AI: opportunity instead of threat

Laura Cepeda, E3 Magazine: How does Workday intend to compete with other ERP giants such as SAP?

Rob Enslin, WorkdayWe don't see competition the way most people think we see it. We want to change the conversation with customers to prepare them for what AI will bring them and to make sure they understand how fast change is happening today and that we enable that speed of change. That's our focus. That is our dream.

Cepeda: Can you explain this in more detail?

EnslinThe biggest competitive factor, regardless of who the competitor is, will be talent. The combination of AI-savvy people and experienced people is a really interesting question. AI-savvy people approach problems very differently. So the companies that do that have a clear advantage because they are able to attract world-class artificial intelligence talent. And we look at what we think we have: Peter Bailis and Garrit Kazmaier and Joel Hellermark and so on. We think that level of talent is what's going to make the big difference in the competitive world.

Cepeda: Some people find it a bit scary what AI can currently do. I think we should wait and see how it develops. What do you think?

Enslin: I don't find that frightening. Every big change finds its rhythm. And I keep coming back to the analogy that this is us. We forget that the smartphone is not even 20 years old. The iPhone came onto the market in 2007. So it's basically 18 years old.

Laura Cepeda with Rob Enslin at Workday Rising in Barcelona in November 2025.

And how has it changed us? Look at the e-commerce platforms, even in South Africa. With home delivery. Can you imagine if the pandemic had happened in 2005? We didn't have smartphones yet and distribution was through people and physical warehouses. So technological advances have really helped to solve unique problems. And I believe it will continue to do so in the future.

I think governments need to figure out how to help with that because it's a level playing field with a fair player. It's much more even than with other technologies. I always think back to my time at Google when Sergey Brin and Larry Page used to say that there's someone in the Philippines who has exactly the same information as the professor at Stanford. The quality of the exchange of this information is the same. So that's another way of creating a level playing field that can massively advance humanity in a really positive way.

Cepeda: What do you say to people who focus more on the disadvantages of AI?

EnslinYes. I don't want to say anything about Europe. I find that the naysayers are always the loudest, don't they? The negative aspects always seem to be at the forefront, even if they only make up a small percentage. But I think our job is to educate and provide the technology in a trustworthy and safe way so that people have confidence in what we're doing.

And as software companies, we all need to do this in a very trustworthy way. There's no way this technology is going to go backwards. In many ways, this technology will force companies to adopt it. Because if they don't, they will be driven out of the market. Their competitors will destroy them in the market. With this technology, there really will be winners and losers. And it's much more about people than ever before. So when you think about the human-centered behavior of helping someone have a better experience in the workplace, it makes the work more meaningful.

Cepeda: How can you ensure that the AI always works? That there are never any malfunctions or hallucinations?

EnslinEvery client within Workday, every field within Workday is exactly the same. We know exactly what every bit of every client's data is. So there's zero hallucination in the data that we have. And when we combine the AI stuff with external data, we have to validate it to make sure that the data matches the hallucinations.

Then we need audit logs that the customer can validate themselves and say: Okay, if I make a hiring decision and these are the decisions, what were the criteria? What were the decisions? How did I come to this decision? So we've actually logged this audit so that the customer can see it for themselves. So we make sure that we don't have hallucinations. We don't publish thousands of workflows or agents. We publish the ones that have the biggest business impact for our customers.