just to set the stage, you may know this, but he was a co-founder of Workday. He was CEO, co-CEO for 15 years, from 2009 to 2024, when Bhusri recruited Carl Eschenbach, who had been a venture capitalist after a great career at, you know, within the industry. And then he was also on Workday's board. He was going to be the person that ran all the business, the operations, and Aneel said, I can go back to what I truly love, which is developing products and strategy. Eschenbach left about a week ago. The board asked Bhusri to step back in as CEO, and he's done that. So there's no question that Aneel Bhusri's first love is products and strategy. He's always said that. He has sometimes said things along the lines that, I was never trained to run a multi-billion dollar company. And he's quite a self-deprecating person, great sense of humor, great ego around him, where he doesn't need to have this CEO title to be seen as, you know, the big cheese, the big chief here. No, in fact, it was at a Workday Rising event, probably about two, two and a half years ago. It was going to be the final time when Bhusri would, as CEO, would be giving the keynote talk at Workday Rising. So, Aneel had invited his mom to be in the audience and she was there in the front row. He said, hi mom, I wanted to celebrate with you. This is the last time I have to do the keynote as the CEO. And he chuckled about that. He said, now with Carl Eschenbach coming in, it's a couple of years ago, he said, now I can go do the stuff I really love around products and strategy.
It is, this thing about never being trained to it, he's on the board of directors at General Motors, a highly accomplished executive in a lot of ways. Aneel certainly doesn't need the money, doesn't need the healthcare insurance that Workday offers. He's just turned 60 years old, he could do anything in the world he wants to do. But at this challenging time here, as Workday, like every big enterprise software company, is dealing with a lot of changes, right? Customers are more demanding, they have to move faster than ever before. The agentic AI phenomenon has disrupted what customers expect from and want from their SaaS applications. How does a company like Workday or Oracle or SAP Salesforce balance those two things? The enterprise applications that brought them here and the agentic AI that has to take them forward. The whole notion of becoming a data company, Workday several months ago announced Workday ERP. There's a lot of things going on at the company and no doubt from the outside, you've got work or SAP and Oracle trying always aggressively to go after Workday customers. Now with this change at the top, they're going to no doubt be seeking to sow some uncertainty and doubt in the minds of key Workday customers. So there's lots of reasons that I know Bhusri could have said, hey, man, this is this is somebody else's fight, but he's agreed to jump back in as CEO. I want to mention one other thing about Aneel, just the way he manages. I had this brother about five years ago, I was talking with him and he smiled. He said, I've sort of become, this is when machine learning, ML was really becoming hot. Everybody talking about it and the impact it could have on software. Aneel smiled, he said, yes, several months ago, he said, I became the Pied Piper of Workday. He said, I was just going around to all the different developers and engineering teams and just asking them over and over and over again, what are you doing with ML? What are you doing with ML? He said, it's funny. He said, you asked that question a bunch of time, pretty intensely. He said, in a very short period of time, he said, I had lots of the people on the developer and engineering teams coming to me and saying, hey, Aneel, let me tell you about my new ideas around ML. So that sort of inspirational person getting down in the trenches with the developers and the program is very much who Aneel Bhusri is. But this very critical, challenging time now for Workday. It's no surprise to me that he stepped back in and does this. Now, they've got two great president level executives at Workday. Rob Enslin is president and I'm not sure the exact time, but he's sort of the chief in charge of revenue worldwide customer operations. Gerrit Kazmaier is president for products and technology. I would not be surprised. In fact, I think it's very likely that about a year from now, at the end of Workday's fiscal year, 12 months from now, I bet Workday will announce that Bhusri is going to become co-CEO and elevate one of those two, Enslin or Kazmaier, to the co-CEO role with him. And then I think six to nine months after that, late in calendar 2027, he'll elevate the other executive to co-CEO and Bhusri will step off again to be chairman. And after that, I don't think he's coming back as CEO, but wouldn't have thought so this time. Who knows? Got a detailed article about this later this morning on Cloud Wars and I want to thank you for being with us here at Cloud Wars Minute and I hope you have a fantastic day.