Workday cofounder Aneel Bhusri retakes CEO job to steer AI push

Aneel Bhusri, who cofounded Workday in 2005, has returned to the chief executive job at the software company in February, describing the move as a "refounding" of the business, he told Fortune in an interview published on October 15, 2026.

Bhusri had given up the top post two years earlier to Carl Eschenbach and moved to executive chair before his cofounder, Dave Duffield, pressed him to come back. Workday ranks 430th on the Fortune 500 and took in roughly $9.6 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, according to Fortune.

Bhusri said he prepared by studying how Steve Jobs rebuilt Apple after rejoining it in 1997, borrowing the idea of running a large company with the accountability and speed of a startup. Among his early decisions was reducing Workday's lineup of AI agents from 50 to 20 and dropping work he judged peripheral.

He said artificial intelligence will reshape employment within five years and that he already sees systems doing work at a human level in human resources, finance and legal functions. "I didn't come back to run Workday better," Bhusri said.

This story was first reported by Fortune.