Aneel Bhusri on coming back to refound Workday: 'When AI showed up, all bets are off' | Fortune

Workday co-founder Aneel Bhusri is returning to the CEO role in 2026 with a stated goal of “refounding” the company for the AI era, arguing that recent AI advances have overturned prior assumptions. In a Fortune podcast, he said he expects AI to displace many jobs within five years, starting with routine work such as payroll processing and junior auditing. Bhusri also argues that firms profiting from AI should retrain impacted workers, pointing to Workday’s RAISE US program. He described cutting Workday’s development “agents” from 50 to 20 and assigning a single owner to each AI effort, while using aggregated training data to limit customer IP exposure.