Workday confronts existential threat as customers freeze hiring

Workday is confronting a troubling reality. Customers aren't hiring much and some are actively cutting staff. The solution? Cross-selling to squeeze more revenue per user out of its installed base. The SaaS finance and HR company posted a 12.6 percent year-on-year rise in revenue to $2.4 billion for Q3 of its fiscal 2026 ended …

[Korev]

> CEO Carl Eschenbach said the company had added new customers and expanded deployments within companies such as Levi Strauss and Novartis.

So Jeans and Genes then

[Taliesinawen]

Yet more AI waffle (YMAIW)

ClippyAI said: Workday’s recent acquisitions, such as Sana (AI interface), Flowise (low-code agent builder), Paradox (recruiting chatbots), and HiredScore (talent software) are core to its AI-driven ecosystem ..

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

So AI won't save money because everybody will raise prices to compensate.

[Roland6]

“ Since Workday's revenue model depends on per-employee seat licenses”

So suddenly that benefit sold to customers about how with subscriptions they only needed to pay for the actual number of seats used is now seen to have a downside.

>” and we do have floors and minimums that the customer can bring their headcount down”

If you want to increase prices beyond what’s agreed in the contract, then this clause is void.

Plus if I have need to reduce my headcount to the extent I encounter your floor, there is a real risk you won’t be collecting any subsriptions…

[Anonymous Coward]

No growth option

I suspect the big problem for a lot of these highly successful new-ish corporations is that their business models have evolved around constant growth. So in a stagnant market and possibly contracting one (we blame it on AI but actually it's debt) they have a problem coping. People drive consumption and if they are dealing with inflation, increased taxation and then their own debt, they spend less. With the advances in technology and productiveness we should be seeing price collapse not inflation. Where does it go? It's sucked upwards to a few who know how to use inflation, to big government and its interference in citizens lives and meddling overseas.

[David Hicklin]

Re: No growth option

> business models have evolved around constant growth

I think you will find that this is a problem for *all* businesses especially if they are listed on the stock market and have a share price to protect.

business models assume infinity for growth but we live in a finite world

[Anonymous Coward]

Workday is dire

Have to use it.

As an employee, over the years used a few timesheet / holiday etc packages, but Workday is the worst.

It may have lots of back end functionality for managers but or just entering your data it is dismal.

e.g. using "copy last weeks schedule to this week action". A half decent system looks at your holidays & realises e.g. Monday of this week was a holiday so do not add the Monday work info from previous week, not Workday it just does a simplistic copy, so you end up with your Monday as a holiday & then whatever work hours you did the last Monday (& have to manually edit to remove them). Not much intelligence (artificial or otherwise)

From an employee perspective mandatory timesheet / holiday stuff should be as fast & fool proof as possible - Workday is neither (don't get me started on how slow it is to select a project to allocate time to due to lack of any decent search ).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Workday is dire

I've never know any company to have an HR/Payroll/recruitment system that wasn't sadistically awful to use

[Roland6]

Re: Workday is dire

You can blame the system developers as they seem to delight in making their payroll awful.

Whilst Quickbooks Online Standard (UK) payroll had many issues, it mostly worked, however in 2024 Intuit replaced it with the even less functional Core Payroll…

It is concerning when you have to create (Excel) spreadsheets to do the calculations Quickbooks should be doing to create the values Quickbooks needed to get the pay correct…