Workday CFO Zane Rowe: Twice the Reports Isn't Twice the Value

Workday's tax team is building 10 AI agents, and CFO Zane Rowe says not every one will survive the cut. That's the point. The projects show how the Fortune 500 enterprise software company is testing agentic AI on itself before selling it to customers.

Rowe reviewed the agent list recently and shared the details with Fortune. For him, AI's promise isn't automating tasks. It's giving employees the freedom to rethink how they work, uncover new insights, and add more value to the business.

Workday's finance transformation team sits at the center of that effort. The group works with the company's R&D and business technology teams to test Workday's own products and explore other technologies. It also talks to customers directly, exchanging feedback on how finance organizations are adopting AI, Rowe said.

Where is Workday deploying AI in finance?

Rowe sees two major opportunities: improving business insights and redesigning processes end to end.

On the insights side, Workday is expanding Decision Intelligence beyond Adaptive across its portfolio to HR and finance. The tool helps finance teams understand what's driving business performance, test different scenarios, and assess the potential impact on the company, he said.

Finance teams can model, for instance, what would happen if they hired more or fewer people in certain parts of the world or in particular business areas, then forecast the effect on the company.

"It's a whole way of identifying how we think about planning; it's not just forecasting," Rowe said.

The product news backs the strategy. At its annual Rising event last week, Workday announced new "autopilot agents" that automate routine workflows across accounting, payroll, and hiring. It also unveiled an expanded "Trusted Agent Platform" for building and deploying custom AI agents, plus a new partnership with Anthropic to connect the two companies' platforms and agentic experiences.

The announcements land as Workday enters what it calls its "refounding" chapter. Co-founder Aneel Bhusri reclaimed the CEO role in February. "Great companies are not built on one generation of technology. They pass the test of time," Bhusri told Fortune's Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell on the Fortune 500 Titans podcast.

How should CFOs measure AI success?

As CFOs become key strategic partners to CEOs in shaping AI strategy, Rowe pushes back on the default metric.

"I always hear people talk about ROI, and I think it's so much more than that," he said.

His approach is outcome-based. ROI still matters, but success is ultimately defined by better work, stronger decisions, greater organizational capacity, and improved customer value.

The distinction is concrete. AI might let a finance team generate twice as many reports, but that alone doesn't make the business better, Rowe explained. A more meaningful measure is whether the team can use AI to uncover insights, anticipate problems, advise business leaders, and improve decisions.

More output isn't better business. The shift Rowe describes moves people away from simply producing information and toward using it to drive the business forward.

What about the people doing the work?

Engagement is part of the ledger.

"CFOs are leaning in on: How do we make sure the teams are motivated and engaged?" Rowe said. "It's not just about finding efficiencies. It's about people actually doing the work that they thought they were going to do when they signed up to join a company."

Rowe's framing gives finance chiefs a checklist that goes past payback periods: decisions improved, problems anticipated, capacity gained, customers served. Workday's own 10-agent experiment — where failure is an expected option — suggests the company is betting that AI's real return shows up in judgment, not just output.