Workday's Bhusri Returns as CEO, Cutting AI Agents From 50 to 20

Aneel Bhusri reclaimed the Workday CEO seat in February and one of his first moves was cutting the company's AI agents from 50 to 20. That's the clearest signal yet of what he calls Workday's "refounding" chapter — and he built it by studying Steve Jobs's return to Apple.

Bhusri knows the baseline he's working from. He cofounded Workday in 2005 at age 39. The enterprise software company now ranks No. 430 on the Fortune 500 and generated about $9.6 billion in revenue last fiscal year — roughly $26 million a day.

In early 2024, Bhusri handed the CEO role to his co-CEO, Carl Eschenbach, and stayed on as executive chair. At that point, he felt his role in securing Workday's future was complete. The AI wave changed his math.

In the age of AI, Bhusri told Fortune's Alyson Shontell, "all bets are off." The top skill CEOs need today, he said, is the ability to innovate. Few leaders can do that better than founders. At the nudging of his cofounder Dave Duffield, Bhusri took the CEO job back in February.

What does the Jobs playbook actually change?

Founder comebacks are rare. The one legendary success is Steve Jobs. Pushed out of Apple in 1985, he returned in 1997 to a company in a death spiral — so close to bankruptcy that Apple took a $150 million investment from archrival Microsoft. Jobs's second act turned Apple into one of the world's most successful product-led companies and produced the iPhone.

Bhusri studied that return extensively before his February restart. He says he drove his management team crazy sending them Instagram clips of the Apple cofounder. His biggest takeaway came from an interview in which Jobs described his ambition to make Apple the biggest startup in the world.

For Jobs, that meant restoring a culture of ownership, accountability, speed, and focus. He slashed Apple's sprawling product line down to the few products that mattered most.

Bhusri applied the same logic. His first moves:

• Cut Workday's AI agent lineup from 50 to 20.
• Eliminated projects that weren't core to his vision of the company's future.

"Jobs wasn't just a product genius. He was a management genius, too, in the way he organized Apple for success," Bhusri said. "I'm trying to bring that same mentality of recreating a startup mindset with clear accountability."

The stakes for practitioners watching this are straightforward. If a $9.6 billion-revenue company can justify halving its AI portfolio weeks after a founder returns, the burden of proof for every non-core AI project just went up — at Workday and everywhere else.

Why Bhusri thinks urgency is warranted

Bhusri doesn't mince words about AI's impact on jobs over the next five years. He's already seeing AI capable of human-level work in HR, finance, and legal departments — three of the exact functions Workday's software serves. That's either an existential threat to his product line or the biggest opportunity in the company's history, and his bet is that a founder's speed decides which way it breaks.

"Great companies are not built on one generation of technology. They pass the test of time," Bhusri said on the Fortune 500 Titans podcast. "I really wanted Workday to be one of those companies that was not just great in cloud but also in this next generation. I felt I had a role to play in getting us to be a leader in this new world."

He frames his mandate in deliberately narrow terms. "I didn't come back to run Workday better," Bhusri said. "I came back to make sure that we are super innovative with the AI products, and that we do it responsibly. It's an incredibly powerful technology, and we have to do it the right way. It's a daunting but exciting task."

For context on the broader environment Bhusri is operating in: markets sank worldwide after a hot U.S. inflation report, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has shown zero tolerance for AI-related cybersecurity incidents, according to the same Fortune briefing that carried the Workday profile.

The so-what

The Jobs comparison only pays off if the focus cuts translate into shipped products that win the enterprise AI market. Bhusri has set the test himself: not running Workday better, but rebuilding it as an AI-first company with a startup's accountability — and he's given observers a clean metric to watch, starting with whether the slimmed-down roster of 20 AI agents outperforms the 50 it replaced.

By Nathan Brooks