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
