Workday CEO Predicts AI Job Displacement And Which Roles May Be Safe

Aneel Bhusri (0:01)

Can an agent do that and replace a human at a lower cost? Yes. Will companies want to do that? Yes. Am I worried about the job displacement? Absolutely.

Alyson Shontell (0:09)

If you don't know what Workday does, chances are your head of HR or your head of finance does. I'm going to talk to Aneel Bhusri today. He and his buddy, Dave Duffield, founded it in 2005, and now he's back in the CEO seat in 2026, reinventing the company for AI.

Aneel Bhusri (0:24)

When AI showed up, it was a refounding moment in that all bets are off. It's a brand new world.

Alyson Shontell (0:30)

We talk about a lot of things, including where we are in this moment for the workforce, what the future workforce will look like, and he's pretty candid about his thoughts about job displacement. And what timeline do you think this will play out?

Aneel Bhusri (0:42)

Within the next five years.

Alyson Shontell (0:44)

I'm Alyson Shontell, and this is Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry. We'll be back after a short message from our sponsor.

SPEAKER_3 (0:55)

Fortune spoke with Deloitte US. CEO, Jason Garzades, on building a culture of speed and agility to drive innovation in large organizations.

SPEAKER_4 (1:05)

There's a natural tendency for large organizations to become slow and deliberate. But in this environment, given the pace of technology and other competitive dynamics, there's also a need to increase agility, increase speed.

And so there's a way through evaluating cultural drivers of the speed of decision making, the speed of communications, accountability for decision making, that large organizations can be agile. It doesn't have to be an either or. An entrepreneurial culture within a large organization really means that the speed of decision making is a priority, that the decision making process, accountability, clarity of decision rights, a culture of making speed a priority can thrive. It's a CEO's job, a leader's job to make sure that individual units or divisions or groups or teams within a large organization feel that degree of empowerment and support and expectation that the speed of decision making is a priority. It's something that winning larger enterprises are intentional about.

Alyson Shontell (2:16)

Aneel Bhusri, thank you for joining me today for our podcast. I'm sitting here across from Fortune 500 CEO Workday, which is now number 430 on the ranking, 21,000 employees, about 10 billion in annual revenue. A lot has changed since you were 39, 2005 starting this company.

Aneel Bhusri (2:34)

Sure has. It's been a great ride.

Alyson Shontell (2:37)

Incredible. You recently came back into the CEO seat after a brief hiatus, a couple of years.

But first, I want to get your big picture thoughts. I don't think there's anyone more credible we could be speaking to about what the future of work looks like. You have about 60 percent of the Fortune 500 is your clients using software and even now agents to help figure out efficiencies within their orgs. I'm curious, what do you see in 2030, the future of work from an employee standpoint and employer standpoint looking like?

Aneel Bhusri (3:08)

Yeah, I don't think anybody has a crystal ball. We actually have a project called HR 2030 to try to figure out what organizations are going to look like. But there's never been a more profound change in technology than AI. I've never seen like it.

I'm old enough that I've seen the mainframe, the client server, web, cloud, but AI is different. AI has the promise of replacing how humans think and act, and so it's pretty profound. We're going to live in a world of humans and agents, and they're going to have to co-exist. And I'm optimistic we're going to find a path where it's mutually beneficial as opposed to just agentec technology replacing humans, but it's still to be determined.

Alyson Shontell (3:51)

So a lot of this is playing out, but based on what you're seeing and how you're seeing companies adopting the agents you're putting out, do you think organizations will be as big? Do you think job functions will change drastically? What are you thinking there?

Aneel Bhusri (4:04)

I do think job functions are going to change.

Agents are effectively role-based technologies that you can look at a specific job and say the agent can do that equally well as a human. And that to me is both exciting and a little bit scary. The more rote, repeatable work that doesn't require a lot of human judgment, that will be replaced by agents. And I think that that's already happening across the board. The ability to analyze an amazing amount of data in a short amount of time and come up with predictions at a much faster pace than humans, yeah, that's what AI is really good at. The question is how far it goes. What I see from startups is that they're designing their business models around AI. Large companies are trying to figure out how to put AI into their existing business model. And I think there's a lot to learn from the startups and what an organization in the future looks like. To me, a lot of the great talent going forward from the human perspective are people that really know how to use AI, as opposed to be replaced by it, figure out how to use it. And I see that in our own company.