What will leadership look like in this new world of work? I believe we will be freed to lead with heart. If I think back on the best managers and leaders I’ve known, I realize they were both motivational and inspirational. It takes heart to be an effective leader. It takes authenticity. It takes connection. My hope is that AI-enabled leadership will free us to focus on these critical leadership levers instead of the tasks that can weigh us down.
But creating this future requires collaboration among forward-thinking leaders willing to reimagine growth through more human-centric means without sacrificing profitability. Big picture, we’re trying to build a fruitful relationship between humans and AI helpers. At a practical level, this will necessitate strong partnerships between companies and individuals.
I often say that with all tectonic shifts, people find a way to peacefully coexist with new technologies, and it will happen with AI as well. As we learn to peacefully coexist, it will drive a step function change in human and company productivity.
Many companies will need external expertise to navigate challenges like ROI uncertainty, data privacy and security, and integration difficulties. Most companies cannot manage the AI journey alone, and they shouldn’t have to. That’s what we’re here for.
A Future Built on Trust
Customers partnered with us on their journeys to the cloud, and now they’re turning to us to harness the power of AI to boost productivity, efficiency, and cost savings. Workday is in a unique position to give them the ultimate advantage. We’ve been delivering AI capabilities to our customers for nearly a decade, building AI into the core of our platform. That means that AI features and functionality are embedded natively in all our applications. And with more than 70 million users generating more than 800 billion transactions per year on our platform, the volume of clean, trusted data that Workday and our ecosystem can leverage for AI is simply unmatched.
We know that AI innovation won’t truly reach its full potential unless it’s used responsibly and ethically—and in a way that keeps humans at the center. I’m proud that Workday has been leading by example in our commitment to the responsible development of AI technologies for our customers, the deployment of AI for our employees, and the ongoing advocacy for AI regulation that positively impacts the world. Leaders are eager to realize the benefits of AI, but they want to work with partners they can trust. Workday has a long history of keeping our customers’ most critical data—about their people and their finances—safe from the beginning. We take this same trustworthy approach with AI.
I’m looking forward to discussing these topics and more, and learning from the forward-thinkers (especially our customers) at Davos.