Largest Workday Rising Ever: Forever Forward With Workday

Workday Rising kicked off in Las Vegas last night, drawing Workday’s largest attendance ever for its annual conference with more than 30,000 in-person and online attendees.

Forever Forward

Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach thanked Workday’s more than 10,500 customers, 2,000 partners, event sponsors, and more than 20,000 Workmates from all over the world during the Opening Keynote. 

He introduced this year’s event theme, "Forever Forward," emphasizing the need for leaders to stay ahead of constant evolution, disruption, and change. 

The theme highlights the role of HR, finance, and IT in driving companies forward and adapting to economic shifts and technological advancements like AI, and in creating company growth. 

Eschenbach talked about how the message underscores the importance of proactive adaptation and innovation to avoid falling behind in a rapidly changing business landscape.

He then challenged the audience to be Forward Thinkers —change agents leading their companies forward by optimizing their most important assets— people and money.

Finally, Eschenbach presented Workday’s vision to elevate humans and supercharge work in a meaningful way.

Leading the AI Revolution

Eschenbach then shifted to Workday’s approach to AI and how the focus across the industry has been on fitting AI into how we work, not what work should look like next.

This was followed by his preview of Workday Illuminate, the next generation of Workday AI.

As the leader in HR and finance, Workday’s goal is to “light up the future of work,” said Eschenbach.

Customers have already seen great value from Workday AI, Eschenbach noted, using it to write job descriptions, find payroll errors, evaluate contracts, and more. 

Workday Illuminate represents a bigger vision and a more robust roadmap, with new capabilities for accelerating manual tasks, delivering real-time AI assistance, and transforming entire business processes via AI orchestration.

For AI to have transformational-level business impact it needs data–and lots of it. That’s where Workday has an incredible advantage. With a 10-year start in AI and more than 10,500 global customers, it has a massive financial and HR dataset that’s constantly growing, with 800 billion transactions processed by the platform every year. 

Workday Illuminate understands not only the data, but also the “why” or “how” of how processes are connected, the people and roles involved, and the current task at hand—along with previous conversational AI interactions.

Eschenbach concluded by explaining how “Workday is the platform that will illuminate the future of work.”

So how will this play out, in terms of real-life solutions for customers? Workday Illuminate was officially announced today. And in tomorrow’s Workday Rising Daily, we’ll delve into additional innovation announcements.

Watch keynotes and sessions from Workday Rising 2024 on demand! Visit Workday Events for more information.