Good morning. Agentic AI could be the catalyst that gets most finance chiefs on board with using AI to support the finance function.
Aneel Bhusri, cofounder and CEO of Workday, an enterprise HR and finance platform with AI, returned to the role last month, two years after stepping down, succeeding Carl Eschenbach, Fortune reported. “I think there’s a lot of misinformation out in the marketplace about AI and SaaS applications,” Bhusri said during a virtual press conference on March 12. “There’s this idea that AI is going to replace a lot of these applications with things like vibe coding. I’m a technologist, and I’ve been in this space for a long time. I just don’t see that happening.”
There will exist a hybrid world, where the best of enterprise apps are paired with the best of AI, and where low-level, rote work gets replaced by agents that drive business processes underneath, Bhusri said. In his first month back as CEO at Workday, he spent time with many financial customers and prospects—and found that many accounting departments are still “running old systems like the one I was part of at PeopleSoft,” he said.
Cloud computing improved software and user experience, but finance teams were slower to adopt it because their systems served fewer users and were heavily customized, Bhusri said. But AI is different: it can cut costs, automate complex work, and even enable near real-time audits, he said. “That was not possible with either the legacy on-premise systems or the newer cloud systems,” he said. “They were still business process automation systems, not reasoning and probabilistic engineering systems.”
That distinction is resonating with finance chiefs. For CFOs, “the agentic story and solutions are really what’s catching their eye right now,” Bhusri said. “CFOs look at it as, ‘The new way to differentiate how we do business. We need to embrace AI.'” And that, he said, is the reason many will finally move from a legacy system to an AI-driven cloud system.
The shift appears to be gaining momentum more broadly. Gartner recently predicted that 40% of enterprise applications will be integrated with task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025 — a sign that agentic AI is moving from concept to corporate priority.
Workday (No. 455 on the Fortune 500) is moving quickly to capture that momentum. On Tuesday, the company launched Sana from Workday, a new AI tool that can answer questions, complete tasks, and automate routine work across HR and finance. It uses AI agents that can carry out multi-step tasks on their own, for example, reviewing emails for receipts and submitting them for approval, and works across apps like Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, Google Drive, and SharePoint while following company security rules. The tool is based on Workday’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Sana Labs, completed in November 2025.
It will be interesting to see how AI continues to shape the finance function.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Leaderboard
Leaderboard
Fortune 500 Power Moves:
Chris Stansbury, EVP and CFO of Lumen Technologies, Inc. (No. 325), was appointed to the additional role of president. In his expanded capacity, Stansbury will work to drive operational excellence, capital allocation discipline, and enterprise growth across the company. He has more than 30 years of leadership experience. Prior to joining Lumen in 2022, Stansbury served as CFO at Arrow Electronics. Before Arrow, he was CFO of the Networking Group at Hewlett‑Packard.
Every Friday morning, the weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 company C-suite shifts—see the most recent edition.
More notable moves:
Matthew Minielly was appointed CFO of Direct Travel, a travel management company. Minielly succeeds John Coffman, who served as CFO for more than a decade. Coffman will take on the role of chief corporate development and business officer at the company. Minielly brings more than two decades of financial leadership experience. He most recently served as CFO at Partnerize, and previously held senior leadership roles at Allintus and Cunningham Lindsey.
Lisa White was appointed SVP and CFO of OnPoint Community Credit Union, serving more than 633,000 members with $9.5 billion in assets. White has more than 20 years of finance and accounting leadership experience. White previously worked at Columbia Bank (formerly Umpqua Bank) for nearly 15 years in senior finance and accounting leadership roles. She most recently served as its executive vice president, principal accounting officer and corporate controller. She previously served as an audit manager at Deloitte.
Big Deal
"From Silence to Stryker: Iran's Cyber Retaliation Begins" is an analysis by Christopher Vos, director of Cyber Model Development at Moody’s. Vos examines the implications of a March 11 "wiper" attack—where the primary goal is to permanently delete or destroy data— conducted by the threat group Handala against Stryker Corporation (No. 195 on the Fortune 500), a medical device manufacturer. Handala (also known as Void Manticore) has been linked to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security and operates under a hacktivist persona to obscure attribution, Vos writes.
Stryker stated that the incident was contained to its internal Microsoft environment and caused widespread operational disruptions. However, it did not affect any of Stryker's products, and there is no indication that patient care or the functionality of its medical devices was affected, according to the company.
The attack marks the first confirmed destructive cyber operation by an Iranian-linked group against a major Western company since the conflict escalated in late February, signaling that cyber activity may now supplement—or potentially replace—kinetic retaliation, according to Moody’s.
“The central question is no longer whether Iran will retaliate in the cyber domain, but whether this is an isolated incident or the beginning of a broader campaign,” Vos writes.
Going deeper
"‘The Karpathy Loop’: Former OpenAI researcher’s autonomous agents ran 700 experiments in 2 days—and gave a glimpse of where AI is heading" is a Fortune article by Jeremy Kahn.
Kahn writes: "Earlier this month, Andrej Karpathy, a well-known AI researcher who was one of the founding employees of OpenAI and later headed up AI for Tesla, went viral on X. This alone isn’t so unusual. Karpathy—who now works as an independent AI researcher and is also the founder of Eureka Labs, which says it is creating a new kind of school for the AI era—has 1.9 million followers on X." Read more here.
Overheard
"Energy security has historically meant securing access to oil reserves. In the next era, it may mean something different: the ability to produce fuel wherever it is needed, using whatever resources are available."
—Gregory Constantine, CEO and co-founder of AIRCO, writes in a Fortune opinion piece titled, "The next energy superpower will make its own fuel."
