Workday Rising 25 - the CIO view on balancing innovation with AI control

For CIOs, managing a growing number of AI agents demands as much attention to oversight and cultural change as it does to technical innovation.

At Workday Rising 25, speakers included Workday's Chief Information Officer Rani Johnson, Chief Technology Officer Peter Bailis, and SVP Gabe Monroy, alongside customer voices from Accenture's Penelope Prett, Google's Richard McColl, and Pfizer's William Compton. Together, they offered practical lessons on how CIOs can balance innovation with control as AI becomes embedded in day-to-day operations.

From applications to intelligent platforms

Peter Bailis, Workday's Chief Technology Officer, framed the transformation this way:

We're seeing massive transformation in the IT stack, driven by AI, and for the CIO community, we're feeling it the most.

The shift, he explained, moves beyond traditional application selection:

The mandate is shifting from finding the best applications to go in each box in a stack to ...