SE 32: The Work of Reinventing Work Is Just Getting Started, with Leaders from Workday and OneDigital | Live from Workday Rising 2026

Bhusri returns to lead Workday's AI refounding

Guest interviews

• Max Wessel, SVP of Product at Workday. Wessel says Aneel Bhusri's mantra is to run Workday like the world's largest startup, with clear accountability and people empowered to move fast. He cites Anita Elberse's case that abundant content creates gravity toward quality, and argues product management still needs taste and judgment now that code is easy to generate. He defines generative UI as interface created on the fly by an agent, and says Workday is still early in building the frameworks and coaching agents to use them.
• Gerrit Kazmaier, President of Product and Technology at Workday. Kazmaier rejects the idea that AI is simply applied to an already perfect workplace to make perfection faster. He says most people spend their days on work about work, and that nobody comes home proud of answering 50 emails and sitting through 20 meetings. Five years out he expects people to spend their time on work that inspires them while a work platform runs everything else, and to see many more brilliant minds once that bandwidth tax lifts.
• John Bruce, VP of People Innovation and Technology at OneDigital. Bruce expects 85 to 90 percent of an employee's Workday usage to flow through ACE, OneDigital's general coworker that answers employee questions. OneDigital calls its agents coworkers and develops them the way it would a new hire, and his team forced them to push back after one called every idea great. He is presenting a talent sentiment agent that reads engagement data and surfaces insights for managers, and he says AI cannot replace human curiosity.

News

• Bhusri returns as Workday CEO for second stint. Co-founder Aneel Bhusri is back at the helm, a moment host Dan Turchin calls Workday's refounding. Turchin says the special edition goes past the headlines to Workday's vision for AI and work.
• Workday introduces Work Intelligence for AI planning. Gerrit Kazmaier says it helps companies understand how work actually happens and decide where AI should sit alongside the existing workforce. Some work should stay innately human, he says.
• Workday ships Decision Intelligence analytics tool. Max Wessel calls it a team of analysts in your pocket. A chart built by chatting with the data can be saved as a playbook the agent reuses the next time the question comes up.
• Workday launches Sonic Coach for performance talks. Shown in the Workday Rising keynote, it turns a performance conversation into a coaching and development conversation, part of a release wave meant to free teams for higher-value work.
• Workday opens an MCP layer to customer agents. The company has exposed an MCP layer that customers can connect their own agents to, and OneDigital plans to hook its homegrown agents into it.