The Fortune 500 list for 2024 has arrived, and along with mainstay companies like Walmart and Apple, there are a few fresh faces. Among the newcomers is Workday, a finance and HR software company that now ranks number 490 out of the largest U.S. companies by revenue.
Workday had a breakout year, pulling in $7.3 billion in revenue and grossing nearly $1.4 billion in profits. But it started out 19 years ago as just the kernel of an idea between founders David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri that a software company could be “born in the cloud” and support HR and finance operations, according to the current CEO Carl Eschenbach. At the time, the founders wrote down six “core values” that the company still uses today: employees, customers, innovation, integrity, fun, and profitability.
“A lot has changed. We’ve grown, we’ve scaled, we’ve gone from two founders to almost 20,000 employees,” Eschenbach tells Fortune. “But the values of the company have never changed, and nor will they change going forward.”
Eschenbach became sole CEO of the company in 2024, after leading jointly with Bhusri for more than a year. Over the past year and a half, the company has also hired a new CFO, CMO, and CIO. Eschenbach credits Workday’s success with the fact that it’s both an application and a platform—consolidating both capabilities under a common data architecture for ease of use. He adds that as companies try to consolidate their vendors, they’ve turned to the company because it offers both HR and financial services in one package.
Workday has been making software for years, but the pandemic forced businesses around the world to transform digitally and serve a more decentralized workforce. That shift benefited the business tremendously, as hybrid and remote workers forced companies to update their infrastructure and design a new employee experience. For example, Workday has tools that help employers send out pulse surveys to track workforce productivity and sentiment. It also has applications to match employee skill gaps with different learning opportunities. The company currently has more than 65 million users across 10,500 organizations, across more than 60% of the Fortune 500.
“I think we caught a nice tailwind during COVID. An unfortunate time for the world, but it was a very good one for our business because we help people digitize their infrastructure,” says Eschenbach.
As the pandemic recedes, and bosses struggle to bring employees back into the office, hybrid work is here to stay, and that’s good for Workday’s business. Looking forward, Eschenbach says that the company’s AI transformation is well underway. It has rolled out around 50 AI features so far, including generative AI capabilities for creating things like employee growth plans and job descriptions. The company plans on releasing another 25 AI features later this year.
