Workday, Inc.

Workday, Inc. is an American enterprise cloud applications company that provides AI-powered human capital management, financial management, spend management, and planning software to more than 11,500 organizations and over 75 million users under contract, generating $9.55 billion in revenue in fiscal 2026. Founded in 2005 by David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri — veterans of PeopleSoft who had just lived through Oracle's hostile takeover of their former company — Workday was built from the ground up as a cloud-native alternative to on-premise ERP suites, and it has since become one of the two dominant platforms in cloud HCM alongside SAP SuccessFactors, with more than 65% of the Fortune 500 among its customers.

This is a story about a franchise in transition. Workday enters fiscal 2027 with a co-founder back in the CEO seat, a $28 billion subscription backlog, and a conviction that the 80-million-user data moat it has built over two decades positions it to become the system of record for enterprise AI agents. But the stock trades near $135 — roughly half its 52-week high of $250 — reflecting a market that is unsure whether AI will strengthen Workday's competitive position or erode it. The company's core subscription business is a genuine compounder: 97% gross revenue retention, 12–13% guided subscription revenue growth, and free cash flow approaching $3 billion annually. The question is whether the AI investments of the last eighteen months — nearly $2.2 billion in acquisitions alone — will re-accelerate that growth algorithm or simply defend it. The file turns on whether Workday can translate its customer-relationship depth and transaction-scale data into durable AI economics before AI-native competitors and generic large-language-model tools chip away at the rationale for an integrated suite.