Dive Brief:
- Workday is banking on AI adoption to expand its enterprise footprint, company executives said Tuesday, during a Q3 2026 earnings call. The cloud-based software provider saw revenues increase nearly 13% year over year to $2.4 billion for the three months ending Oct. 31.
- Three-quarters of the company’s new sales and more than one-third of sales to existing customers included AI in Q3, according to Workday Director and CEO Carl Eschenbach. “We're going all in on AI,” Eschenbach said. “We have the data, we have the context of the data, and we're built in the business workflow.”
- Workday raced to add AI capabilities to its portfolio in the last several months through three acquisitions. The company signed an agreement to purchase AI agent integration platform Pipedream and completed its acquisition of AI user interface Sana in November. The prior month, Workday closed on a deal to acquire AI-powered hiring agent Paradox.
Dive Insight:
Incumbent software vendors and their channel partners are holding their ground as customers look to integrate generative AI across business functions.
Workday bolstered its technical capabilities and its partner ecosystem in an effort to ward off competition from nimble startups touting agentic solutions and vibe coding capabilities.
Channel partners accounted for more than one-fifth of net new contract value Workday added to its books in Q3, according to Eschenbach. “It's not just our customers who are saying they believe in our platform, it's partners,” he said.
The company activated a partner network for its Workday Go payroll system and added HR and finance operations management agents to the platform in November. The move strengthened ties between Workday’s AI and partner strategies.
“We've combined the power of enterprise-grade HR, payroll and AI with one predictable price, one trusted partner ecosystem and one of the simplest deployment experiences in the market,” Max Wessel, SVP of growth at Workday, said in the announcement.
The integration strategy and acquisition bonanza have helped Workday keep AI upstarts at bay.
“Our customers, while maybe they're enamored with these point solutions, they're ultimately coming back to the vendors they trust, who have been in their infrastructure for a long time,” Eschenbach said. “The narrative we've been hearing in the last couple of quarters is changing.”
