Workday Rising EMEA 2025 in Barcelona brings finance, HR, and IT leaders together to turn innovation into measurable results. Learn how to justify your trip, estimate ROI, and return with actionable insights from 250+ sessions and 400+ experts.
Budgets are tighter than ever. Every flight, every hotel booking, every day away from work needs to earn its place. Yet for leaders tasked with steering organisations through another year of economic pressure, regulatory change, and rapid AI adoption, one question matters more than cost: where can we actually move forward?
This November, the answer may well be in Barcelona. Workday Rising EMEA brings together thousands of business and technology leaders across finance, HR, and IT to share what’s working, what’s next, and what still needs fixing. It’s not a trade show. It’s an operating system for ideas—one built for a world where every decision has to prove its worth.
Workday Rising EMEA is designed less as a conference, more as a working lab for the future of enterprise technology. Over three days, attendees move between sessions, demos, and discussions that go beyond theory: how AI agents can reduce manual work, how finance and HR can collaborate on planning cycles, how data can be turned into decisions that actually stick.
The scale is real: more than 250 sessions, 65+ live demos, and 400+ product experts. Yet what draws people back each year isn’t the number of sessions—it’s the quality of the conversations. The chance to sit down with someone who solved the same integration headache you’re wrestling with. Or to walk away from a session with a roadmap that connects what’s technically possible with what’s politically feasible in your organisation.
“Workday Rising inspires us to think bigger, dream boldly, and explore innovative ways to support our organisation.”
Head of People and Digital Solutions
SAAB
Convincing a manager or CFO starts with clarity. Rising EMEA isn’t just another line item—it’s a short, intensive investment that can pay itself back several times over.
This justification framework maps the benefits into four measurable areas:
Profit and performance. Even a 0.01–0.1% improvement in margin for a €10 million business equals €10,000–€100,000 in value.
Team efficiency. Hands-on learning and direct guidance from experts can save 10% of time for 5–10 key users, worth €50,000–€100,000 in capacity.
Technology and risk reduction. Avoided integration or redevelopment costs can save €25,000–€50,000 per project.
Employee engagement. Peer learning and success stories often accelerate adoption—especially for AI and automation—leading to longer-term productivity gains.
Together, those add up to roughly €100,000 in business value plus €25,000–€50,000 in direct savings, depending on scope and execution. And the total investment? About €4,000—covering registration, travel, and accommodation for three to four days.
That’s the math most executives understand: a pragmatic return, not a perk.
The programme is built to turn strategy into action:
Hands-on sessions and live demos. See how AI and machine learning are built into daily workflows in finance, HR, and IT.
Roadmap briefings. Learn what’s coming, when, and how to roll it out without disrupting what already works.
Industry roundtables. Share strategies with peers navigating the same compliance, labour market, or transformation challenges.
Meet-the-expert sessions. Bring specific questions to the engineers, consultants, and partners who can answer them in real time.
For many, this direct access to expertise is worth the trip alone. A week in Barcelona can replace months of email threads, troubleshooting calls, and internal guesswork.
Framing matters. Here’s what typically works when asking for the green light:
Anchor the goal. “Equip our HR and finance teams to operationalise Workday’s AI features and align our roadmap for 2026.”
Show tangible value. Reference the four impact categories and the €100k+ potential business value, grounded in Workday’s internal model.
Clarify the investment. Three to four days away, €4,000 total, with a plan to share learnings upon return.
Commit to knowledge transfer. Offer to host a short internal readout and translate insights into actionable next steps.
The request lands differently when framed as acceleration, not absence.
The best results come when teams attend together. Finance leaders validate their planning frameworks. HR explores skills-based strategies and workforce planning. IT refines integrations and security setups directly with Workday experts. The shared learning builds alignment that’s hard to recreate remotely.
Every attendee returns with something concrete—whether it’s a new use case for AI, a more efficient workflow, or simply a clearer sense of what’s next on the platform.
Workday Rising EMEA in Barcelona is where enterprise transformation stops being an abstract idea and becomes something you can see, test, and take home. The timing—18–20 November 2025 at Fira Gran Via—makes it ideal for shaping 2026 plans.
For those navigating the next phase of AI, finance modernisation, or skills transformation, this is not just another conference. It’s a strategic checkpoint: three days of concentrated learning, €4,000 of investment, and a realistic path to unlock €100k+ in value.
In a world of scrutiny, that’s what green-light decisions are made of.
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