Workday, Inc.
Leadership History
2 leaders · 2022 to present
Aneel Bhusri is the CEO of Workday, in the role since 2026. The first chief executive was Carl Eschenbach, from 2022.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aneel Bhusri | Co-founder, CEO, and Chair | 2026 | Present | < 1 |
| Carl Eschenbach | Former CEO | 2022 | 2026 | 4 |
Workday is a Pleasanton, California, enterprise software company listed on Nasdaq as WDAY. It reported $9.552B in fiscal 2026 revenue and is led by co-founder, CEO, and chair Aneel Bhusri.
Most of Workday's revenue comes from multi-year cloud subscriptions. In fiscal 2026, subscription revenue was $8.833B of $9.552B total, about 92%. The rest is professional services: deployment, training, and advisory work, much of which is handled alongside implementation partners. Customers usually start with HCM or Financial Management and later add planning, payroll, recruiting, learning, and AI agent products. Because Workday holds employee, payroll, and accounting records, replacing it is slow and risky for a large customer, which keeps renewal rates high.
Co-founder, CEO, and Chair
2026 – Present
0 years (current)
Bhusri guided Workday's product strategy from its inception, overseeing its transition from a pure HCM platform into a unified finance and HR enterprise suite.
He scaled the company into a dominant cloud SaaS provider, fundamentally reshaping the enterprise software market before handing over the CEO reins.
Former CEO
2022 – 2026
4 years
Eschenbach expanded Workday's go-to-market motion globally, driving deep integration with major systems integrators and expanding partnerships.
As co-CEO and later sole CEO, he aggressively pushed the platform beyond HR into the broader and highly lucrative enterprise financial management sector.
These officers report to the chief executive and are not part of the CEO timeline above.
Workday's revenue growth fell from about 17% in fiscal 2024 to 13% in fiscal 2026, and total subscription revenue backlog grew only 8% year over year at the end of Q2 fiscal 2027. Oracle and SAP compete hard in finance and HR suites, and investors worry that AI agents could reduce the number of paid seats in HR and finance departments. The company has also gone through repeated restructurings, including a cut of roughly 8.5% of staff announced in February 2025 and a further reduction of about 2.5%, mostly in product and technology, disclosed in a September 2026 filing.
Aneel Bhusri is the Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chair of the Board of Workday, having guided the company's vision and product architecture since founding it in 2005.
Dave Duffield served as co-CEO alongside Aneel Bhusri from 2005 to 2014, and served as Chairman of the Board until stepping back to Chairman Emeritus in 2020.
Carl Eschenbach, veteran technology executive and former partner at Sequoia Capital and COO of VMware, served as co-CEO and CEO from late 2022 into 2026, driving go-to-market scaling and international expansion.
Chano Fernandez served as co-CEO alongside Aneel Bhusri from August 2020 to December 2022, leading global customer operations after successfully scaling Workday's European operations.
Zane Rowe serves as Chief Financial Officer, bringing deep financial and capital markets leadership from previous CFO positions at VMware, EMC, and Continental Airlines.
Workday is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, with major regional technology centers in Boulder, Colorado; Atlanta, Georgia; Dublin, Ireland; and Munich, Germany.
They instituted an employee-first culture based on integrity, fun, and customer success, routinely ranking Workday as one of Fortune's '100 Best Companies to Work For.'
Bhusri envisions Workday as the premier cloud backbone for global commerce, leveraging artificial intelligence to automate enterprise operations and scaling revenue past $15 billion.
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