Workday is in a race to redefine vertical SaaS, says its CTO. How's it going?

AI is forcing massive, rapid change on established enterprise application vendors, and their ability to survive this disruption depends on several factors. Will their value proposition remain competitive? Can they change fast enough? And how will they bring their customers with them as they evolve? At Workday Rising EMEA in November I caught up with Peter Bailis, Workday's CTO, and our conversation touched on several aspects of the vendor's response to these factors.

One element of what Workday sees as its unique value proposition helped persuade Bailis to make the leap from a pivotal role at Google Cloud to join Workday nine months ago. Its single data model contrasted with his experience at Google, as he explains:

I was coming from the data space. I ran the coding models and Gen AI and assistance for the data services at Google Cloud. In a [hyperscaler] cloud environment, every customer ...