Peter Bailis, the new CTO of Workday, discusses the company’s ambitious AI agent strategy and recent major acquisitions including Sana, Paradox, and Flowise. He explains Workday’s vision to become the “agent system of record” – extending their people and money management platform to govern AI agents across enterprises.
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Bailis reveals how Workday plans to compete with tech giants like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and SAP by leveraging their unique position as the system of record for 75 million users. The conversation covers their open data lake strategy, enterprise search ambitions, and how recent acquisitions will accelerate their AI platform vision.
Key insights include Workday’s approach to AI agent governance, the technical challenges of enterprise search, and why the company believes they can win the “experience layer” battle in enterprise AI. Bailis also discusses the evolution of agent protocols and Workday’s strategy to enable customers to build AI applications on their platform.
Key Takeaways:
- Workday introduces “agent system of record” concept for AI governance
- Three major acquisitions: Sana ($1B), Paradox, and Flowise explained
- Strategy to compete with Salesforce, ServiceNow, and SAP in AI platform space
- Open data lake with zero-copy architecture and Apache Iceberg format
- Vision for enterprise search as the future front door for knowledge workers
- Discussion of agent protocols (MCP, A2A, OAuth) and delegation permissions
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Techzine Talks on Tour: season two
We started Techzine Talks on Tour in May of 2024, with the goal of doing at least one episode every two weeks. After 25 episodes in 2024 we were close enough to that target for us to call the first season a good start. That’s what it is, a start, because we’re not done yet. We continue with a second season, with the goal of growing our reach even further.
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Previous episodes of Techzine Talks on Tour:
- Navigating VMware’s transformation under Broadcom
- Connected from curb to gate at Harry Reid International Airport
- The browser is the next security frontier: how do we secure it?
- Slack is evolving into a work operating system
- Oracle Database@AWS: best of both worlds?
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