Workday, Inc. (WDAY) Q2 2027 Earnings Call Transcript

Welcome to Workday's second quarter fiscal year 2027 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will conduct a question and answer session towards the end of the call. During the Q&A session, please limit your questions to one. I will now hand it over to Justin Furby, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Welcome to Workday's second quarter fiscal 2027 earnings conference call. On the call, we have Anil Bushry, our CEO, Garrett Katzmeyer, our President, Product and Technology, Gabe Munroy, our Chief Technology Officer, Rob Enflin, our President and Chief Commercial Officer, and Zane Rowe, our CFO. Following prepared remarks, we will take questions. Our press release was issued after close of the market and is posted on our website, where this call is being simultaneously webcast. Before we get started, we want to emphasize that some of our statements on this call, particularly our guidance, are based on the information we have as of today and include forward-looking statements regarding our financial results, applications and solutions, customer demand, operations, and other matters. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to the press release and the risk factors in documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our fiscal 2026 annual report on Form 10-K for additional information on risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such statements. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Workday's performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. You can find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations with comparable gap results, in our earnings press release, in our investor presentation, and on the investor relations page of our website. The webcast replay of this call will be available for the next 90 days on our company website under the investor relations link. Additionally, the prepared remarks of this call and our quarterly investor presentation will be posted on our investor relations website following this call. Our third quarter fiscal 2027 quiet period begins on October 15, 2026. Unless otherwise stated, all financial comparisons in this call will be to our results for the comparable period of our fiscal 2026. With that, I'll pass the call to Anil.

Thanks, Justin, and thanks everyone for joining us today. It's hard to believe I've been back in the CEO seat for six months. Time flies when we're having fun, and I'm having a lot of fun. This is a fun time to be back in the tech industry. Q2 was another strong quarter, and AI played an increasingly bigger role. AI products alone drove more than $100 million of new ACV, which accounted for more than 25% of all new ACV closed in the quarter. And it's starting to lift our core business, too, including our win rates. We had commercial success with AI in the quarter, including strong early returns with FlexCredits, and we expect this to accelerate going forward. But what I'm watching more closely is adoption. Today, more than 5,500 customers are using one or more of our organic agents. That's up more than 35% from last quarter. As we continue to build organic agents on Workday, we're also deeply integrating acquired agents like those from Paradox, Hired Score, and Evisort into our platform. And we've signed some of the world's largest brands to our Light Us program, which gives strategic customers SANA Enterprise free for a year. We've rolled it out to our own workmates last month, and they're hooked. I expect these customers will be too, and we know that if we deliver the value, modernization will follow. After two strong back-to-back quarters, I really like the momentum we have going into the second half of the year. Garrett and our product and technology teams have our innovation engine humming again. While Rob and his team have done a phenomenal job building pipeline that will drive more new business. Today we'll cover the numbers shortly, including the impact of AI adoption on our outlook for the second half and fiscal year 28. I spent much of the past six months with customers. Last quarter I told you I hadn't met a single customer looking to replace Workday with something they're building internally or buying from a startup. A quarter later, that hasn't changed. The reason is the deterministic rails I've talked about before. Our agents are lawful. They work inside the permissions, policies, and business processes a company already runs on. That's why our customers can trust them with the work that matters and it's why we're seeing our organic agents really take off this year. One of those customers is BMO, a top 10 bank in North America. They piloted self-service agent with 500 employees in May and successfully rolled it out to all 55,000 employees in June. SSA gives BMO employees and managers a personal, intuitive way to get HR questions answered and work done faster and easier. And because it's native to Workday, the agent understands employee permissions and which HR policies apply to them. That built-in context is exactly what makes this a responsible and scalable AI deployment for BMO. BMO is one of many. More customers are moving from pilots to production with our agents. But we know that no one company will build every agent. The future will be open and CIOs need a trusted platform to connect it all. We're building for that world with Data Cloud and Developer Agent. Data Cloud lets customers use their Workday data alongside the other systems they run on without copying or moving it. Customers see the value and demand is building. Developer Agent, which we announced at DevCon in June, makes it dramatically faster and easier for developers to build on Workday using natural language. It's one of the innovations I'm most excited about. I'll add just one thing, because I don't think it's fully understood. Workday is not just an enterprise apps company. We're an enterprise context platform, and we were built that way from the start. Agency context to do anything useful. Who reports to whom, what the policies are, how money moves. So whether a customer runs our agents or builds their own on top of Workday, we win either way. Gabe will go deeper on this shortly. Finally, Rising is coming to Las Vegas October 12th through the 15th. I have to tell you, Garrett and his team have walked me through our rising announcements, and I was blown away by how much innovation we have to show, not slides. Live demos and customers talking about the work our agents are already doing inside their businesses. That's the proof I care about most. We'll also be hosting our financial analyst day at Rising, and I hope to see you all there. To close, as many of you know, I'm an unabashed optimist, but I'm not leaning on optimism here. We're shipping AI products. Our customers are adopting them rapidly. And it's happening across the board, from the agents we've built ourselves to the ones we've acquired. This is Workday's moment, and I've never felt better about where we're headed. With that, I'll hand it to my Vulcan mind-meld friend, Gareth.

Thanks, Anil, and hello, everyone. In Q2, once again, we have accelerated our roadmap and added new AI capabilities across our platform. All of it builds on our unique world model of work, and we keep moving more agents into production at scale. So let me put this into numbers for you. Nearly $600 million in ARR from our AI SKUs, and that is up more than 200% year-over-year and up over 20% from last quarter. Here is what this looks like in practice. In recruiting, more than 30 million candidates interacted with our talent acquisition agent, and AI automatically scheduled more than 8 million interviews last quarter alone in functions like procurement and legal workday contract intelligence agent drove nearly 70% year-over-year growth in agreements processed and in HR case resolution more than 100 customers moved sana self-service agent into production last month since February we have nearly doubled AI tools and skills in the agent that run in production so now let's talk about three key innovation highlights from last quarter sana adaptive decision intelligence and our deployment and adoption agents let's talk about sana enterprise first sana enterprise is our ai workbench for hr finance and it to build orchestrate and run ai across the entire enterprise in q2 we have shipped 23 new capabilities in sana that open up what customers can do with it For example, our brand new SANA Agent Builder lets any user create an agent in natural language and then run it on a schedule or trigger it on a business event. Every one of those agents runs in a secure sandbox. We now have one shared agent task inbox in SANA where work is managed in one place, human or AI. And we have added custom MCP connectors so SANA can connect to any third-party application out there. This innovation, it's already changing AI adoption inside and outside of Workday. Here is what we have done. We rolled out Sana Enterprise internally on August 4th and already have 12,000 active users on it. These workmates have built 22,000 custom agents in three weeks alone. Now this is what AI looks like when it's embedded into real work. We have also brought Workday Learning and Sana Learn together into one product. It is in GA now with a learning admin agent, AI-based course generation, an AI tutor for self-paced learning, and MCP support as part of our open platform. And the results are clear. In Sana, monthly active users grew almost 190% year-over-year, and 78% of all published courses were created with AI. And we're taking the next major step of Sana for Workday. As we have shared in the past, Sana is our vision for an AI-driven work experience across Workday and beyond. With our unique meta-driven platform, we can now unlock all Workday processes through generative UI in Sana. So by Workday rising in October, Sana's conversational AI experience will be the default home screen for Workday. The second big AI innovation is decision intelligence as you know frontier models are good at analyzing data but they sit on the sidelines of the operational system they are detached from business semantics they are working off downloaded spreadsheets and they are unable to close the loop back to work actually happens adaptive decision intelligence is different it is our ai agents for analytics and planning that runs analysis generates plans and takes governed action directly inside workday always under our security model audit rails and governance rules on July 31st adaptive decision intelligence entered into GA and this was one of the fastest products we have ever delivered from concepts to general availability in four months and it's built organically within Workday here is what we have shipped all AI agent-based. Live analysis of plan data, scenario modeling, sensitivity analysis, regression models, version comparison, and AI recommendations that you can submit as govern plan updates with approval, audit trails, and staleness detection. And as of today, 170 customers have already purchased it. And one EA customer told us it gives finance teams answers they can actually defend. And we're not stopping here. We just kicked off the early adopter program connecting adaptive decision intelligence directly into workday finance to give it access to journal lines, plan data, and to our accounting center. Our customers can now tie AI to financial outcomes with transaction level evidence. And next, we're going to move this to workforce analytics, connecting live people data with financial decisions in one AI agent experience. And our third AI highlight for this quarter is deployment and adoption agent. Deployment agent momentum has been dynamite. As of today, we have more than 4,600 customers, almost 24,000 users, and query volume surging nearly 500% in Q2. Mohegan Gaming is now live, and Mohegan says the downstream impact is priceless. Deployment agent deploys updates so rapidly that employees remain focused on their core business. And our long-term target is to reduce deployment task time with this agent by 80 to 90 percent. And once customers are live, Adoption Agent helps keeping them ahead of what's new. It surfaces the releases that matter and recommends the next step for their environment. Adoption Agent entered GA just last week. We had more than 200 customers signed on in the first three days alone, with 20,000 release notes evaluated and achieved a 94% customer satisfaction rate. One customer, Solution Health, used Adoption Agent on their latest release. They ran it across every functional area, and they have cut that release time down by 70%. And here is why this matters so much. faster deployments, faster adoption, and a lower cost to serve are fueling Workday Go's momentum in the medium enterprise. Workday Go's win rates and deal volume are both increasing in Q2. And here is one more note for you. Travel Agent and Sana for ITSM have both moved into early adopter with the first customers already onboarded. And the bottom line of this is this. The world model of work is not a thesis. It is in production, it is compounding, and you can see it in the numbers. A key part of this vision is our open platform strategy, unlocking the power of Workday for our customers and for the entire ecosystem around us. I'm going to pass it to our very own Gabe Monroy, Workday CTO and the leader of our technology platform to share our progress here. Gabe, take it away.

Thanks, Garrett. it's good to be here building on what anil said it's almost as though workday was built for ai 20 years ago having one data model one security model one version for every customer from the start is an incredible advantage and it's a big reason why i came to workday over the last several years we modernized that foundation to handle the complexity of running ai at scale we built tools that can query workday using industry standard analytics solutions and an mcp layer so ai models can talk to our APIs in natural language. But access is only half of it. The stakes are different in the world of people and money. That's why we've updated our security model and built the agent system of record so our agents act with the same permissions, rules, and controls our customers already trust. An agent isn't just a model. It's identity, permissions, guardrails, logs, and governance all working together. That's what separates a lawless agent from a lawful one. A lawless agent will attempt to take action on its own. A lawful agent takes action because the system allows it. Inside Workday's deterministic rails, every step is checked against the security model, the business process framework, and the compliance logic before it runs. Now, in Q2, we advance our platform strategy in three ways, making it more open, extensible, and lawful. Starting with being open, CIOs aren't going to settle for a single rigid AI stack, so we built Workday with three paths in. Developers building custom agents on their own AI stacks need safe, governed access to Workday, both for querying data and for taking action. Data Cloud gives external agents and partners like Snowflake, AWS, and Google zero copy access to HR and finance data. In Q2, we closed six deals with all customers choosing our premium Data Cloud Pro Edition. Data Cloud remains on track for GA in Q3. And at DevCon, we launched agent-ready tools over MCP. These agent APIs allow third-party agents on any stack to safely get work done inside Workday, like updating an employee record or approving an invoice without breaking corporate rules. Agent-ready tools are now available to early adopters through Workday Extend Pro with GA and Q3. Today, more than 1,600 customers use Workday across third-party services like Teams and Slack, as well as Copilot and Gemini, which we added in Q1. Over 100 of those customers are already leveraging self-service agent directly in the tools they use every day whether a manager approves spend or logs and expense right in chat the underlying policy checks and compliance stay securely anchored inside Workday and some works simply outgrows a chat bubble travel and IT service management which Garrett mentioned earlier those need a canvas that work lands in Sanaa where we own both the reasoning engine and the experience. Whether a customer uses their own agent, uses our agents with their own front door, or sauna, we meet them wherever they work. And because all of it runs through flex credits, we monetize every action happening on our rails, regardless of the path. In Q2, custom apps built on Workday X10 grew over 90% year over year, even when building required specialized engineers. Our new developer agent removes that bottleneck. Now, builders can generate policy-compliant workflows using plain language directly inside tools like Cursor, Codex, and Cloud Code. This takes development time from weeks to minutes and opens up the platform to all builders. Customer uptake was instant. Developers have built more than 3,000 custom apps and agents since DevCon. As we expand these plain language tools across our user base, we fundamentally shift our business model. You don't have to be an engineer to build on Workday. Finally, none of this matters if the transactions are not lawful. In Q2, we launched Agent Passport. It gives security teams a verified, auditable record that an agent was tested against critical risks before it deployed and is monitored after. Cisco joined as a launch partner, bringing Cisco AI Defense to test agents against leading standards and protect them in production. We'll add more security partners and attestation stamps in coming months, giving CISOs the confidence required to route higher value work through Workday. In short, our customers can work where they want, build in plain language, and trust every execution. With that, I'll hand it to Rob.

Thanks, Gabe, and hello everyone. Our customers trust Workday with the most important parts of their business, and we see it in the field every day. Companies on legacy HCM and ERP systems are realizing they can't get value from AI without modernizing their core. They want one platform they can trust with security and reliability, which is a big driver behind the demand for SANA enterprise. AI is amplifying the value of the software stack customers already trust you can see those tailwinds in our q2 results with more than 65 of the fortune 500 running on workday we continue to bring on some of the world's leading brands in q2 we form new relationships with companies such as kpmg us dunkska bunk bwx technologies and guide house in medium enterprise as you heard from garrett Workday Go is taking off. Customer volume increased more than five times over Q1. Across large and medium enterprises, AI is a key reason companies are modernizing their core on Workday. In fact, over half of our net new wins in Q2 signed up for one or more AI solutions. And we're seeing even faster AI adoption across our base. As customers leverage our unmatched HR and finance context to truly unlock the value of AI in the enterprise. Genesis is using our new financial audit agent. The chief accounting officer described it as the first step toward the dream of getting a touchless audit. Seminole Hard Rock Services is using payroll agents to automate complex tax and compliance calculations for 28,000 employees. In Carlisle Investment, one of our first 20 customers back in 2007, added Sana Enterprise to power an AI layer over the employee experience. This boils on the other AI agents they recently added, including recruiting, contract intelligence, and planning. Sana Enterprise had an exceptional launch in Q2. New customers included AstraZeneca, Novartis, Caterpillar, and Delivery Hero Group. Since we combine SANA Learn with our core learning management system, we've seen a sizable jump in our overall learning business, which more than tripled quarter over quarter. Adaptive decision intelligence helped drive strong performance across the entire planning business, and our ecosystem is moving fast with it. Partners have helped build more than 100 industry-specific use cases in a little over a month. In late May, we made SANA for Workday and SANA self-service available to all our customers on our AI terms of service. That drove a surge in the number of customers that have signed a universal main service agreement, which gives them access to our agents and our AI capabilities. That strategy clearly worked. More than half of our customer base has already migrated to the UMSA, and that momentum is accelerating. Our focus now shifts to driving adoption through FlexCredits. We've already signed 200 customers this quarter, and we expect to significantly grow that number in the second half as R2 adds more GA agents and expands our platform and data cloud capabilities. We continue to see strong execution across the globe. North America, our largest market, had an exceptional quarter, anchored by U.S. large enterprise and another strong quarter in Canada. EMEA drove solid growth, a strong performance in France, Germany and the Nordics. AI now accounts for nearly one-third of new ACV in EMEA. Japan also had a standout quarter, further proof that our continued investment day is paying off. I'm proud of the results our teams delivered across the business in Q2. Let me close where I started, with trust. For more than 20 years, organizations have trusted Workday with their most critical work and now with their AI. That's a durable advantage, and it sets us up for an even stronger second half.

Now over to Zane. Thanks, Rob. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Building on Rob's remarks, our second quarter results reflect the continued strength of our platform as organizations rely on Workday to power their most critical HR and finance operations. Subscription revenue in Q2 was 2.471 billion dollars up 14 percent. Professional services revenue was 178 million dollars resulting in total revenue of 2.649 billion growth of 13 percent. Looking at our results by geography, U.S. revenue totaled $1.97 billion, an increase of 12%, while international revenue was $682 million, up 17%, benefiting from stronger performance over the last few quarters. Turning to backlog, 12-month subscription revenue backlog, or CRPO, ended the quarter at $9.03 billion, an increase of 14.2%. Growth was again fueled by expansion within our existing customer base, with AI increasingly a driver, alongside a steady contribution from new logos. Total subscription revenue backlog ended Q2 at $27.4 billion, up 8% from a year ago. The year-over-year growth rate was impacted by a continued mix shift towards customer-based bookings versus net new, and the mix of industries that drove our net new bookings. Gross revenue retention remained strong at 97% for the quarter, and net expansion from existing customers once again led to about 60% of our subscription revenue growth. Non-GAAP operating income was $824 million for the quarter, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 31.1%, driven by a combination of revenue outperformance and ongoing cost discipline. Our GAAP results in the quarter included a $374 million non-recurring tax benefit related to an internal IP transfer. Operating cash flow totaled $520 million in the quarter, and free cash flow was $460 million. The year-over-year decline was impacted by the timing of the payroll calendar, which had an additional payroll run this Q2. We repurchased $1.3 billion of shares during the quarter, completing the $5 billion repurchase plan that we discussed at our Financial Analyst Day last September, six months ahead of our target. Buybacks will continue to be an important part of our capital allocation philosophy, and our Board has recently approved a $4 billion open-ended share repurchase program. We ended the quarter with cash and marketable securities of $3.4 billion. dollars. Our headcount as of quarter end stood at 20,896 workmates around the globe. Turning to our outlook, we are pleased with our first half results and we now expect FY27 subscription revenue of 9.94 to 9.95 billion dollars, growth of 13 percent. For the third quarter, we expect subscription revenue of approximately 2.515 billion dollars, growth of 12%. We expect Q3 CRPO growth of 11 to 12%. We lapped the Paradox acquisition in the third quarter, which added over a point to last year's Q3 CRPO growth. For Q3, we expect professional services revenue of $175 million, and for the full year, we expect $710 million. We continue to prioritize investment in AI alongside strategic investments in the core, while driving efficiencies across the business. With that, we're increasing our FY27 non-GAAP operating margin guidance to 31%. For the third quarter, we expect a non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 30%. We expect to continue expanding margins while positioning ourselves for future growth. We expect Q3 GAAP operating margin to be approximately 18 percentage points lower than our non-GAAP operating margin. and the full-year FY27 GAAP operating margin to be approximately 18 to 19 points lower. Our FY27 non-GAAP tax rate estimate remains 19%. We are maintaining our FY27 operating cash flow outlook of $3.45 billion, and we continue to expect FY27 capital expenditures of approximately $270 million, dollars resulting in free cash flow of 3.18 billion dollars growth of 15 percent as our q2 progress demonstrates embedding ai across workday's platform provides a significant opportunity to drive customer value while we're still in the early innings demand for our agentic portfolio is building we're focused on driving discovery and adoption through initiatives like our lighthouse program, which we believe will benefit subscription revenue growth over time, and we continue to execute against a framework that delivers both top-line growth and margin expansion. With that in mind, and ahead of our upcoming Financial Analyst Day, I'd like to provide some early context for how we're thinking about next year. Our current target for FY28 subscription revenue growth is consistent with our expected second half FY27 growth rate of approximately 11%. We also see potential upside across new products, including SANA Enterprise, Workday Extend with Datacloud, and our AI agents, all of which are seeing great early demand. In addition, we expect our non-GAAP operating margin to expand by at least two percentage points next year. We're encouraged by the significant opportunity ahead to continue to deliver long-term earnings and free cash flow growth. We look forward to diving deeper into our platform innovation at our Financial Analyst Day on October 13th in Las Vegas, and we hope to see many of you there. With that, I'll turn it back over to the operator to begin Q&A.

Thank you, and we'll now begin the question and answer session. If you have dialed in and would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star 1 a second time. If you're called upon to ask your question and are listening via speakerphone on your device, please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. To be able to take as many questions as possible, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question. Again, it is star 1 to join the queue. And our first question comes from the line of Gabriella Borges with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks so much for taking the question. Zane, I really appreciate this early look into growth rates exiting to age 27 and then the longer-term upside potential. The question I want to ask about this is twofold. One is, tell us a little bit about how you're thinking about monetization for headless, And the second is how do you as an executive team think about the risk that some of the upside opportunities end up coming as a tradeoff between some of the core? What I mean by that is do customers end up essentially negotiating harder on the core products or exerting pricing pressure on the core products such that you end up at a similar place even when adding new functionality? So maybe just those pieces together would appreciate your thoughts.

Yeah, so I'll take the first part. On the headless transactions, we are pretty much indifferent whether, you know, somebody uses from a profitability perspective, I think it will show in a revenue perspective, whether a company buys our agent, uses our APIs, which we get to monetize, or goes through data cloud, which we get to monetize. So, or, you know, the other option is to build their own agents using Workday Xtend AI. So we feel like we're pretty covered in all ways that AI gets used, and it doesn't take away any opportunities. If anything, it grows our market opportunity where it has been before. Second part, I'll probably ask Rob to weigh in. What I actually see, Gabrielle, is that customers are making five-year, seven-year decisions on new platforms, platforms, and AI is a huge decision point for them, and if anything, it's impacting our win rates on the platform because we're viewed as the much stronger player in terms of an AI vision and AI agents than our legacy competitors that we all know so well.

Yeah, and Gabriel, from my side, I don't see compression on the call. What I see is customers starting with the AI discussion and wanting us to be the AI platform for Gentix on HCM and on finance, and I think that's driving a broader conversation and a much broader conversation to the value we offer. You can see it actually in the amount of uptake on the agents that we started to announce and bring to the fore, where customers, this is where they actually want to see where HR is going and where finance is going in the future.

Yeah, and just to add to what Rob said, you know, our competitors don't have one data model across their multiple versions of their applications you know these legacy companies might have six or seven different versions and as a result they can't aggregate the data model to drive the the the AI models and so we are just way ahead of where they can be not just where they are now but where they can ever be from from that AI perspective in terms of driving driving outcomes using AI hey Gabrielle I'll just add you know the early look into FY 28 it's just to give you a target and how we're thinking about it.

As you can tell, we have a number of initiatives in place, and we're very enthused by what we're seeing as early indicators in our AI products. Not all of that has been factored into our FY28 outlook. So we're, as you can tell, very enthused on the upside there, but I just wanted to, ahead of financial analyst day, give you at least a baseline to let you see how we're thinking about it.

And our next question comes from the line of Michael Turin with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.

Hey, great. Thanks. I appreciate you taking the question. A lot's changed over software over the past couple of months. We've seen the topic shift to the rise of open source, open weight models, and signs of cooperation between the frontier labs and existing vendors. And Neil, I'm curious where Workday fits within those discussions, if any of that, if any of those shifts your view on where to focus. And I want to also give you a chance to respond to just some of the recent headlines around private equity interest, given we've all been fielding a number of questions there as well. Much appreciated. Thank you.

I obviously can't comment on the latter. On the former, we're going to do what's in the best interest of our customers. And so I'm going to ask Garrett to talk about how we think about the different models. And, you know, we work with all of them, but we're trying to do what's best for our customers, both from a performance but also from a cost perspective.

As Anil has said, we are really focused on driving the right ROI and economics for our customers. So as of today already, we deploy a large set of models for multiple vendors. We have small models, open-weight models, and large frontier models, all in the set of models that we use to build our AI systems and agents with. And quite frankly speaking, we are pretty excited about open-weight models. So they open up new opportunities for us for having own reinforcement learning, building on adapters over them, they give us a much stronger optionality when you think about international and sovereignty. So it's a core tenant, you know, for us, as Anil has said, to be model agnostic. And because of the different characteristics already, we get great benefit from them. And now as the benchmarks are getting closer, we have signed the Open Weights initiative as well as other companies. We truly see, you know, a real big upside, you know, for us and our customers to drive better ROI out of our AI investment. And last comment, we also started our own research foundation inside of Workday. So we have an own research lab, which specifically actually focuses on getting high-accuracy HR and finance AI systems in place. And one of the things that this team is doing right now is actively actually exploring opportunities for us to not only use open weight models, but truly to specialize them to our purposes and see what lift we get out of that.

And our next question comes from the line of Kirk Matern with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Yeah, thanks very much for taking the question. I think this is probably for Neil or Rob. Obviously, we hear the enthusiasm around the early progress on AI. I was just kind of curious if you can give us an idea. Is AI crowding out some of your other products at this point in time, meaning when you go in and talk to a customer, you obviously want to talk about AI. You obviously want to get AI into their hands. Does that mean sometimes your salespeople have to put something they might have been thinking about a year ago on the shelf for now? And the reason I ask that is because your tone and your enthusiasm is obviously very apparent. But, you know, I look at CRPO just for a proxy. That's more or less in line. And Zane gave a guide for early guide. Nonetheless, for next year, that seems more or less in line with where people were kind of forecasting. So it seems more substituted than incremental. incremental. So I was just wondering, is there something from just a go-to-market perspective where there's a purposeful push with AI, whereas we're not going to try to load everything into every customer right now? Let's get them successful with AI, even though that might mean you're not seeing as much incremental benefit. I hope that makes sense.

Yeah, I'll start. Thank you for the question, Kirk. So first of all, you're right in that it's early days. The difference on these agents versus traditional applications they iterate and become better so much faster so so I'm very optimistic that we're going to see you know ramping up usage of these agents faster than we ever saw of our of our apps and we're also new to the flex credit consumption model and you know that's a delayed gratitude delayed gratification model that that is frankly newer to Workday Again, very optimistic. We're seeing great early signs, but I think that's one of the reasons for cautious optimism going into next year because we are aggressively moving towards a hybrid model between subscription and this consumption model. I don't actually see it as crowding out. I actually see it as, you know, customers, new customers choosing Workday because of our authentic strategy. Existing customers, they have an AI budget, and now we have products that actually fit in that AI budget, which is a big win for us. But, again, a lot of these new AI products are consumption-based, so we won't see the impact from the revenue until, you know, until months or a year down the road. So, Rob, what do you want to add to that?

Yeah, I would add there's a lot of excitement around AI, but our focus has really been about getting adoption. And when you look at bringing an agent, you've got to harden them, so you've got to get them adopted. The more customers that go through early access, the more customers that are adopting these products just get better really fast. And so that's how our mojo has been around how do we get adoption fast. The more customers we have access to our agents, the more they're using those agents, and that's how we're measuring them and moving the company in that direction. And I think you can actually see it in the amount of UMSAs we've signed. Like our UMSAs have really started to take off. Customers really want that. They need to have the UMSA to actually get into the AI world. And then you link that to the data play and the Xtend Pro and what you're doing with the developer agent. As Anil says, this is a lag in it, but our conversations are really good. And it's in almost every conversation, And irrespective of the level of customer I'm speaking to, whether it's a C-level executive or the HCM team or the finance team, people really start to understand that Workday has really entered the Gentic world in a big way.

Hey, Kirk, and just to add to that, you know, as we mentioned, we've got, you know, 5,500 customers using our organic agents and, you know, just over 200, I think, that have actually signed up, you know, for flex credit. So that's the delay that Anil's alluding to, and that's been factored into our CRPO guide as well as our revenue guide for the remainder of this year, but also our cautious optimism heading into FY28 and beyond.

And our next question comes from the line of John DeFucci with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open.

Thank you. Thanks for taking my question. My question, I think, is for Anil, Garrett, and maybe Gabe. Listen, Workday's approach to AI seems, at least to me, seems sincere and, frankly, more thoughtful than some of your peers. But it's also more pragmatic. In other words, it makes sense. And my understanding, simply, is AI is going to be part of everything you do, which, again, sounds simple, but also an immense task and, frankly, the right move. It sounds like you're certainly on the way from your prepared remarks, but how much effort do you think it takes to accomplish that? And, of course, it's a continuous effort, but when do you think you'll get to the point where you can say, we've arrived as an AI platform? Is that going to take years? Or I'm just curious what you think about that.

I'll start. And I think both Garrett and Gabe should weigh in. And we are trying to be very thoughtful in the way that we're building our agentic solutions. They're not meant to solve simple problems. Anybody can solve the simple problems. When I look at what we're doing with the self-service agent, it's really hard. What we're doing with the financial audit agent is really hard. But by building these agents and coming out the other end, they add tremendous value to our customers. And, frankly, from a competitive perspective, they're really, really hard for anybody to compete with because they're so deeply embedded in the bowels of Workday. I don't know when we arrive. I think we're arriving now, and I think it just gets better over the next couple years. But it's all about adoption and customer success. We have to have agents that have real ROI, and that's been the lens we've been looking at it since I came back. We had a lot more agents when I came back. We killed a lot, or we rolled them into bigger agents. And the ones that we have right now, I'm very optimistic. They're all very meaningful to our customers. But let's have Garrett and Gabe add to that.

Yeah, I had a couple of points on the top of the stack, if you will, and then Gabe on the platform side. But to give you a few concrete points on what are the key milestones that we're looking at that we truly believe are landmark moments for Workday, as well as for the industry of moving into the AI era and enterprise SaaS. And one of the biggest ones for us is how work is going to change in the work experience with SANA. You heard in the prepared remarks that SANA is going to be the default home screen for Workday coming rising this year. Rob spoke about the Lighthouse program with SANA Enterprise, and I have shared how it has changed the world of work inside Workday already. with 24,000 agents being built in just three weeks. You know, we really see this, you know, coming, this rising as a key moment because the face of SAS and how work happens is going to fundamentally change. And frankly, we believe it's a stark difference to what that work experience is than what you get from generic jet co-pilots because they're deeply tethered into the system of action and the system of work. Secondly, you heard, you know, that our agents are making a lot of progress. And when we say agents, we really mean AI systems that automate large parts of the value chains in HR and finance. We just put decision intelligence into GA, which is truly a reimagination of how you, you know, collaborate with AI on enterprise data. We are about, you know, to bring new functionality to recruiting agents. and you have heard earlier how much momentum that has already. We are making great progress in one of the areas that Anil is most excited on, financial audit and financial compliance agents. All of these agents are coming out, you know, either they are already or coming out at rising at the end of the year. And I think when we come together in the next, you know, callbacks, and you look at the age momentum we have built until then, I think there will be no question mark left anymore about Workday being an AI company or not, because the world of SaaS will have changed. Gabe, over to you for platform.

Yeah, and thanks for that, and thanks for the question. In terms of just the timeline view on this on the platform side, it's pretty obvious that the AI technology evolution has been at a frantic pace, right? We're seeing rapid and continuous evolution, and I don't really see an end to that. It's going to be continuous, constant evolution. And so the way we're looking at this is as these new integration patterns change, as protocols change, as identity approaches change, we're on a process of taking the new capabilities, pulling them into the platform, driving adoption, as Rob was mentioning, and then delivering outcomes and ROIs. And the key is going to be doing that continuously in a loop. That is the art of building AI systems. And that's going to be a long journey. This is not something that's going to end anytime soon.

And our next question comes from the line of Alex Zucin with Wolf Research. Your line is open.

Yeah, hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Probably another AI question here, but just it's great to hear about the agents and the data cloud opportunities that you're getting in front of customers, but maybe just help crystallize as how you're monetizing and maybe any specifics around, like, how many flex credits does an onboarding or procurement agent actually go through and what that could mean in terms of a net expansion, in terms of spend at a customer that's deploying them? Or like a Salesforce yesterday talked about how in order for customers to unlock AI functionality, they had to upgrade to a premium version that's 60% to 80% more in some cases. How do you see that with some of the MSA agreements you were talking about, Rob?

And when should we think about that as a tailwind to numbers is that uh is that a 2020 fiscal 27 um dynamics or or or the following year you know you said it's a question about ai but you are hitting all of the courts here you know from sales to finance to core technology um so maybe let me start and then i hand it over to rob and probably saying on on the outlook question you know what we are seeing is that you know the workload that these agents are driving are quite substantial when you when you heard about early the numbers and our volumes we are driving, recruiting already. And the key of the ambient agents, the agents that are running in the background, you know, we see a substantial opportunity, but we're not comparing it to software spend. Actually, you know, what we are modeling it against is the labor spend that companies have in those given roles already. And think about what is the share of the agent that actually will, you know, get, you know, basically transferred from a labor spend into an AI agent spend for that specific task group. You know, right now, though, and Rob has said it, so I want to repeat that, our focus is really on adoption, adoption, adoption, right? This is the way, you know, how you actually build great AI systems. And so what we are doing right now, and Rob spoke about it, right? We're incentivizing this with programs like the Sana Lighthouse program, that we basically allow customers to use it for free in the first year, Self-service agent, one of the most consequential agents we do, we put out a promotion that we are not, you know, putting on a flex credit meter until the end of August or September. So, you know, the question that you're asking, you know, how does this translate now to sales and dollars? Right now it's difficult to answer because this has not been our focus point. But then you ask me for the, you know, potential that we have because on how much workload it actually processes. It is incredibly substantial. And this is why Zane has said, right, we are so bullish as this being an upside because we can see on the one side the usage increasing, and then we see it on the inside that this represents a significant monetization opportunity for us.

I mean, you kind of said it. Look, Alex, I'm super excited. You know, we focus on the adoption side of things. Now we start to focus really on the consumption side of things. So as we move into this, the sales motion changes. And what you see with broad adoption of SANA self-service agents, it's going to rise all the other agents as well because it gives it a completely different look and feel on how you utilize Workday in the future and what kind of users can work with Workday, pretty much anyone. I watched a CFO and a COO look at the decision intelligence agent, and it was just, you know, they were completely blown away. So I think the opportunity for us is really good. The back half of the year looks really positive for us, and I can't see that changing. And we are lockstep in making certain that these agents, as you adopt them and consume them, the quality of the agent continues to improve all the time. And I think that's what Gabe meant by it's a circle, it's a loop. And I think we've got a really good process on how to define that loop. So the field is excited by it. Every single one of my customer conversations is really, really interesting. And even customers that I've known for years that are not really in the HCM or finance space really want to understand what we're doing and want work to lead in the space of HCM and finance. And then lastly, I would just say, you know, don't forget that we've also got agents like Talent Acquisition Agent and a document where we actually measure by different statistics. And that, you know, if I look at Talent Acquisition Agent, we had more than 30 million candidate interviews in Q2 with 8 million interviews scheduled. So the numbers are starting to show up, and it will continue to improve over the next months and quarters.

Yeah, Alex, I would just add, you know, this quarter we talked about, you know, roughly $600 million in AI, ARR, which is up from, you know, around just over $150 just a year ago. So we expect that trend to continue. As Neil mentioned earlier on the call, this is all about customer success and customer value, and that's going to be the ultimate driver of our revenue. So, you know, we've got some of that built into the back half of this year, as you would expect, but really growing from F by 28 and beyond where the AI component becomes a significant part of our incremental ARR. So we're excited about the future, as you can tell, and we just want to be thoughtful as we as we monetize it.

And we will now take two more questions. Our next question comes from the line of Carl Kirstead with UBS. Your line is open.

OK, great. Thanks. maybe I'll direct this one to Zane. Zane, you gave us a preliminary look at 200 bps of margin expansion next year, a little bit more than I was modeling, and actually a greater pace of expansion than you're guiding to this year. I'm assuming there's no big change in the prioritization on investing, so perhaps you'll probably address this at the Investor Day, but a couple of things that might be driving that. Thanks so much.

Yeah, Carl, thanks for the question. You know, So as Anil mentioned earlier this year, this was the year where we intentionally invested heavily in AI and brought on some great talent and feel like we're doing a lot in that area. And I think we've done a credible job prioritizing and then leveraging size and scale and really being thoughtful on how we drive, you know, just thoughtful expenses in the future. So it's a continuation of that. we're doing, I think, a pretty good job utilizing AI ourselves internally and expect that trend to continue. So it's really been about the team focusing on what matters and rethinking what we are doing and, as importantly, what we're not doing and where we're not going to be spending money in the future. And it's that kind of focus that I think is also driving the increase. And we believe that the two points for next year is a good starting point. As you know, we've increased to 31% this year. And we believe we can continue to see that improvement as well as leaning in as much as we have in investments in critical areas around AI and our platform.

I would just add we're leveraging AI internally and we're doing more with, you know, flat head count. That's the goal. And I think that's a really important direction for us to head.

And our final question comes from the line of Islamic Chatterjee with JP Morgan.

Your line is open hi uh thanks for taking my question uh you talked a lot uh today about the organic agents and the adoption curve you see there uh maybe if you can sort of dive into the acquired um ai acquisitions that you've done and particularly the acquired agents and how you think about the roadmap there in terms of integration finally sort of making to a product and then the monetization on that front and particularly how should we expect that to um impact your fiscal 28 sort of financial outlook as well any thoughts on that front would be helpful thank you well i'll just say that they're all doing well but most important they're all deeply integrated already we we don't

we don't ever buy technology and just leave it on the outside we deeply integrate it right away so it so we can deliver that unified experience uh maybe you uh gary you want to talk about where the products are headed yeah awesome so it's a great question because actually you know we kind of you know spoke about it earlier you know the big you know products that you can think of is you know hired score on the recruiting side in paradox they're actually both are part of our talent acquisition agent now so they are basically agentic skills as we evolve our ai systems and both of them have tremendous momentum i'm going to hand it over to rob in a second to talk about that but you know we are not really thinking about this as hey this is separate from the core As Anil has said, you know, we have a really good M&A regime that we look for strong technical fit. And so as we move forward with workday recruiting, Hired Score and Paradox, they are an integral part of that. And they're all coming together under the role-based agent for talent acquisition. Again, right, this whole idea, this is the embodiment of an actual recruiter with all of these skills. And on the Sana side, which had an absolutely blowout quarter as well, gangbuster growth, We put it into GA in a combined product. So Workday Learning and Sana Learning is actually one product now. It's in GA already, and it's driving substantial growth for our customers. But as we take it to them, we don't portray this as Workday and others. You know, this is the learning agent from Workday. This is the recruiting agent from Workday. And those acquisitions, they are just widening the breadth of skills these agents have.

Yeah, I'd simply say, I mean, we drove more than 100 million of new ACV with our AI products, which is 25% of all new ACVs. So just look at those numbers. And then our AI ARR numbers are up at 600, close to 600 million now. More than half of the new int in Q2 signed up for AI solutions. So our AI solutions are really paying off. And as Gerard said, I think it's really important to point out they are integrated into the Workday Foundation. It's one call. It's one view for our customers. And that allows us to deliver the agents even on top of that.

And ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation on today's conference. You may now disconnect.