Workday

(NASDAQ: WDAY · $188.25 ▲ 0.9%) Workday is an enterprise software company that brings HR and finance together on a single platform built around AI. The company describes the platform as open and extends it beyond HR and finance to IT, legal and frontline operations. At the center of the platform is Sana from Workday, which the company presents as the means of putting AI agents to work for organizations and their people. In practice, this means software agents that are meant to carry out multi-step tasks within business processes, not just answer questions.

On the HR side, the offering includes human capital management, employee experience and payroll tools. Its finance products cover financial management, spend management and financial planning, while its IT offerings include a data cloud, platform and product extensions, and Workday AI. Its legal products handle contract lifecycle management and contract intelligence, and its operations tools cover workforce management, global compliance and mobile access for frontline staff. Keeping these functions on one system means that people, payroll and financial records share the same data, which is a common reason large organizations consolidate onto a suite like this one instead of maintaining separate point systems.

Workday serves large enterprises and also sells Workday GO, a packaged product that combines HR, finance and payroll for midsize businesses. Customer examples cited by the company include 7-Eleven, Medtronic, Cognizant, Jabil, NetApp, Chipotle and Great Wolf Lodge, with reported results such as Cognizant cutting payroll processing from 9 days to 2 days. The company frames its work around high-impact outcomes for customers, summed up in its line "Welcome to a new work day."