Please welcome Vice President of Investor Relations, Justin Furby.
All right. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Workday Rising and Financial Analyst Day 2023. We've got a great group of folks here in the audience as I scan through. I can feel the energy coming this way, so keep it coming, and the collective mind power working its way to the stage. I had a better joke, but I forgot it. So, it's my privilege to welcome you all here, as well as the folks that are on the webcast, joining us here today. I know that you all have a lot of analyst days to choose from, and we certainly appreciate you choosing to be with us today and spend the next few hours, and I think we're gonna have a great show today. So, a couple of things before we get going.
For those of you in person, I do hope you had the opportunity, and you still have the opportunity later today and tomorrow, to take part in the broader Rising experience. So hopefully, you were able to take in the Innovation Keynote today. There's another one tomorrow, and get to speak with customers and partners and prospects. And I think if you do that, you'll find this unbelievable representation across different companies, different buyers, different size organizations, and it really is an important part of the overall experience, I think. So actually, I have a couple of other slides, but for the folks on backstage, I don't have the notes, and when I do the safe harbor, I'll totally botch it if the notes aren't up. If one of them wouldn't mind seeing that, bringing them up. Oh, there we go.
So, a couple of things that we're gonna do today, as part of the program. First of all, we're trying to be a little more targeted with the content. So we did. You'll notice there are fewer speakers as part of this. That was intentional. We took your feedback to heart, but I think the content we have is really what I deem to be very exciting. I hope you agree. There's a lot of really exciting things going on inside this company. There's a lot of new faces that you'll see today, a lot of familiar faces. But you're gonna hear us talk a lot about some really important investment areas that we're looking forward to in terms of areas like International, the Financials opportunity, AI, ML, the partner ecosystem.
And so throughout the day, you'll hear those themes woven in, and then at the end of the session, Zane will bring that all home, with what is a very durable medium-term updated framework, through FY 2027. So, a couple of things before I kick it off. First of all, I really want to put a say a big thank you to the broader team. Annie Bowden on my team, who I know a lot of you know, went through a ton of work to put this event on, and all of the people that registered, like, 30 minutes ago, that we were able to bring in. So, thank you to Annie and for all the great work she does.
To Sarah Leder , who also helped on the registration side of things, to make this event happen, and then all the folks across finance and the broader Workday organization, and our designer, Kyle Scudder, as well. Thank you to all of you guys for making this happen. It is a labor of work and love . So anyway, the second one is less interesting but equally important. This is our safe harbor statement. Please be mindful that some of the matters that we'll be discussing today include forward-looking statements regarding our strategies, operations, or financial items. Based on information we have as of today and our current beliefs with respect to the future of our business. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and actual results and financial conditions may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements.
Further information on risks that could affect our results is included in our most recent filings with the SEC, which are available on our investor relations webpage. Whew! Okay. So with that, kicking us off today, will be our co-CEOs, Aneel Bhusri and Carl Eschenbach, who are gonna sit down with our amazing new CMO, Emma Chalwin, and catch you up to speed on some of the important announcements coming out of this week. And more importantly, spend time talking about and offer some perspective on the really exciting opportunities we see ahead for the business. So with that, it's my delight to bring on Emma Chalwin.
Emma came to us by way of quick background, she's, I think, been a couple of months now with the company, but spent nine years at Salesforce running global field sales, and before that, many, many years at Adobe. So really exciting hire for us. Excited for her to be here and part of this. And so with that, please take your hands off of your Excel models. Put your hands together for Emma Chalwin.
Thank you so much, Justin, and for all of you joining us here at Rising for our Financial Analyst Day. It's been wonderful. I've joined the company as CMO, as Justin said, but only just a little over two months ago, so it's been a fantastic journey so far, and I really hope you're enjoying the event so far. And today I have the pleasure of hosting and chatting with Aneel and Carl, our co-CEOs, where we're gonna touch on a variety of topics, including our growth strategy, Workday innovation, and much more. So if you're good with it, I'd love to jump straight in, and welcome to the stage our co-CEOs, Aneel and Carl.
Hey, Emma.
Good to see you.
Thank you.
I think you're here, actually. This way. Hi.
All right.
Lovely to see you both.
Great to be with you.
Welcome. You've got a nice, intimate gathering with some friends here.
Hello, everyone. Good afternoon.
Which is good.
Well, that was exciting.
I know.
Good afternoon.
Yeah.
There we go.
There we go. I thought I was back in the UK for a second.
Listen, you guys haven't been on stage all week like Aneel and I. There should be some excitement from you lot up here.
Wonderful. Well, everyone's thrilled to be here, and I know that last time this audience was together was in Orlando at Rising last year, and what a difference a year makes. I think we can all agree a lot's happened in the last 12 months. Aneel, I'd love to come to you first and talk a little bit about you sharing your perspective on the change in the business in the last 12 months since we last saw you at Orlando.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we've been fortunate. Our business continues to be strong. I think a lot of it ties back to having great employees, taking care of our customers and continuing to innovate. And, you know, what I'm personally excited about is, and this has happened several times in the Workday history, we brought on new leadership to take us to that next level, starting with Carl. I couldn't be more thrilled to have Carl as my current co-CEO, but ultimately, February first, sole CEO, and I can go back to being the nerd that I'm more happy being. And then world-class marketing person in Emma and a world-class CFO in Zane.
I feel like we've got this team that marries some of the traditional old of Workday with the new of where we're going, and couldn't be more excited. You know, on the product front, we've just made huge investments and leaps forward on AI and ML, and you i f you saw my keynote today, it's not because we just all of a sudden jumped on it. We've been at it for over a decade, and as some of these new opportunities came up b y the way, we've been pitching AI to our customers for a long time. It really was ChatGPT that got all of our customers so focused on the possibilities with AI because and GenAI because they could actually experience it as a consumer.
So I feel like we're extremely well positioned, and you saw our new wave of applications. Very excited about the new partner ecosystem. And, you know, it continues to support a strong business that's done well during COVID, that's done well during a very challenging economic time. Kudos to our sales folks. So I just, I feel really good about where we're at.
That's wonderful, and I think I can speak on behalf of Zane and Carl and myself, you know, thank you for building such a great organization that's built on a foundation of such an amazing platform, but also a company that's built on such strong values, and that's really important, I know, to all of us, so thank you for that. And on the point about new leadership joining, Carl, I'm going to come over to you. You've been busy recruiting lately, including me, so thank you.
Thank you.
You've started describing Workday as kind of a talent magnet. Can you expand a little bit on that for me?
Yeah. So first of all, again, good afternoon. It's great to be here, and it's great to be here with my partner, Aneel. I couldn't be more excited and honored and thrilled to be working with Aneel and our 18,000 workmates around the world. It's a great opportunity for me to join an amazing company, and I always say we all stand on the shoulders of giants at one point in our careers, and I feel like that's where I'm at right now, standing on the shoulders of Workday, the last 18 years and what the company's built, and I'm excited to be here, and I'm excited to be here at my first Rising this week with Aneel. Yeah, as far as recruiting, I, you know, I use the word magnet.
I feel like there's a magnetic pull towards Workday right now. We've recruited some amazing talent, to join forces with the existing talent that was here, so you can't have all of one or the other, but when you get great talent coming in, like you, Emma, like Zane, you're gonna hear Doug Robinson spend a lot of time talking about the talent in the, you know, last few quarters we've attracted across Europe. We've attracted across, you know, APJ. We'll have some exciting announcements about that today. And then on the operating side, we've brought in a number of, you know, really senior executives on the operating side, whether it's in professional services, whether it's in, you know, revenue, and sales operations.
We're getting some of the greatest talent in the industry wanting to come work here right now, Emma, and, you know, it was just last night in my hotel room, I got 2 more pings from really senior people at some really big companies wondering, what's going on in San Francisco and Rising this week and how do I become part of that journey?
Great.
So I forwarded that on to a bunch of people. So I just feel like with the energy and the momentum we have in the market and as a team, we can attract great talent, and when combined with the existing amazing talent you'll see up here, like from Sayan, who's been here a long time, and Doug, that's when magic happens.
Yeah.
I think we're in a very interesting time and space in the history of Workday, and I think people wanna be on this journey with us for the foreseeable future.
It's exciting times for sure, and I'm gonna stay with you and kind of evolve on that a little bit more, Carl. It's your first Rising, as you said, and your first Rising as co-CEO. So what are some of the themes you've been hearing from customers that are really driving Workday's business right now?
Yeah. You know, so first, I know, there isn't a day that doesn't go by where I don't wake up and think about the massive opportunity we have ahead.
Mm-hmm.
We have ample opportunity across many parts of our business. It's really about how we go execute to get it, and you'll hear a lot about that today. I, I just see opportunity everywhere we look, whether it's in how we go to market, whether it's what we've displayed on stage with Aneel and Sayan and the product team today. I guess the word I'd say is opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. The other thing that Aneel and I actually had some customer meetings this morning, our customers absolutely love us. They trust us. They want to be part of the Workday journey, but they're also very vocal, they're very direct, and they demand a lot from us, and Aneel and I heard that this morning.
It's great when you go into a customer meeting, and they tell you all the good things that are happening, and then we also turn the page and say, "Hey, what can we do better?" They're not shy.
Right.
But it's what makes us better. So I really think, you know, our customer engagement and, and the feedback they give us is really important. And then the last thing I'd say, I think we are in a very unique position right now. You know, when there's a tailwind in the market, everyone does well, and Workday will do extremely well if there's a tailwind. If there's a headwind, I think our value proposition for our customers is only accelerating and becoming more prevalent. People are looking to consolidate from best of suite or best of breed to best of suite. We're seeing that. There's a lower cost, total cost of ownership people are getting, by going to our platform. They see the innovation we're doing.
We're opening it up, you know, to an ecosystem that we announced today on stage to, you know, go forward. So I just think I see opportunity everywhere. And the last thing I'd say is there are very few companies in the history of technology that can originate what Aneel and Dave did from being a system of record to a system of engagement, to a system of intelligence, where we built in deep AI and ML capabilities from the very beginning, to what I then describe as a system of trust, going back to the customers.
Mm.
They trust us, because we do support their most precious assets, their people and their finances.
Yeah.
That's, that's what I see, and that's what gets me excited. It's opportunity, opportunity, opportunity.
That's wonderful, and I'm gonna dive a little deeper into something you said about customer love. So I'm gonna come to you for this one, Aneel. I'm gonna sneak another little question in. We celebrated yesterday, Mark Newsome, the customer number seven from McKee Foods, which was wonderful to see him on stage, and it's such a reflection on the power of the Workday community. And really, you know, the customer success is really our success. Is there anything else that stood out to you over the last day or so, speaking to so many customers as you do? Any special moments that you wanna share with any customers or any great feedback that they've given us?
Yeah. Well, that, that was a special moment, and, you know, for any, any entrepreneur in, in any, startup, you remember those early customers that bet on you, and, you're just grateful that they took the risk when I mean, we, we probably had 10 developers, and we didn't have a payroll, and they bought a product, and we built the payroll for them. I mean, that's, that's just magic. I've met with several of our large customers. What I really enjoyed is that they're having a good experience, and they want to know more about AI.
Mm-hmm.
But they also want to know more about the full platform.
Yeah.
So a Fortune 100 financial services company is a very, very happy HR customer. I spent an hour with them today, talking about Financials.
Mm-hmm.
I, I feel like some of these very large companies are now finally moving into the cloud with Financials, and those conversations are happening here. I don't know when they will actually culminate in a sale, but I, I see that.
Mm-hmm.
Feedback on our UI, and they love the vision, but they want it, they want it now. And so we're working on that. I still think on the AI/ML front, what I'm hearing from customers, that they're still learning, and we have to do the job of not just building great products but actually educating customers-
Mm
on how to use them.
Yeah.
That was a theme that came back, which is this technology sounds great, but if you're an HR executive or a finance executive, it's a little scary. Help us understand how to use it, and that's where the trust comes back.
Yeah, the trusted advisor piece is super important there. So for both of you, Carl and Aneel, there's a handful of growth drivers that we're covering throughout the day, including International expansion, our partner ecosystem, Fins, AI, ML, and M&A, so lots of things. Carl, let's start with you. You've got oversight of the sales and customer experience team, so I'd love you to start with your thoughts before we pass on to Aneel, on International partners and Fins, if you may.
Sure. So I think we've been talking to all of the folks in the room, Emma, for, you know, at least the last 7 or 8 months-
Mm-hmm
As it relates to our International opportunity. I think everyone knows the metric, 25% of our revenues come from outside, not North America, outside the US. We include Canada in our International operations. So you know, we have a tremendous opportunity. Only 50% of the TAM of our total addressable market is in the US. The rest of it is outside, yet 25% of our revenues. So we have taken a very targeted approach to how we expand and how we focus on our International build-out, starting with great people in the hiring that Doug will speak about, but also how we start to think about the products and how we internationalize and localize them.
And the other thing, back to a point Aneel mentioned, as we go International more and we push harder into both Europe and APJ, we're finding our customers are making a full platform decision, because it is a medium enterprise. It's slightly downmarket from the Fortune, you know, 500 that we deal with here in the US. They're buying both Fins at the same time as HCM, and they're wrapping planning or Adaptive Planning around for both financial and workforce planning. So, the International opportunity is a huge bet we're making. We're doubling down. We're hiring. We're bringing in great leadership. And then lastly, you know, we're partnering as well to go International because we can't go direct everywhere, and we need to leverage the partner ecosystem. On Fins, this is a huge opportunity.
As Aneel said, we're now talking to our customers, Fortune 100 customers, about looking at, you know, Workday Financials. Obviously, they're all doing well. They love the HCM platform that we continue to innovate, but now we're doubling down on Fins. And, you know, Aneel and I hosted a strategic off-site meeting, I think in January or February, and we said, "This is the year we're truly doubling down on the Fins opportunity," and we gave a significant amount of headcount across the company to double down on that opportunity. And at the last earnings call, I think you heard us talk about that only 20%-25% of Financials have moved to the cloud. That is a huge opportunity for us.
So I think we're doubling down on the Financials opportunity at the time when customers are more open to move those precious resources and assets and data to the cloud. So the financial opportunity is really massive, and we're seeing early signs of the build-out of, you know, the go-to-market there. And then lastly, partners. You know, our partners, you can just walk through this conference, you'll see every big partner in the world, every big global system integrator here sponsoring the conference.
But really, if you look at what they've done, they've built massive businesses on deploying Workday for, you know, for the 18 years of their existence, and now we're starting to work with them to help us go to market so that they're not only building big businesses around, you know, the Workday practice, but now we're giving them referral fees. We're doing co-sell, we're doing resell. We're partnering with people like AWS, right, and selling to the marketplace. So we are absolutely looking to expand the partner ecosystem, and not just for partner's sake, but also go-to-market operating leverage. And that'll take a while for us to get right. It'll take a while for us to get, you know, the momentum we want to augment what we're doing in our direct side.
But I will tell you, the early signs are quite exciting, and I think Doug will spend more time on that up here in a little bit.
Wonderful. Well, I'm certainly very passionate about the International expansion piece.
Yes!
I'm really excited about the opportunities that we have there, for sure. And Aneel, you touched a little bit on AI and ML and our focus. Would love you to talk a little bit more from an innovation perspective, how you're thinking about M&A as we continue to scale.
Well, first of all, just, as Carl mentioned, AWS and partners, I do think they're really, really important co-innovation-
Mm-hmm
P artners, too. In the model, as we move more of the workloads from the private cloud to the public cloud, we're able to leverage their capabilities, and we have great relationships with both of those companies. I was on the stage for Google Next, and they're really working with us to do some very cool things on GenAI, and I think that's super exciting. It allows us to do what we do best, which is to build great applications-
Mm.
using what we, what we're trying to solve for, ML and AI. I don't think our M&A strategy really has changed very much over the years. It's interesting, in the world we're in today, I see a lot of very interesting AI startups. We'll see which ones actually get some momentum. But in general, we've always looked for really strong technical teams solving a problem that is typically adjacent to the Workday marketplace, like planning, or in the case of, more recently, VNDLY, with, contingent worker management. When we look at these applications, they have to have great teams, great products. We're not looking for a lot of revenue. We're looking for a proven model, and we're looking for something that we can put into our sales force and get the scale and leverage.
We've never been a company focused on really large acquisitions. I think I've told that story here every year for the last decade. I think we're gonna continue to focus in on those emerging companies that have something special that are adjacent to what Workday is building, but fit our sales model of HR and finance, potentially now even IT.
Mm-hmm. Okay, that's wonderful. And I know we only have a few more minutes left, so Carl, I'd love to come to you as we close. I know that you are a person that believes in something... You call the power of threes. So if the analysts have three main takeaways from today, what do you want everybody here in our audience to walk away remembering?
There's a lot of things I want them to take away. Maybe I'll say four.
Can't have 33.
Okay.
You can have three.
No, no.
Just three.
Maybe I'll have four.
Okay.
So the first one is, I hope you recognize the incredible talent we have at Workday, and you will see on stage today some of the best technologists, as best tech, you know, go-to-market folks, and, and one of the best CFOs in our industry. And if you combine that with the talent we're bringing in, I think we have some of the best talent, and they are joining us because of the core values that this company has been built on over the last 18 years, thanks to David and Aneel. So that's number one. Number two, I hope you walk away, once again, understanding the durability of the Workday business. We don't have a single tenant that we're tied to as far as customer base, you know, or new sales. It's both. We are diversified across many industries. We're gonna grow our International footprint.
We have a very diverse business, and that gives us the opportunity to do really well in both times of tailwinds and headwinds. The second thing is, we have many of growth opportunities ahead. These don't happen overnight, but we will get leverage and operating leverage from them. You'll hear today about our five core drivers, which is International, fins. We're doubling down on partners. Thanks to Aneel and Sayan, you'll hear about AI and ML, and where appropriate, we'll do M&A. We have core drivers to sustain a business model-
Mm
W ell into the future. And last is you'll hear about our financial framework from Zane. This is a very good business. It's solid. It's been that way for a long time, and you're gonna see a three-year roadmap that allows us to continue to build on our success of the past and take it into the future. And we truly believe the durability and the resilience of this business will be seen both at the top line growth and expansion of the bottom line in operating margin. They're not mutually exclusive, right? We think they're tied together, and we can expand both, right, going forward, if we execute on the growth drivers you'll hear today.
Okay, wonderful. Aneel, do you want to sneak three in?
No, I just got one. Well, I'd first start off by saying this is a great moment for Workday. I think our future is really bright. I couldn't be more optimistic about where we're headed. It's rare in the life cycle of a company that you get a chance to be part of two major technology disruptions. Workday exists because we disrupted the ERP and HR markets with a cloud offering that was ahead of our competition. I think if we do it right, and you're gonna hear from Sayan, we will do it right. If we do it right on AI, I think it's equally disruptive, and we've been so focused on replacing legacy software. I think we have a chance to actually replace...
Cloud deployments of other ERP vendors and HR vendors, if we do it, because the value we'll bring with AI is so much better than what you get out of a commodity legacy cloud providers, and you know who I'm talking about. So, I think there's a chance to just also replace existing cloud deployments, not just not legacy, and I think that's just a phenomenal opportunity for us.
Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. I, for one, have been very inspired by the conversation. I couldn't be more excited and inspired myself to be part of this organization. So with that, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So hopefully, all of you attended the Innovation Keynote this morning and heard all of the inspiring content that we had from Sayan himself, and he's going to join the stage any second to give you some more insights into Workday's AI and ML advancements. So please join me in welcoming to the stage our Co-President, Sayan Chakraborty.
Thanks, Emma, Carl, Aneel. Since we were last together here a year ago, a lot has changed. Most importantly, OpenAI's public release of ChatGPT in November officially inaugurated the generative AI era. And that's what I'd like to talk to you about today, how Workday is positioned to capitalize on generative AI, the revolution that's going on, and share a bit about where we're going with all this. I think it helps to touch on what generative AI really is in a straightforward manner. At its core, it's just another form of machine learning based on artificial neural networks, a technology that learns from massive amounts of data to find patterns, and from those patterns, to make predictions. This technology isn't new, right? It's been around, artificial neural networks since the 1960s. I built a neural network at MIT in 1990.
But it's taken several innovations outside of that specific technology to get us to where we are today. Necessary innovations in our ability to collect data, to transfer massive amounts of data, innovations in processing capability. I think especially the realization that the math necessary for graphics processing was the same math necessary for neural networks that allowed us to leverage GPUs for machine learning, and you've all seen that with NVIDIA's incredible success. And breakthroughs in algorithmic approaches, particularly the transformer technology out of Google in 2017, that allowed us to take what was a serial processing model and turn it into parallel processing, so we could take advantage of the massive scale of these networks.
It's putting all these things together and then combining it with a market that's evolved, that's really ready now to adopt these technologies in a way that it wasn't a few years ago. So knowing ML is good at handling pattern identification in these massive amounts of data, generative AI takes it a step farther by building really gigantic models, trillions of parameters, with massive amounts of data to produce emergent characteristics, and able to do things that models couldn't do before.
...
I have to say you like I. I have to say you.
Please take your seats. Our program is about to begin.
But there's alive, and then there's living. Am I living for today? Mm. I'm getting older with every memory I make.
Apologies for the inconvenience. We will continue our program. If you could please take your seats. Thank you very much.
Did your mama always say, "Look up into the sky, find the sun on a cloudy day?" Did your mama always say-
This is like when this happens at home, like, I have to go find the circuit breaker. No, that's not the right one. So that's what they're doing back there. Picking up where we left off, we're talking about key risks that I think are inherent in generative AI and the way these models are built. And I think these are structural, right? And especially when you're talking about consumer generative AI built on a common crawl of the internet, and when you're pulling these massive datasets of uncertain provenance, uncertain contents, lots of comment threads off the internet. Anyone spent time in comment threads on the internet kind a gets what I'm talking about. There's good stuff there and not so good stuff there.
The producers of these models have been less than transparent about what exactly went into their training data. What we've seen so far is that it may never be possible to fully align or ground opaque internet models like GPT and make them safe for high-risk use cases. I believe, Workday believes that it's best to start to treat this problem much further upstream, with the data that goes into training and fine-tuning these models. We found, in fact, the risks become much more manageable when we're talking about models trained on highly curated fact sets, so kind of core Workday data, coupled with our responsible approach to building and deploying, AI. We do use enterprise LLMs, at Workday. We've developed our own. We're not just reliant on leveraging other people's internet-trained models. We have our own in-house developed models.
We also use open-source models. We've been working on large language models for the last several years. We've been using them in production actually for quite some time now, for search and skills. But even though we've developed our own models and are leveraging others, it's not clear to me that long-term models are gonna be differentiated. They're already being commoditized. There are over 100,000 models available for public use and download on Hugging Face right now. So we believe that what will continue to matter is expertise and data. Do you have it? Are you allowed to use that data? Is it in clear form? Do you have provenance on the data? Have you made efforts to identify and address inherent bias in that data? And we have data.
We have a single, secure, large, high quality, and constantly growing dataset that spans HR and finance. We have over 65 million users under contract. They produce over 600 billion transactions a year. But it's not just we do talk about the structured data we have, but it's not just structured transactional data. We also have massive amounts of unstructured data tied deeply into that structured data, right? We have over 11 billion files and process logs, policy documents, contract documents, and we're on pace to exceed over 265 million job applications in 2023. It's also as important to note that every customer at Workday, and I think this is exceptional in enterprise software, is running the exact same version of software at the same time everywhere in the world. Why does that matter?
Well, it certainly matters from being able to deliver security, security updates across the entire population simultaneously in an increasing threat environment. But focusing on AI, it matters because there's no conversion cost or friction associated with understanding the data we have, and when we want to deliver value back to the customer, we know they can uptake that value immediately. And the technology, our technology platform, has always had security built in from the ground up, tightly controlled access and auditing. And it matters because of the way machine learning works, because machine learning gets better the more you use it. It's a learning process, and the more places you use it, the variety of places you use it, it's a flywheel effect. You can see that with Workday Skills Cloud, right? We use skills throughout our product.
We have skills in recruiting, we have skills in learning, and the quality of the outcome in all of those surface areas becomes stronger and stronger the more customers use it and in the more different places they use it. But to take advantage of that flywheel, you have to deploy it as a platform technology everywhere you can, and you have to deliver that value in a trustworthy way so customers can use it and will want to use it more. So to talk more about this platform approach, look, we've built a state-of-the-art platform. We really have, and I'm very proud of it. It allows us to deliver AI responsibly, responsible AI, including security and privacy. We provide customers with visibility into and control over how we use their data.
We have the ability to ground and align our models to ensure the results are trustworthy and accurate during training, during fine-tuning, and at inference time when they're in active use. Our models are typically federated models, and that allows us to meet regional regulatory requirements. These are edge models, and so they can do final training at the edge of in the customer environment. And we, by our standard, always look at the problem from using hybrid, ensemble, or mix of expert approaches, and I think this is the way all of this technology is gonna be delivered by everybody going forward. That's when you use multiple models together to produce a better outcome than any single model can. And we can actually combine Workday models, third-party models, and open source models together in these ensembles.
And we can actually also bring in domain-specific models that are smaller, cheaper, better, like all three. They're smaller models, they're cheaper to operate, and they actually deliver better outcomes, and then we combine them with other models. But those of you who've been following Workday for a long time know that at our core, we have trusted long-term relationships with our customers, and that really pays off when you're deploying a technology like generative AI that has lots of sharp edges associated with it. We build on this relationship by providing transparency and control, so we create this environment where our customers are happy, where they wanna provide us with the data, and thousands of our customers have done that, so they can take advantage of our AI-powered solutions to give them, in turn, a differential advantage. And it goes just beyond our customers, right?
We're actively involved in shaping AI policy to make sure that benefits can be realized and risks can be mitigated. We're involved at the state, federal, and International levels. This combination of our technology platform and approach, really the data we have, who we are as a business, and the trust we develop with our customers, uniquely enables us at Workday. So we're uniquely suited to capitalize on this moment. Going beyond that, we can get leverage from our ecosystem. Through our Extend platform, our new AI Gateway that you've already heard about, our Extend customers and ISVs and SIs can build their own applications. They can leverage Workday models, they can leverage Workday security, they can bring in their own or open source models, or they can even leverage proprietary models from partners like OpenAI, GCP, and AWS.
And they can incorporate Prism into this as well, so in the future, we can enable customers to use Prism to bring data into Workday, enrich Workday's object model with that data, which allows them to then use our security model and all the controls that come with Workday, build applications on top of that data, leveraging AI Gateway to bring ML to that solution and produce really exceptional results. It's very exciting. And this morning, we announced Workday AI Marketplace, which I think is a great example of the unique take that Workday has on ecosystems and what customers want and need. Because there's this incredible energy and excitement among this generation of AI native, AI first companies.
AI Marketplace is designed to allow our customers to thoughtfully and safely take advantage of all the vibrancy going on outside of Workday by partnering with those companies and Workday to do it safely. Shifting from the ecosystem, you're also gonna see Workday leveraging this technology internally as a way that we can reduce cost and increase productivity over time. It's gonna provide our business with substantially more leverage. We're already deploying copilots across our software teams to accelerate our ability to write and deliver code, and we anticipate utilizing GenAI to bring down our costs and improve productivity and velocity across the entire software development life cycle. We see real opportunities, for example, in code review, in security review, in cybersecurity threat and log examination, in our data center operations.
Even looking beyond R&D and software development, we can look at reducing the cost and speeding up the delivery and deployment of our software to our customers. It's through this combination, GenAI, incorporating our software development operations life cycle, our ongoing shift in our location strategies, continuing our leverage of public cloud, that we can reduce the cost and speed up customer deployments, and we can believe that all of that together can significantly impact R&D and OpEx spend over time. That's even as we continue to invest more in areas like generative AI. In addition to gaining leverage, we also believe that we can add to the top line with generative AI. You've already heard from Aneel and Carl that we believe that AI in general, and generative AI in particular, are transformative technologies that organizations will want and will need to adopt to stay competitive.
We're gonna offer most of these capabilities to our customers as part of their current product subscription, including generous base usage limits, rather than creating haves and have-nots among our customers. But we also know that generative AI is substantially more expensive to train and use than previous AI technologies. While we do expect those cost curves to come down, they always have in technology before, o ur approach of using smaller domain and task-specific models will help us defray some of that cost in the near term, but we will plan to charge a usage uplift for customers once they've exceeded. There are specifics about those here today, but I will share some of the criteria we're using to define when we want something to be a standalone SKU versus a base capability in the product. First is, is it additive? Is it non-essential to our core product?
The second is, does it leverage unique data or combinations of data where we have a differential advantage? The third is, is this technology easy to deploy or easy to self-deploy for our customers so they can quickly realize time to value with this capability? And then we are gonna continue to look at the economics of it. Is this inherently expensive to operate? Because that may require us to have a different pricing model than the way we price our core products, and make it a natural, separate SKU in that case. We also expect to grow demand for some of our existing products, like Extend, as more customers and partners utilize technologies like AI Gateway, and they'll be charged an uplift via new SKU, and they'll get ongoing usage charges based on volume of use, especially if they're using third-party models.
And with our partners, we're also introducing new revenue models, and Doug is going to speak honestly to that in more depth. But that includes direct monetization through referrals and indirect monetization through things like co-innovation and the AI marketplace. So where does all of that put us? Four key focus areas I want you to keep in mind. We are focused on delivery of GenAI and AI in general, plain old machine learning from last year, in the product, base product or additional SKUs. That was an ML joke, but with a continued focus on human-centered responsible AI. We will be incorporating GenAI internally at Workday to drive leverage and continued reduction of R&D as a percentage of revenue.
We'll be focused on expansion of the ecosystem to take advantage of all this vibrancy, all this innovation and investment across the technology landscape, and our continued engagement with customers, regulatory agencies, and other key stakeholders to make sure that this technology is being delivered in a way that maximizes value, but mitigates risk. We believe that these focus areas will positively impact revenue, will increase competitive win rate, and will allow our net revenue retention to remain extremely high. It will impact cost. We will decrease R&D as a percentage of revenue over time, even as we make substantial investments into GenAI. Look, I know this section is called Where We're Headed, but I think it's useful to remember that we're actually delivering GenAI today in our products right now.
So I'm gonna finish talking about it, and I'm gonna ask Aashna Kircher to come on stage and show you what we're building for customers. Okay?
Thanks, Sayan. Hi, everybody. My name is Aashna Kircher. I'm our general manager for our talent products here at Workday. I actually joined Workday in January of 2014, the same month that we made our first acquisition in the AI space, and I've been working on embedding AI in our products ever since. Today, I've got the pleasure of showing you how the investments that we're making in generative AI are manifesting and coming to life in our products. At the core of these investments are the three design principles that you see here. The first is designing for simplicity. We truly believe that AI should reduce complexity and not increase it. The second is building trust through transparency. We know from our research that explainability is key in reducing bias and building trust with users.
And the third, and perhaps most important one, is keeping the user in control. We're in the business of fostering collaboration between humans and machines. We know that AI provides ample opportunity to automate business processes, but our emphasis remains on augmenting and not replacing people. So let's take a look at how these principles are showing up in a handful of generative AI use cases. You may have seen one or two of these in the keynote this morning, but we're going to go a little deeper. Please roll the demo. We'll start in the office of the CHRO, where talent, retention, growth, and development are permanently top of mind for HR leaders. We know from our customers that managers are at the nexus of so much of the change that their organizations are experiencing, and their number one priority is developing their people.
As the single source of truth for people data, Workday is uniquely suited to support and supercharge this development. As a manager, I'm going to go ahead and start in our newly released Manager Insights Hub, my one-stop shop for all things related to developing my team. I'm going to select Create Growth Plan, where I now see Workday AI ingest performance reviews, peer feedback, and other structured and unstructured performance data to generate a personalized and tailored summary of an employee's strengths and areas of growth. I can also choose to regenerate this summary, based on an employee's needs. Here, selecting a future job profile of interest. At every step of the way, we keep transparency at the forefront, and I can make changes as I'm the ultimate decision maker.
Here, we surface those inputs as the new plan is processing, and once we have our new growth summary, I can view sources at any point in time to pinpoint the data underlying the AI's recommendations, so that I can better understand what data exactly is contributing to the strengths and growth opportunities presented to me for my employee. Workday AI then goes a step further in recommending actions that my employee can take to build on this growth plan. Here, you can see those recommended actions, all next steps that they can take in Workday, including meeting a mentor, completing a piece of learning, or even joining a stretch project or flex team. Ultimately, in the same spirit of transparency, our manager can share that growth plan directly with the employee.
So you can see how Workday AI is saving managers hours of time in summarizing and synthesizing information if they were doing it at all, but more importantly, elevating the quality of the conversation with employees around growth. Let's now take a look at how generative AI can impact the office of the CFO. Consider contract analysis. Once contracts are executed, they must be ingested into Workday. Then, finance teams spend lots and lots of time, reviewing and ensuring that the data is accurate. Frankly, this is boring, and it can take a couple hours per contract. But now, with generative AI, we can ingest and analyze contracts within a matter of seconds, allowing you to minimize downstream disruption. Our contract admin receives a proactive notification through Slack that lets them know that the terms of the contract in Workday don't match the terms of the signed contract.
Specifically, it highlights that the end date is mismatched. I'm gonna decide to dig a bit deeper, and I go ahead and select Investigate, which brings me into Workday, where Workday AI is already active along the side. Here, I can see a summary in the side panel of my key terms and dates, a summary of the contract, and a clear call to action around the data discrepancy that was just flagged. With one click, I can pinpoint the source of that data discrepancy. I can see a comparison of the signed contract and the data in Workday, with the mismatched data highlighted for ease of use. Workday AI then goes a step forward in recommending actions and resolutions. But before I accept this offer, I decide to check for an early termination clause.
Here, I can use the contextual question prompts provided to me by Workday AI, or type a free-form question and use autocomplete, as you see here. Workday AI, having read the contract, replies that there was indeed a termination clause, but that it has ended. For my contract admin, this is great news, and I'm now comfortable and ready to move forward with the original proposed changes. But Workday AI first surfaces to me, clearly documenting before and after changes to the data and clear next steps so that I understand and can make changes or adjustments at any point in the way to what's gonna happen next. In this case, I'm fine with it, and I tell Workday AI to go ahead and resolve the issue.
My contract admin has been saved hours of time, and she and her team now are freed up to work on more strategic imperatives to drive the business forward. But generative AI's impact isn't just limited to Workday's applications. It's also transforming the Workday platform and the office of the CIO. Workday Extend allows our customers and partners to build bespoke people and money applications on the Workday platform. We now have over 600 customers and thousands of developers that have deployed over 1,300 applications on Workday Extend, up more than 70% relative to last year. Customers and partners are drawn to the ability to seamlessly access Workday data through a consistent UI, object model, security model, and of course, with the comfort of running inside the Workday cloud.
As you heard Sayan just share, we expect continued momentum with both customers and partners in using Workday Extend moving forward. Let's take a look at how generative AI is impacting the Workday developer ecosystem, upskilling them and making them exponentially more productive. As a developer, from my app builder page, I see a new icon called Workday Developer Copilot, my partner for every step of the building journey. It serves as a guide from design to deploy and provides seamless text to code generation. In this example, I'm building a volunteer certification app, and I decide to ask Workday Developer Copilot for help. I'm gonna ask it to generate a Graph API query for me, and sure enough, it pulls a query with the exact volunteer and worker data that I was looking for. Copilot is context-aware. It knows our code, and it knows our app.
In this example, volunteer is an object that I've specifically built for this application. It's not data in Workday. We've turned natural language into a fully functioning GraphQL query, and it even goes a step further, providing prompts like Add to App to help guide me through the next actions I can take. But before I do that, I decide that I'm going to update this code, and I ask it, in this example, to add an expiration date to that query. Once it updates the code, and I'm comfortable and have reviewed this, I decide to go ahead and add this code directly to my application. But Copilot doesn't stop there. It knows that I'm likely to build a page and offers to build this page for me.
Again, once I review the proposal, with one click, I can now view my AI-generated page live in App Builder, all done within a minute or so that we've been talking here. You can see how Workday Developer Copilot will transform the way that customers, partners, and even our own Workday developers, as Sayan just talked about, leverage, can deliver value at a pace previously thought impossible. These are just three select use cases that highlight the breadth and impact that generative AI can have across Workday's platform. Teams in every function are thoughtfully experimenting with dozens more generative AI use cases, validating them with customers and with users. Many of these we're showing at Rising here next, this week.
At the end of the day, our goal is to amplify human performance across all user types, managers, employees, professional users, and even developers. In doing so, we empower our customers to make quick and informed decisions so they can focus on solving their critical and ever-changing business problems. With that, I'd love to welcome our Co-President, Doug Robinson, to the stage. Thanks.
Good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
Think of the lengths that our competitors will go. Cutting our mics? Take that as the sign of desperation that it is, analysts, please. All right. So I'm Doug Robinson, Workday Co-President. I have the enviable job of bringing all that innovation that you heard from Sayan and Aashna to market. So that's what I'm going to talk to you about. A fun fact for you. One of Workday's two co-presidents qualified for Jeopardy! I'll let you come to your own conclusion about which one of us that was, but I'll give you a hint. He has advanced degrees from MIT. It wasn't me. Okay. All right. So there are lots of ways that we dimensionalize our go-to-market. Certainly, you are aware, but we go by certainly geography, solution center or buying center, so OCFO, Office of the CHRO.
We look at large enterprise, we look at medium enterprise, but we thought a really good way to walk you through it today was to focus and bring this to life for you around this notion of net new and customer base. Carl mentioned some of this in his comments at the beginning, or as we like to call it, land and expand motion. So we'll step through both of those, and then I'll provide you some context on where are the big bets that we're making from a go-to-market perspective that cut across all of these different dimensions that I just mentioned to you. All right, so let's get started with the land motion, which really remains the lifeblood of Workday. And even at our scale, we, you can still see we drive roughly half of our new business from new logos.
I think it's important to note this fact that 18 years in, we still have a sales culture of focusing on net new opportunities, bringing net new core customers to the business. As you heard at our last earnings call, I believe we disclosed this, we now have over 5,000 core customers. So core meaning HCM or Financials or both. But now you put that against the backdrop of what we believe our addressable market to be, which is 40,000 in this addressable market, and so it's still, still very early going against this broad opportunity set, which is why we have that focus on that land motion. We also have over 50% of the Fortune 500 and 25% plus of the Global 2000 .
But if you put that on the other side, it means we still have another 50%, as Aneel likes to remind me, 50% more to go of the Fortune 500 in this massive opportunity with the Global 2000, which is, generally speaking, all of the International sort of large enterprise gets swept into that, which is, again, part of our focus on the International expansion and land motion for our business. I think it's also important to not underestimate our opportunity in the large enterprise, so that Fortune 500, when you consider that accounts in three of our strongest verticals, not the only three verticals we focus on, but three really strong ones, don't show up in the Fortune 500, other than maybe nine or so healthcare providers that are for-profit.
All of these large enterprises within government, education, healthcare, a lot of them fit into that large enterprise space for us, and we have dedicated sellers going against each of these industries in the land opportunity. So we're focused on the big ones, the large enterprise and the Global 2000 , Fortune 500, but we also have this really strong motion and a vibrant opportunity within medium enterprise. Over half of our new land dollars in the US came from the ME market in the trailing twelve months, which we define as less than 3,500 employees.
An important development, and one we'll get into here in a little bit when I talk about that investment area of, of where we're placing our bets for the fiscal year, is taking that same playbook that we've now sold 2,500 medium enterprise customers in the U.S., taking it into some of our really important International markets. And so again, we'll hit on that a bit more later. You also can't talk about our land opportunity without sort of striping our business by industry. And as we've recently disclosed, we now have two industries that are over $1 billion in ARR for Workday: financial services and retail and hospitality. And what we see in this, in these industries, particularly the ones highlighted here, is that we tend to land larger.
We tend to land with this industry focus with HCM and FinancialsFinancials, and I'll give you some sort of further disclosure about what we're seeing in that space. But it's also important to note, every single one of these industries has an opportunity to reach that same scale as I just highlighted, that billion-dollar plus, across, a billion-dollar plus ARR over time. Okay, that's the land business, and I want to now transition to the expand business, which has actually been growing faster than our land in recent years, and arguably, even earlier days for us. So as we've talked about, our value proposition is only getting stronger as a true platform. I think Sayan and Aashna in the keynotes this morning have highlighted that particular strength, and that's driving meaningful momentum across our, our broader solution portfolio.
So the expand motion would be the other 50%, roughly, has been a big source of investment over the last few years. In fact, many of you who spend time with us on a quarterly basis know that we really made this pivot to customer-base focus at the beginning of COVID, and that continues to be the case for us, that we're investing further in it. So at the same time, the product portfolio's actually expanded significantly in this time period. So we're driving this expand motion overall to be a much more meaningful growth driver for us, especially compared to just a few short years ago. Okay, so we built this compelling, loyal customer base. We highlighted sort of the Fortune 500, Global 2000 aspects of it.
We wanted to give you a sense of, of the breakout of what you see within those 5,000 core customers. You see, we've highlighted for you there Financials customers, core Financials, core HCM. We have some that are just core Financials, which is why you would see the map not tie. You'll have dedicated just core fins or just core HCM customers, and then certainly Venn diagram of overlap. But this, this rich, loyal customer base provides us this really rich opportunity. Now, this slide we've shared with you, I think, at least the last two financial analyst days, and I always get good feedback from this, is really getting a good sense of where which particular solutions are we seeing momentum against.
So if you were to go back and pull those from previous years, you would see that everything has moved to the right, as it should over time. But it's important to remember, this is all the while we're increasing that denominator. As you saw, we're still doing 50% of our business is net new logos, adding to the addressable market for us to then go drive this attach rate. And then, and the attach rate, just for clarity, is against either core HCM or core Financials. That's what we would consider the core customer. So I'll call out one in particular, talent optimization. This time last year, when we met with you, it was at 35% attach. In just 12 months, 45% attach within our customer base and continuing to grow.
But on the other hand, we have so much opportunity with solutions less than 20%, if you look, or even less than 10% penetration at this point. And this is what's driving so much momentum within our customer base motion, a desire by our customers to to standardize on our platform and adopt more of these solutions over time with us. Okay, here's another way of thinking about the expand opportunity, and want to give you just a little bit more insight into the business. What you see here on this bar is pictured our top 100 customers, which is close to approaching $1 billion in ARR. So top 100 customers approaching $1 billion in ARR, but at the same time, you see a nd that's the shaded area on the left, pretty obvious.
Then on the right is the what we believe to be the addressable market just within those 100 customers. Another $2 billion of opportunity for us in, in ARR to go capture. And this isn't a theoretical number. This is us putting it through the paces of product-market fit within these 100 customers, addressable market, and then also looking at sort of normal co-commercial transactions. In other words, we didn't just throw list prices up here and say we got $2 billion more to sell to them. This is what we could realize within these 100 customers, and it's a big focus of ours. This year alone, we've dedicated a team, new development this year, of dedicated key account managers, a key accounts program, a proper key accounts program that really drives the momentum within this space.
These large customers, again, similar talk track or feedback that we get are looking to consolidate, certainly simplify their IT landscape and build off of the Workday platform. You know, the last three or four quarters, there's been talk of what is, how do these early renewals operate? And, I would point out that this, these top 100 customers are emblematic of that.
So where you have a billion, close to a $1 billion ARR, want to be precise, and you have an opportunity for another $2 billion, it's within this segment where we've seen a lot of customers say, "Let's now cast a new strategic plan where we can adopt more of your solutions," the slide you saw two ago, over time with Workday and kick out other more point solutions and look to get some real operating leverage from it. So onward. While we're focused on those top 100 customers, we're also really focused on driving the, the, what we call sort of the create and close motion. You've heard us talk about this on quarterly earnings calls.
Sometimes we refer to them as speed SKUs, but essentially, what these solutions represent are really quick time to value, really quick deployments, and we have the ability to create those opportunities in a beginning of a quarter and close it within that same quarter. And so we have this digital account executive team that we spun up actually last year, was where we made the big investment, but continued that investment this year. That team's solely focused on the solutions you see here and driving those speed SKUs or that create and close motion... You know, earlier, Carl talked about the what we're seeing by way of talent. And while it's true that we're getting some great enterprise talent coming into the company, we also think it's really important to build our own talent pool.
I would point out that these digital account executives are a tremendous source of talent for Workday. They come through the Workday training curriculum program, learn to get some experience, and then they get deployed into the field, and we're seeing really great results and out of that particular team. Okay, so we covered the land, the net new business. We covered the opportunity, the very large opportunity still within our customer base, our expand opportunity. Now, let's move on to those go-to-market bets that we're looking to drive and invest in over the next several years. I'll highlight three for you. I'll call out the first one, but again, there's gonna be three. Core Financials. Yeah, you have to start there.
As Carl mentioned, we believe only about 20%-25% of our addressable market has moved to the cloud for Financials. In many ways, this segment is behaving sort of similar to the early cloud HCM market in that you see stitched together systems, some cloud, some on-prem, but really at the core, sort of on-prem solutions. So we're just getting started there. If in fact, 20%-25%, we believe it's a matter of when, not if, this particular segment moves in entirety to the cloud within Financials. And I wanna paint a little bit more clearer picture. I'll put some numbers to arrows, so it's more instructive than just giving you 3 arrows to look at.
So, first, Carl mentioned this, the largest go-to-market investment we've made this year were these dedicated OCFO sellers. So these are sales professionals who wake up every day, and they only are incented to sell core Financials. It should be really important to understand that this is a global team. It's not like we just put them in U.S. large enterprise or U SME. It cuts across the teams globally. This investment, we've put them in medium enterprise nd large enterprise. We've put them in the land motion, we've put them in the expand motion, and we've put them across industries. Even those industries where I highlighted before, we tend to do really well attaching Financials or sort of full platform from the start. We still think there's opportunity there to get even more, so we're making the investments there.
Again, back to that point of we're having a moment in the market by way of recruiting, this has been a tremendous. We've found a tremendous set of external, sort of, really high-level ERP sellers globally who have a desire to be part of Workday. All right, so now let me sort of give you a little bit more as it relates to the arrows that you see. So first one on the left, what you're seeing there is purely pipeline. The next two, we'll be talking about results. In other words, it booked ACV and feeding our AR engine. So from a, purely from a pipeline perspective, our build year to date is up meaningfully in the last year.
And if you now look at the FINS unit growth, so that's closed new Financials customers, we've added in, in the previous trailing twelve months, rolling four-quarter, 30% more FINS units than the prior period. So again, 30% more units of core Financials, more customers than in the previous period, similar period or compare period. And even in Q2, which, as you know, we just recently wrapped up and shared with you, that growth rate was even faster than the 30%. So we're also seeing a higher percentage of deals closing full platform. So in the rolling four-quarter, roughly one third, one out of three of our land deals, so new customers to Workday, were full platform, meaning they bought HCM and Financials at the same time.
To give you some compare, that was up roughly from a quarter or 25% in the same period last year. Okay, so we're seeing some signals there that we like, and our overall confidence in this market is high. So this is why we're gonna continue to invest. We've added these sellers. It takes time to ramp new people into Workday, but we're seeing really good results, and we find it promising, at least by way of early returns. All right, second area I want to focus on. First was Financials, the second is around International expansion. This has been shared widely, so no need to spend a tremendous amount of time on this, but it is actually greater than 50% of our TAM is outside of the U.S.
And so we're focused on driving acceleration in this particular space. And we, you know, we've been blessed with a strong presence in the U.S. and performance, and we intend to bring this same kind of performance into our Tier One markets. And so for us, that certainly includes U.K., Australia, Germany, and France, and Japan. We'll come back to Japan. And we've also evolved our go-to-market structures within some of these International markets to best align to what these local markets need. And we're going after, as I mentioned before, the very best talent that we can find and bring into our business. So let's start with that.
I mean, go-to-market starts and stops with great leadership, field leadership, and we're coming up on a year now that Angelique de Vries has joined us, and she's done a phenomenal job for us in Europe. And she, of course, brought scale to the role and some experience with scale, but also a real GM and global mindset that, frankly, has been good for our company and for all of us back in California about how we approach and go after these markets and what it takes to be successful. But she's also a really good recruiter. So case in point, Dan Pell has joined us this year to lead our UKI business, and really impressive background with Dan. He was at Salesforce before he came to Workday, and most recently, he led Tableau sales for all of EMEA.
Partnered with Dan is Chris Noll , also new to Workday, coming up on a year as well, who leads our DACH region and came to us from SAP. He was on a rocket ride of a career. Again, he's based in Germany, on a rocket ride of a career at SAP, but decided to come be a part of the Workday journey and bring in some talent with him as well. So really strong leaders from the outside. Again, experience at scale, a desire to be part of Workday and what we're doing here. But also in other key markets like Northern Europe, we've tapped into our internal talent pool to drive us forward.
And so as we've brought in this great talent, I think you probably hear it in our tone and narrative around the really consistent execution that we've seen in EMEA over the last year. And it shows up in ACV, in book deals, and it also shows up in the pipeline build, the rigor with which the team is approaching building pipeline for FY 2025 and beyond. Okay, I mentioned I'd bring up Japan again. So we'll go to APJ, and you know, I mentioned we're making some structural adjustments as well as appropriate. And so to that end, we've recently elevated Japan to a Tier One country. That means something in Workday parlance. Essentially, it means there's company-wide investments around product, CX, customer experience, and our go-to-market teams, and it's a massive market.
We already have some flagship customers in that market, but if there's anything we've learned, it requires a higher level of upfront investment. You have to approach the market very differently than I would say we have historically, but there's opportunity there. And so we're also moving Japan out of the APJ construct, and as I mentioned, moving it to Tier One means it's now on the same footing. It reports directly into Patrick Blair, our President of Global Sales. And so Japan now reports are on the same footing in terms of resourcing and focus as North America, as EMEA, as the, as the remaining APAC region. And so I'm also pleased to announce that we have a new leader for that newly formed APAC region. So starting November first, Simon Tate is going to join us to lead our Asia Pacific team.
Simon comes to us from holding a similar role. He was president of Asia Pacific for Adobe for the last 3.5 years, and so, brings a ton of experience. He was at Salesforce, previously, SAP and EMC, and, and we're really excited about what, Simon will bring to, the teams within, the APAC region. So one part of International growth, I sort of anchored in on, you know, it's important to get the right talent and the right leadership. It's everything, in this business. But the other area where we see real opportunity internationally is around bringing this U.S. medium enterprise, playbook, to the markets in the other Tier One markets. And there's, there's a couple questions you have to answer to be able to successfully do that.
The first of which is, in our experience in the U.S. market, you have to have an end-to-end solution. It's, we have the good fortune and benefit in the U.S. market to have U.S. payroll. Medium enterprise attaches payroll at a really high rate within the U.S. market, and that's a challenge or has been previously a challenge. This is why we went and developed this partnership, with Alight. And you see a circle there with partner, TBA. Stay tuned for the next 24-ish hours. We're gonna do more on this front, where we have really sort of deep integrations with Sayan's team and the payroll providers in country.
So we now go with a complete solution for our customers, and I would add, a complete, seamless solution from onboarding all the way through to, the gross to net and the payroll and the local statutory and tax, reporting that's required there, and all with the ability to manage it, centrally from Workday. So that's one important part of what we got right in the U.S. market that we know is important in some of the Western European countries, but also important in Singapore, Philippines, and some of these other markets we're in. And so you now take that, and you partner, particularly in Australia and the U.K., where we already have our own, built payroll offering. We think there's a lot of opportunity in the medium enterprise market.
So I said there was sort of two, two things we had to do there. The other is this notion of a launch business model. We don't talk about it a whole lot externally, but essentially, we have come up with very defined, fixed fee, fixed duration, low-risk deployments in the US medium enterprise market, and we did so based off of learnings from our 2,500 customers. We didn't define best practices by industry. As Sayan talks about our technology, it's an object graph, and it lights up how these 2,500 customers use our software. And from there, you can say, "How have the 400 mid-size banking customers or FSI customers used the software?" And then you can come up with deployment plans and also packaging and pricing that meet those requirements. So we're taking those learnings.
We're off this fantastic foundation that we can then take this deployment approach, this launch methodology, into the International markets. Okay, I said there were three. This is the third and final one, which is our partner transformation. So globally, it's, you know, quite impressive. It's a vibrant economy, a multi-billion dollar economy all to itself of 19,500 certified consultants. And it's been critical to our success and our customer satisfaction that hopefully you're picking up on here as you interact with our great customers. And so it's been an important part of our success. This ecosystem, in the last 12 months, has deployed 95% of projects on time and on budget, which is, I'm pausing for effect because that's, in my 30 years of experience, rather unheard of in ERP and HR deployments.
So that's great. However, we think there's a real opportunity for this same ecosystem to not just give great customer sat and deployments, but also help us drive the market from the top, the top of funnel, and become a much bigger driver of opportunities for Workday. And so today, less than 3% of our ACV is sourced from the channel. Not a, a badge of honor. There's an opportunity here, is how I hope you, you take that. And at the same time, less than 25% partner impacted, which really means really influenced by, the partner. And so that's great opportunity for us, which is why we decided, when Carl came in and we all sat down and said, "What are, what are we doing with partners?" This is why we're driving this partner transformation. We think it's...
I think Carl used the phrase operating leverage. We see tremendous opportunity to get operating leverage from this partner ecosystem of almost 20,000. And so we've really divided that into three tracks: sales partners, innovation partners, and services partners. And many partners, like an Accenture or Deloitte, cut across all three of these, but these are sort of specific swim lanes where we have specific value and ways in which we're going to market together and finding alternative routes to market. So I'll go through each of these really quick. We set up really clear incentive structures. This is only four or five months old, but they're now in place.
In that 4 or 5 months, we signed up 80 referral partners, where the incentives are in place, and then another 15 of these co-sell partners, which is usually we're selling, in, in most cases, selling side by side, but then taking that all the way through delivery into the project outcome, and we're seeing really good early signs of that. Already, with the AWS announcement that we did earlier this year, we've seen $70 million of total contract value created and closed so far with this partnership, and the pipeline's building. Okay, second track within the partner transformation is the innovation partners, and I think a lot of this touches on what Sayan and Aashna were talking about.
But over time, over the longer term, we think we have an opportunity to nurture an ecosystem of software partners that are building entire businesses on the Workday platform. And one important step here, we recently launched this week, our Innovation Partner Program for the software ecosystem, and the new Solution Marketplace, I believe, went out today. And really, what that's all about is matching these 300 partners. We think there will be significantly more over time. You should expect that from us. But matching these partners and their solutions to our customers with demand, and then providing that to our existing customer base. All right. Last one I'm going to cover for you is around services partners, and these are the ones you traditionally would think of as...
When you think of Workday's ecosystem, which is the large global GSIs and some of the boutique partners that have really dedicated practices around deploying Workday. And for this, and as you've seen today, Extend is a really, major investment area for us here, and it has implications for our partners, too. I've had a number of one-on-ones just this morning with some of these partners that you see referenced, and there's great opportunity to co-innovate together. And the way we're thinking about it, and these four partners are thinking about it and others, but these are certainly, notional and for example, what industry expertise can these partners bring? What IP can they bring to the table? And then marry that up through Extend to expand the usage and the use cases that Workday can solve for by industry.
That's a tremendous benefit to our financial sellers who go out to solve a lot of corner cases with our customers, and when you do full Financials and HCM, you can't leave capabilities behind. You have to be able to solve for all. A great example of this, by the way, is Accenture. They just recently developed industry accelerators for retail and hospitality. They've built out a market architecture, deeper integrations, and we're really going to market with them in that vertical. They've also done the same thing with media and technology companies as well. But there'll be much more to come on this front. We mentioned Sayan mentioned co-sell, resell. There's revenue share opportunities that we're looking to take advantage of.
Some of them take time to develop, but they're pretty magical when you can tap into them and go to market together with the power of some of these companies. Okay. As I hope you can see, we're pretty fired up. I mean, I didn't know break was the next slide. We got a lot of reasons to be excited about the break. Thank you. We got a lot of opportunity, and I'm fired up for it, and h opefully, you get a chance as you mix it up a little bit, but talk to some of the people in our field organization, some of our sellers.
I think you get some really good intelligence and insight on what they're seeing in the field, but I think you'll see that they share that same positive attitude that I've got about our opportunity ahead of us. So thanks for your time. We're going to take a break now and make sure the mics are protected from our competitors. We'll take a short break, and then next up will be Workday's Chief Financial Officer, Zane Rowe. Thanks for your time.
We will take a five-minute break. Please be back for the rest of our program in five minutes. Thank you!
Mm, I know it! I got a plan, and I got a plan B. And if it's absolutely necessary, we'll go to plan C. Whatever I gotta do to be with you. I've been playing out a lot of hypotheticals in my mind. I've been writing your name down next to mine, and imagining all the things you and I could do, ooh, ooh. I've seen all the possibilities in my dreams. You're the one who should be living next to me. Baby, let's not wait and see. Nobody can see into the future. Even the weatherman gets caught in the rain sometimes. But I see something in you that I've never seen before, and I can't be sure, no, maybe not, but I think it's worth a shot. Hypothetically, yes, be your recipe forever. We'll see what happens, but I hope we will never be apart.
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Ooh, together-
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Please take your seats. Our program is about to begin.
Love you too. Come now, set the beds on fire. Stand up, raise your hands to the sky higher. Together, we can take it higher. Together, we can take it higher. Come now, set the beds on fire. Stand up, raise your hands to the sky higher. Together, we can take it higher. Together, we can take it higher. I want love. I wanna give it. I want love. Please deliver it. I want love. I wanna give it. I want love. Please deliver it. I want love. I wanna give it. I want love. Please deliver it. I want love. I wanna give it. I want love. Please deliver it. Come now, set the beds on fire. Stand up, raise your hands to the sky higher. Together, we can take it higher. Together, we can take it higher. Come now, set the beds on fire.
Stand up, raise your hands to the sky higher. Together, we can take it higher. Together, we can take it higher.
Please take your seats. Our program is about to begin.
We can take it higher. We can take it higher!
We come a long, long way together... I have to celebrate you, baby. I have to praise you like I should.
Please welcome Chief Financial Officer, Zane Rowe.
All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I see everyone's recaffeinated. I noticed there was a bar outside. I'm just glad to see I didn't notice too many people around that. Justin mentioned earlier, you'll see some new and familiar faces, and I think for many, if not most of you in the audience here, you've seen both new for Workday and familiar face. So thrilled to be here. Obviously, got a lot to talk about. I'm going to be covering our durable financial model, value creation framework. A lot of it you've heard with all the guest speakers that you've just heard, so a lot of this will just be capturing what you've heard.
Talk about the next three years, and I'm modeling out for the next three years, and then we'll have an opportunity to talk about the investments and then, of course, answer some questions, which I know you're all eager. You're never shy about questions, so I know we should expect a fair amount of those coming. So there are three elements here that I'll be discussing. The durable platform that we've built for scale. Again, you'll hear a lot of the same themes that you've heard throughout the day, and if you've been at the Rising conference, you've heard throughout the keynotes as well. So very excited about this. One of the reasons I'm here, it's been just over three months, and I couldn't tell you how excited I am about the opportunity that lies ahead. With that, I'll be laying out the value creation frameworks.
I'll be talking about the next 3+ years. We'll go through FY 2027 and talk about how we're going to grow our revenues and, of course, increase our margins at the same time. Then I'll cover the investments at a fairly quick pace. A lot of information you've heard throughout the day, but I'll at least cover some of those investments and then be ready for some questions and answers. With that, what's exciting about this business is, of course, the awesome scale and the ability that we have to address one of the largest markets in enterprise software, $142 billion in TAM. Obviously, for those of you who've been at other Risings, you'll notice that this number just keeps growing.
So $142 billion, we believe the HCM part of this is $58 billion, so tremendous opportunity there, where obviously already have a strong leadership position in HCM. And then our Financials market opportunity, Doug touched on this as well. Well over $80 billion of TAM there for us to capture, and if you think about areas like analytics and Workday Extend, these are opportunities for us to utilize that platform and really leverage that platform to capture parts of both of those markets. And that's a lot of the momentum you've seen us talk about over the last number of quarters. With that, this is not only a big TAM, but it's a large and growing TAM.
So not only are our core markets growing, but obviously, whether it's innovation, a lot of what we're building internally, and then a lot of what we've acquired over the last number of years, has allowed us to continue to grow and bolster that growth of those markets and really put us in a great position to capture that TAM. And as I pointed out, and as you think about AI, and you think about what we represent with our platform, there's even a bigger opportunity to really go after an outsized portion of that. So with that, we already are the leader in the cloud. So with 21% and growing, we have a tremendous opportunity here. We're well ahead of our competitors, and of course, with Financials, Doug mentioned how Financials is mostly on-prem still and still has an opportunity to move to the cloud.
So with that, we expect to see this pie grow, and of course, our share of the pie grow as well. So very pleased to see our performance over just the last year, and as you would expect, we continue to see growth in this area as well. And with that, we break down our two businesses. HCM, obviously, we're helping people provide the skills and management and really what's company's most important resource, their people, and we're obviously a big contributor of that. You see how subscription growth over the last number of years has had a 20% CAGR, and just over the last year, you see 19% growth. So establishing a really large presence in that marketplace, it's about $4.5 billion for us on a subscription basis. So really pleased with the growth we've seen there.
Probably higher than a lot of you have expected, and the durability of that growth has just been tremendous over the last number of years. Then, if we shift over to Fins, you can tell what Carl mentioned earlier today, we have just an unbelievable opportunity here. We've been investing in this product for many, many years, and of course, we've seen good growth here on a year-over-year basis of 24%, and our CAGR has been 26%. So this is an area as good as this is, it's just over $1.5 billion of sub-subscription revenue for us. We believe we can continue to grow it and obviously spend even more resources on that and see that trajectory, increase over the next number of years. So very excited about the opportunity there.
So this is a slide, unless you took a longer break, this is the slide that you saw with Doug. We're very pleased with both our land and expand motion and our ability to continue to grow our business. So you see a good balance here. Not only are we focused on both elements, but of course, that pie is growing, so we feel great about the market opportunity and what you've heard today. These motions are really important to us on both sides. So if we take a look at the land opportunity, you know, we have 5,000 core customers, including 50% of the Fortune 500, and we have considerable presence in large enterprise, which all of you know about, and of course, a growing presence just across medium enterprise.
So if you take a look at this opportunity, it really highlights proportionally the white space that we see. So not only do we still have tremendous opportunity in landing large enterprise, but we've also got good opportunity on the medium enterprise side. We've got 40,000, we believe, opportunities to grow into that base, and obviously, what you see here is tremendous white space and just a lot of opportunity and what gets a good chunk of Doug's sellers engaged and excited about as we think about our future here. And then shifting over to the immense expand opportunity. So what I've done here is highlighted both the large enterprise customer base penetration and our medium enterprise customer base penetration. So you see here, what we've taken is an industry-by-industry look and a customer-by-customer look at what is that opportunity to actually grow within that customer base?
You see here, we've got tremendous opportunities. Doug talked about a $2 billion opportunity with our largest 100 customers. If you step back for a little bit and look at the customer base that we've already penetrated, you see a great, great opportunity to grow into that white space. We have just over 40% penetration in our large enterprise markets, so we've got, you know, a little bit over 50% there, and a little bit less when you look at our medium enterprise customer base. But just a tremendous opportunity on both the land side and, of course, here, the expand side.
With that, for those of you who have been around at Rising, one area that you can tell we're passionate about and are very excited as you talk to 15,000 of our customers and partners throughout the week, you'll see our retention rates are just really off the charts. We have in excess of 100% on net retention rate, and then I think even more impressive, if you go look over the last 5 years, you can see our average gross retention rate at 98%.
When you're out on the floor, and you see the long lines at our merchandise boutique to get paraphernalia with all of the Workday logos around, you really see that excitement with our customer base in really growing and engaging with us, and that's the excitement that we leverage off as we think about our opportunity in the future. So with that high retention rate, we've been talking a lot about the backlog, and I know over the last number of earnings calls, you've heard us talk about the growing backlog. I wanted to give you a little bit of an opportunity to understand some of the dynamics there and how this high retention rate has been such a great momentum builder for our backlog.
So of course, when we start out with new customers, it's, you know, a lot of the people, if you're here for the first day with the, with the keynote, you'll see a lot of people standing up at their first time at Rising, and it's those customers that really help us land even more customers. We've got a lot of prospects here. We've got a lot of existing customers, and anytime somebody takes on something like an ERP, you really see that customer engagement, and you see that engagement with us. So this is where our retention rates and our focus, our ultimate focus on the customer, really pays off. So obviously, we're excited about the opportunity on landing new customers, and then what we do is expand.
So obviously, with our expand motion, we've done a lot to continue to grow within that portfolio, both organically and inorganically, and of course, we see a lot of expansion opportunities with those customers. And what you have seen over this period of time is our customers want to go longer with us, so they want to extend their duration. Our average contract length has been extending, and we've also been getting into businesses that are more closely aligned with longer contracts and longer duration, things like education and government, where you see those contracts tend to extend for a longer period of time. Now, in addition to that, we obviously have tremendous renewal opportunities. So we have our traditional renewals, and then what you've heard us talk about over the last number of quarters are some of these early renewals.
I thought what I'd do is spend just a few minutes walking through a framework for an early renewal, because the number of questions that you've had for us is around the early renewals and what this has meant for both subscription revenue and then, of course, as well as backlog. We're focused primarily on subscription revenue, as you would expect, and along with these expansion opportunities and the engagement with the customer is that opportunity to bring that renewal in early, and we typically have a framework that we work around. A hypothetical example that I'm sharing with you here is a $1 million ARR contract. It has 9 months remaining, and we have an early 3-year renewal with a $25.25 million extension.
So if you think about it from a revenue perspective and from a subscription revenue perspective, that's 25% growth. Then when you look at the backlog, you can see it's 40% growth. So of course, the backlog accelerates as you bring that renewal in, and then, of course, it hasn't, it doesn't have a large impact once you renew after a year period. You know, you get back to the anniversary date, and then you don't have that increase in backlog. But what we've seen over the last number of quarters is an acceleration of that backlog, in part due to this renewal activity that we've seen with our customers. Again, it's a tremendous customer base. These are sticky products, and we've been growing with our portfolio, but this has been driving some of that.
I recall that in the Q2 , for instance, that we had about 1.5 in our 24-month backlog. As you think about it, this has also contributed to the large total backlog. Our total backlog is approximately $18 billion and has grown 30%. The dynamic with those customers that are moving to longer duration and, of course, some of these early renewals, has had an impact on total backlog as well. Now when I double-click on that, one of the questions I've got over my 3 months is, "When are you gonna start sharing 12-month backlog?" Well, today is the day. Here you have it. It's 12-month backlog. Thanks for the applause. Although I'm concerned about what you're gonna ask for for next year, we'll start with one year at a time. We've got our 12-month backlog here.
So highlighting, as I mentioned, the 24-month backlog in the Q2 was 23% increase on a year-over-year basis to $10.3 billion. Our 12-month backlog is $5.85 billion. Now it's up 21%. So obviously, as you would expect, that early renewal activity has a more pronounced effect on the 24-month backlog than it does on the 12-month backlog. But you can see the impact here. I will call out for the Q2 that 21% was impacted by roughly a point in early renewals, so that's the driver there on the 12-month backlog. So with that, I thought we'd transition to our value creation framework. So as we look at this business, and we think about this framework, what, instead of looking at just a $10 billion segment, we're looking over a 3-year period.
So we estimate over the next three years, given the fact of the current macro and looking at our current forecast, which is 18% for the year, we believe we will target an annual subscription revenue growth rate of between 17% and 19% growth. And of course, this incorporates all of the land and expand motion and a number of the investments that I'll cover with you in a few minutes here, too. So this is all incorporated into our top line target. We believe we'll maintain this target over the three-year period, and obviously be well set up for beyond FY 2027 as well. At the same time, while we do this, we'll be growing our non-GAAP operating margin to an excess of 25%.
So with these investments that we've been talking about, and I'll highlight five of them, we believe we can continue to grow the top line and then make these investments for what will be not only contributing to the top line in this period, but obviously contributing to the top line in future periods as well. So we feel very good about our opportunity. Sayan mentioned on the R&D side, we'll obviously grow efficiently. We'll take advantage of our AI and ML opportunities, but also continue to invest heavily in our R&D. And then, of course, Doug covered a lot of the go-to-market efforts that we have on the International side and on the Fins side, so we'll be establishing a fair amount of investment for those areas, which we believe will have tremendous ROI and grow revenue for many, many years to come.
So we feel confident on that part, and at the same time, we'll recognize efficiencies in the business and focus on systems and automation to grow that scale and efficiency for the long term. So feel very good about what we're able to drive here on the operating margin side. And then, as you would expect, that transitions over to operating cash flow. We have strong operating cash flow in this business. We're also relatively capital light, so it drops down to free cash flow. I'll point out that this includes our expected industry mix. So if you think about government and education, you tend to have this longer duration and a slightly different payment schedule. So this forecast here includes our expectation for a lot more of that business going forward.
So we feel good about where we're heading on the top line and bottom line growth. And another topic I know we get asked about periodically is about SBC. Obviously, we believe that SBC aligns with our employee interest. It's a strong part and an important part of what we do for value creation with our employees. All that being said, we're gonna be more specific in how we target equity and think about how we allocate equity. So from roughly 20% that you see today, we would expect over the same period of time in FY 2027 to target roughly 15% as a percent, with stock-based compensation as a percent of revenue, and that would be expecting to decline over this period of time and then obviously focus on it beyond then.
It's not only looking at the percent as a percent of revenue, but also looking at dilutive effect of that as well. So we focused on both sides of that and delivering in excess of 100 basis point improvement over the next number of years. So in a nutshell, we believe strongly that we can continue to grow this business. I'll talk a lot about these investments that we're thinking about and working on, and the impact that that'll have on that top-line growth. We do believe that these investments have the possibility to truly drive some outsized opportunities and some value that may or may not have been incorporated completely in a lot of this. So we'll talk a little bit about that as well, as we think about the forecast here for the next number of years.
So with that, our growth levers. We have 5 growth levers that shouldn't be a surprise. Carl mentioned to you earlier today, starting with International partners, our focus on Fins, AI and ML, and then, of course, M&A. So I'll just spend a few minutes on each. You know, as we mentioned, the International opportunity for us is tremendous. We've got a TAM opportunity of in excess of $80 billion. It's only 25% of our revenue and obviously 50% of our TAM, so we're excited about the momentum and the opportunity to do a lot more on the International side. As you heard Doug talk about, we'll be focused on those Tier One opportunities.
We've already been investing into those Tier One markets and opportunities, but we're doubling down on those investments over time and continuing to invest there, where we believe we can get outsized revenue growth. That would include areas like localization on the product side, strategic partnerships, and of course, go-to-market resources. We're excited about that opportunity on International. We talk about the partner ecosystem, starts with what is already a very good business on the service partners. We'll be actually deploying more and giving more of our service partners an opportunity to participate and grow that ecosystem, so we'll continue to diversify our offerings there. Then on the innovation side, we're accelerating our co-innovation on the platform. You heard a lot of that from both Sayan, and I know Doug's been working in a lot of areas with strategic partners.
We've got Accenture, AWS, ADP, and Alight, just to name a few, and a lot of opportunity, not only on co-developing, but also co-selling. That's where we're targeting 100+ referral partners. I know we're well on our way to getting there. We have over 80 today, and of course, 15 co-sell partners that we expect by year-end. So a lot of opportunity. I think this was a topic that you heard Carl talk about day one when he joined the company, and there's a lot of energy behind the partnership opportunity here. Together with that partner opportunity, we believe we can do a lot more with Fins. So this is just a highlight with the over 10 years of investments that we've been making in Fins.
If you really think about our opportunities and our success that we've seen, both across industries and segments, in both ME and LE, stretching from education with a recent win with the University of Florida, all the way down to LE with technology and media, with Salesforce. So tremendous opportunity here. We've already seen some great success, and of course, excited about what more investment in Fins will produce for us as well. And with that, you can see 35% of our core, deployments are actually landed with Fins, so we're very excited about the percent that we see today. In the Q2, you heard us talk about our unit growth in Fins. We believe we're at an opportunity with tremendous momentum with this particular product.
And of course, with what we're doing with Workday Accounting Center, Workday CPQ, so we're not only able to grow the product, but we're also able to increase in TAM. Just those two product offerings increase our TAM by about $2 billion, so we're able to do a lot more with our TAM and with our investments in this particular area. Including with that, as you saw, Aneel's been talking about a lot of our platinum partners and a lot of our great partners that we've shared time with on stage, and that's, you know, including partners like Accenture, who will be going to market even more with this opportunity and leaning into the partner opportunity with Financials as well. And as well as areas like with our planning software, we're able to move those customers over to Financials.
So we see 40+% increase in those customers moving over to Fins as well. So a lot of opportunities for us to lean in and sell more with that, notwithstanding the fact that we're simply gonna be putting more feet on the street. I had an opportunity to talk to a class of new Fins sellers, and I can tell you they've got great backgrounds, and they're incredibly motivated to be selling this product. So it's an exciting time for them to be joining the company and selling a product that's growing so fast. No shortage of conversation today on the AI ML topic. I'm gonna keep it light here. You know, I highlight the talent optimization SKU that Doug talked about, that it has a really strong attach rate.
It also has an ARR with over 80% growth rates in talent optimization. So very excited about just highlighting one of the SKUs. Obviously, there are a number of ways that we go to market and embed AI and ML into our, into our products and into our product offerings, so we're excited about that. As Aneel mentioned in this morning's keynote, we have 65+ million users under contract, and that enables us to truly differentiate and target our LLM. So we feel really good about the opportunity there. And then for those of you who obviously had a chance to see some here, we have many, many use cases that we're actively working on. We have 40+ ML cases that are in production, and then, of course, GenAI cases that we announced earlier today as well, with 12 of those and counting.
So a lot of activity and a lot of enthusiasm around the AI and ML efforts there, too. And then Aneel mentioned our thoughts and our opportunities around M&A have not changed. We have a successful history here of M&A that have augmented our portfolio really nicely. Obviously, we use it for that as well as for talent tuck-ins, so we feel very good on both the HCM side of things as well as the Fin side of things, to continue to grow our business through M&A. As we look out to the future, this has obviously helped augment our portfolio. It will be a focus and an opportunity for us to both accelerate and enhance our market positioning. And we feel good about the tuck-ins and what we've been able to already achieve out of the talent opportunity with M&A.
We have companies from GridCraft and Rally Teams that have added talent, like Sayan and David Somers, who was on stage earlier today as well. So we feel good about that. The Workday Ventures team is also out there, working with a lot of startups and really understanding where the market's going and getting great insight across our portfolio. So with those investments, we've got a strong foundation. We're targeting both durable and long-term growth. We'll continue to invest where we believe we can drive incremental value. We'll be focused on that, and you'll hear a lot more of that, I'm sure, in Q&A. And with that, we'll continue to scale and grow the platform. So with that, I'd like to invite my workmates up on stage with me, and we'll be happy to answer any and all questions you have. So thank you.
Thank you. While they're getting set up, we're just gonna. For those of you in the room who wanna ask a question, just raise your hand. We'll do our best. There's 120, 130 of you in here, so I won't hit all of you, but we will try. Try to do one question, please, because that also will be helpful. Go ahead.
Thank you very much.
Michael.
Thank you. Sabotaged again by the-
Yeah.
So desperate, so desperate. Mark Murphy with JP Morgan. How much quota capacity have you brought on with the Fins dedicated sales reps? Because s o we've heard these numbers, possibly 100 of them have been hired, possibly 150. We don't know what's true. I would think that the quota is somewhere in low seven figures for that profile of a person. So you know, it could add up to quite a bit of capacity. And just if you can help remind us, why is the time you know, right now to be kind of upping the ante, as you said, doubling down on Fins sellers? Does it relate to the SAP 2027 deadline?
Does it relate to sort of Oracle kicking customers harder to move to the cloud with them?
Yeah, yeah. Maybe I'll start, Doug, and then please chime in. So I think the reason we're doubling down is because of some of the statistics you saw today, Mark. The fact that 20%-25% of workloads on Financials are, you know, in the cloud, that means there's a huge opportunity, number one. Number two, two of the best marketing advocates we have out there is SAP and Oracle. As they force their customers off of an on-premises solution to the cloud, anytime that happens, it opens us up for an opportunity to have a conversation that probably didn't exist in the past. So that all led us to the discussion that we had earlier this year at a strategic offsite that Aneel and I hosted, where we decided to double down on building out our go-to-market capacity for Financials.
Unfortunately, I did get your question. We're not gonna share the details of how many people or what the quota capacity is, but we are indeed, you know, continuing to build that out. And in fact, just a couple of weeks ago, after doing second half planning, you know, Zane and I released more headcount to Doug and Patrick and team to continue to, you know, build out the Financials. And maybe, Doug, you can just talk about, you know, some of the early indications we're seeing there, of that build-out.
Yeah. You know, one early market signal that gave us confidence, Mark, was conversations with our partners and the prevalence of Workday being asked to be part of evaluation. So we see the market responding and gave us further confidence that now is the right time. For years, we've seen that in healthcare, we've seen that in higher ed, we've seen that in public sector, FSI. But we started to see signals of that end of last year, beginning of this year, from our partners, where it was going into what we call DI, diversified industries. And so we're seeing the demand there, and we thought it was the right time to make the bet at the offsite.
Yeah, and I would just add, product-wise, we're ready for prime time. And if you believe, and I think we all see what's happening with AI, there's no way to really leverage AI against those legacy platforms in any meaningful way. And so it does force the decision into the cloud. Anytime it goes into the cloud, I think we have a better chance to win than anybody else.
Yeah, and one last thing, Mark, is some of the statistics that were shown up here today, while we're building a sales force out for Fins and their Fins-only seller, it's actually driving full platform sales because they're engaging with our core reps, and you see, you know, more than a third of our new customers are coming from a full platform approach, including Fins. So, you know, there's early evidence that this is working, which is why we're doubling down on the go-to-market side and the number of people we're adding.
Thanks. Thanks very much, Kirk Materne with Evercore. Thanks for the presentation today. I guess when I think about the growth levers you guys have laid out relative to your revenue guides that you gave out over the next three years, can you just talk about how much success is embedded in that growth target from those levers? Meaning, you know, if Fins hits, is there opportunities for upside? I'm just trying to get a sense on how conservative you've been around those levers and sort of what's embedded in that relative to those. Thanks.
Yeah, maybe I'll start, Zane-
Sure.
-and turn it over to you. So, listen, we laid out a three-year framework. It's a durable framework, high teens growth rate on the top line around subscription. We're expanding operating margins. We have solid free cash flow. We think it's a really good business model, and it does take into account some of the investments we made. Now, if some of these investments really turn into, you know, maybe something more than we anticipate, maybe those numbers do go up, but we want to just be honest, transparent, and clear about where we're at, what we see in the upcoming three years, and then we're backing that up with all these investments. And we feel really good about. We're confident in our business. We're confident where we're at with our competition. We're confident in the markets we're serving.
We're innovating, bringing great people to the company, and we feel really good about this durable framework that Zane laid out. So some of it's incorporated in that 17%-19%, and if some of them take off, you know, faster, maybe there's upside. But right now, we're sharing with you exactly where we think we are and what we're confident in the growth rate over the next three years.
Yeah, I would just reiterate that it's not just for FY 2027 that we're solving for, it's long term. And to your point, the trajectory and the investment may profile may change, and that opportunity, you know, could grow at different points. And candidly, where we are today, you don't know sort of what market you're dealing with and what the macro is and with some of those. So I believe we've taken a really thoughtful approach to it. Obviously, if some of them don't work out as well as others, there's always opportunity then for margin, but we've struck that balance, I think, quite well and thought about the durability in that long-term growth rate, but not just through FY 2027. We're solving for many, many years to come.
This is, Kash Rangan at Goldman Sachs. How are you guys doing? Great to see you.
Kash.
It's a question that's a variant of what Kirk asked. So you put up pretty close to that kind of growth rate during a pretty tough time, and most people in the software industry went through massive deceleration. So you were a defensive business model during a very tough time. So if things do open up and are more conducive to better growth, what prevents the company from growing faster? Because you do have these big unlocks. You've got AI, you've got a big TAM. Your Financials is starting to really open up, so why couldn't you grow faster? And also, I was curious when you talked about the replacement of cloud opportunity, replacement of cloud legacy companies, how real is that? How big is that? Thank you so much.
Yeah, maybe I'll start, I guess, a follow-on to the question here, Kash. Again, based on the outlook where we're at today and based on the macro we're dealing with, listen, nothing's really changed in the last 12 months. I think we're all dealing with the same type of selling environment. It's just that Doug and team are really good at selling into this environment, and it also shows the strength, quite frankly, of our value proposition. As I said earlier, when I was up here with, you know, Aneel and Emma, it's a very durable business model. It provides value in times of tailwind and headwind. People are consolidating on our platform.
That being said, we are making all of these investments at the time of expanding operating margin, and if some of these investments hit faster than we anticipated, like the partners and the ecosystem we're focused on, you know, the build-out of the Financials, you know, go-to-market, some of the AI, ML stuff, can we do better? Potentially, but we're not going to sit here and tell you, "Yeah, today, we're going to do better," Kash. I know it's what you all want to hear, but we're just trying to be transparent. We're being straightforward. We're telling you what we see in the future, and we're going to deliver against what we're guiding today.
Kash, can I just add that we're fairly nimble in how we think about that, so the opportunity to invest more in areas isn't something that we feel constrained around, because candidly, we would just tell you. Now, I'll also point out that as you think about subscription revenue, as you well know, as well as anybody in this room, you know, a lot of those investments you make, those tend to show up in revenue a little bit in a delayed basis, if you think about just getting feet on the street and then assigning contracts and then ultimately generating revenue out of that. So we feel good about all five of those opportunities and what that could mean for growth.
Obviously, the asterisk is around M&A, because, you know, with M&A, I'm sure Aneel's very active in thinking through M&A, that could be a contributor for increased growth beyond the framework that we highlighted earlier.
And on the second part of your question, I truly believe that if done right, and I know Sayan is going to do it right, because he always does, that the way we've built AI is native to the cloud. It's not an add-on. That if we can prove out real competitive advantage for the customers that have our product versus those that don't, I think people will shift. It's a huge disadvantage if you're up against a company that has massive advantages from AI, and you're on a platform that doesn't. And I think we'll see that over time, productivity, better insights, you know, leveraging massive amounts of data.
There are things that we're gonna be able to show and do that help our customers become a lot more competitive with their competitors, and I think that will cause people to think about switching. But we have to prove that out.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Hey, guys, over here. Brad Sills from BofA Securities. Thanks so much for a wonderful event. Over here. Yeah, great. One of the things that was encouraging for me was that slide that showed a real long tail of some of the add-ons that are less than 20% penetration, a lot that were under 10%, in particular, Accounting Center, which to me seems like a real strategic offering. So surprised to see it as low as it is. I guess the question is: where do you see the opportunity for some of these that have low attach? Is it a combination of all those things? Are there any one or two that you think we could see momentum here? And then any commentary on Accounting Center in particular.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Mind if I go?
Yeah, please.
So, there's three that stick out to me: workforce planning, financial planning, and accounting center, that you just touched on. I think all three of those have the opportunity within our core Fins base to grow significantly. Workforce planning, of course, applies to those HCM core customers. Those are the three that I think have the opportunity to really ratchet up to the right on that curve, getting up above the 20% over time. Anything you'd add?
No, I think they're the three we're focused on.
Yeah. I'd just say on Accounting Center, it's still a relatively young product, and it's one that is very specific industry by industry. We made progress in financial services. We just got to keep knocking down the different industries, and I think that percentage will continue to grow.
I left one out, Extend.
Yeah.
600 customers, but every customer should have it. There's value for every customer. As you've heard from this so far this week, it's foundational. It's the basis from which we're doing a lot of innovation off of, so I was remiss to forget that one.
I'm really excited about Candidate Engagement . You know, we have such a high penetration rate with recruiting, a very high attach rate product. Candidate Engagement layers over top of recruiting, and so it's attached to an attach, and it really provides customers with a way to communicate with the new generation of the workforce that wants to, you know, talk to you over text, you know, not over email. And it has been incredibly popular already out of the gate. And so I see that it's not just about attach, it's about attach to attach in some of these cases.
Hey, guys, Alex Zukin , Wolfe Research. Thank you for the great presentation. I guess maybe if you look at the modulation of the growth framework, right? From 20+% subscription revenue growth to 17%-19%, it seemed. I think what would be helpful to understand is how much of that is macro, how much of that is AI, right? Meaning the headwind from the macro, the tailwind from potential AI monetization that you guys laid out before. And I ask that because it seems like on Financials specifically, obviously an enormous opportunity, and you guys have clearly gotten to almost functional parity with the other solutions, but the macro seems to be making it a much harder decision for the buyer to make, to actually make that move and make that switch.
So maybe just walk us through how that layers in and, and factors in. Is that 17-19, you know, is that like this, is that like this, is that like this, from a linearity perspective?
Yeah. So Doug, why don't you start on what you're seeing in the selling environment macro, and then I'll address the 17%-19% as a, as a percentage of that.
Yeah. I feel like I'll give you an unoriginal answer, so I'll try to use different words, but it is... We're still seeing this extra round trips, and there's more eyes and scrutiny on every bit of spend, and there's certain industries where we see more of that. Medium enterprise, tech sector, tons of scrutiny on it. Regional banks, tons of scrutiny right now because they've got OCC and SEC auditors in there every day, and it's a distraction to the business. So it's sort of that still is the headwind that we battle with just the velocity and volume of what we think, what we know the market potential and opportunity to be.
Yeah, and to answer your question, like, you know, we understand what the headwinds are, and we have taken that into account in our guidance. If things change dramatically, I think maybe our guidance will change, but we're dealing with the current state of an environment. For 18 months, we've been talking about going into a recession. For 18 months, we've been talking about a soft landing, a hard landing. We've been talking about all these macro challenges, and we're taking that into account because we don't see that changing in the near future. And when deals right now for Doug and Patrick around the world get pushed or paused on these big digital transformations, whether it's HR or it's finance, they don't leave our pipeline. It's important to remember, if someone's thinking about doing this, it's not if, it's when.
They may pause it, but they're still in our pipeline. Our pipeline is not decreasing like projects are going away. It's just moving out one or two quarters. So it's baked into our framework. We have to recognize it. I will say, you know, I couldn't be more proud of what the team has achieved, you know, so far this year. We've been dealing with these headwinds. We've raised our guidance for the second half of the year, both on the top line and operating margin. So we're becoming accustomed to operating in the world that we live today, and the teams really know how to sell, and it comes back to the value of our platform.
Hey, Alex, just from a timing perspective for the next quarter, in addition to 12-month backlog, which we will be providing, we'll also give you some insight into how we're thinking about our next fiscal year. So obviously, we've already given you insight into the 18% for this year, and then, as we've done in the past, for our third quarter earnings, I'll give you some thought around narrowing that framework into next year.
Yeah, when you think the economy is going to improve, let us know. Right? I mean, we've got a UAW strike. We've got, I think, Goldman Sachs came out with a 90% likelihood of a government shutdown. I mean, these just keep popping up, and we just keep battling through them. But at some point, we'll get through it, and I do think growth will return to the economy.
We have Keith Weiss here from Morgan Stanley. Understand sort of the top line, there's a lot of macro factors that you guys can't control, but what you can control is the OpEx side of the equation. I think, given that we're no longer talking about 20% plus growth, we've taken down the growth profile. We've talked a lot about operating efficiencies. No change in the operating margin targets, the long-term operating margin targets, and the perspective of just, like, 50 basis points of expansion over the next 3 years on an annual basis. It seems kind of anemic, frankly. So, has something changed in the investment kind of philosophy? Are you guys leaning more into investment right now because of the opportunity?
Because it, it's a little striking to us, so that, like, we didn't see more on the operating margin side. Then on the operating cash flow side of the equation, I think we lost about 500 basis points of operating cash flow target on a go-forward basis. Can you talk to us a little bit about what happened there? Where, where did that operating cash flow margin go?
Yeah, Keith, I'm happy to start, and then Carl can jump in after. As it relates to the operating margin and those investments, each of those investments are discrete priorities that we're focusing on. Now, as you saw with this year, if we don't see those returns, and, you know, I've looked at these closely, and there's significant returns that we would expect to achieve over the course of time, and we believe they'll be accretive. Obviously, we've given a range that we think is a range that we can get behind. But to your point on the 20%, we also believe that if we do it right, in a few cases, we could see outsized benefits and outsized rewards, and those we want to make sure that we're not under-investing into.
Now, when we see that opportunity to play out and we see the scale, we'll have tremendous opportunity to continue to increase operating margin, you know, as you would expect, you know, potentially through, but otherwise beyond the 25% period. So we're confident leaning in that each of those investments that we highlighted are investments that you want us to make because the potential upside is significant, and the opportunity is significant. Maybe not just within this framework, but well beyond that, we believe we'll be very well positioned beyond FY 2027. And then, as it relates to the OCF, the operating cash flow, I'd say nothing significant on the modeling change. There's a slight dynamic change in the shift, which is a good news story, into education, and government markets that just have a slightly different payment profile.
We've also candidly achieved GAAP profitability a little sooner than otherwise expected, so we feel good about that. But there's nothing fundamental about the model that hasn't changed as far as the ability to drive strong cash flow with the earnings that we prepared.
Hey, it's Brent Thill, Jefferies. Just on International, it has been undergrowing the core business in the US, and thanks for all the color about the steps and initiatives you're putting in. But when do you believe that starts to really fire and execute and start to see that acceleration of growth? Are we a couple quarters away? Are we a year away? How would you characterize that build? And then, Neil, we have a marketing this side of the room came up with a new marketing ploy for you. If you want to hear about it, we can talk about it later.
I would love that, for sure.
Selling my hoodies?
Yeah, they already cut you.
Okay.
You hired Billy Idol, so you said Financials is prime time. Are you hiring the University of Colorado? Prime. There you go. Thank you. Thank you. Very on brand.
You want to go first?
You go ahead, and then I'll-
So I would say we're already seeing it in EMEA. I mean, I think I tried to highlight that in my prepared remarks, is that we're seeing a really good execution there. So we expect really solid growth from them this year, and I think APJ will get there, too. I won't give you a specific quarter because, as you see, we're making some fundamental shifts within that market, elevating Japan, of course, and then APAC with brand-new leader, who we think will really accelerate the business, but it'll take some time for Simon to land and for all the investments in Japan to pay off. I do think the partner investments are a really key part of that in the APJ market in particular. We've already spent a lot of time.
In fact, I'll leave next week and be there for another 16 days across Japan and Australia, but spending time with partners, getting these resell and co-sell agreements in place that we think can accelerate that timeline to being accretive to growth.
Yeah. No, I would agree, Doug. I think we're seeing consistent and repeatable, you know, results out of EMEA with all the changes, see it solid in the leadership team. I think that's doing quite well. We just made an announcement today, right here for the first time, about APJ and the leadership team there, and the structural difference that we're taking in APJ, pulling Japan out to report directly to Patrick, our Chief Sales Officer, because we have to focus on that market. So I think all of these will start to pay dividends for us, you know, you know, even in the second half of this year, if we can start to see APJ pick up, right?
Right now, it's not material to our growth or our business, quite frankly, but it will be going forward with all these changes, and EMEA, we think, is performing quite well. That being said, we put a challenge out there to our Americas team, and we say, "Hey, if you can maintain 75% of our revenue and consistently grow like you are, let's do a little internal race to see who can grow faster between the US and EMEA and APJ." So, you know, we're okay with that model, too.
Hey, Karl Keirstead at UBS, here. Maybe, I'll direct this one to Zane. Zane, we've always had trouble correlating your backlog growth today with revenue growth tomorrow, just because you were using that 24-month backlog number.
Yeah.
So you've given us a cleaner cRPO number, so thank you for that. And it's actually, in my judgment anyway, pretty solid at 20%-21%, which-
M akes the low end of that 17%-19% guide for next year at least feel pretty conservative, and I just wanted to test that thesis on you.
Well, you're welcome with the cRPO. No, I mean, the point I would make is, obviously, you know, as I mentioned, we've got 18% this year. We'll be giving an insight into next year in the next quarter. You know, that framework, candidly, is one that we see sort of over the medium term, so it's not necessarily just looking into FY 2025. And we feel good about the business. I mean, as Carl said, we believe it's a realistic range. We feel really good about our investments that we're making, but we just wanna be transparent with where we are, given the macro and given, you know, all of our sort of the backdrop here and what we're seeing.
I wouldn't go as far as saying, you know, narrowing it down to any point in that range, but obviously, we feel good about the business overall.
Hi, Brad Zelnick, Deutsche Bank, over here to-
Oh, there we go.
Carl's left. Hey, guys.
Hi, Brad. Sorry.
No worries. Thanks-
We're not all blind, there are just lights on.
Very bright lights.
In case you're wondering why we're looking around.
I'm here to help. Thanks for a great day. I particularly liked Doug's slide, where he showed the top 100 accounts, slightly less than $1 billion, and yet $2 billion plus in white space opportunity. I gotta imagine if we looked at that for the entire company all the way down through ME, that's gotta be even more white space compared to what they're paying you today. Can you maybe help frame for us, you know, where's the low-hanging fruit within that? And perhaps even by industry or even by core product, how do you align the company best to go out and capture that low-hanging fruit that's right ahead of you?
Yeah.
Thanks.
Yeah. I think I'll go first. I think it's fair to say our rich OCHRO customer base, so HCM customers and going and selling Financials because Financials drags with it a broader solution set of SKUs. So you sell Financials back into our customer base of an HCM customer, you're pulling another 6-8 solutions or SKUs with it, and the ACV on those get really interesting, really quick. So I'd point you to that as sort of where I see a motion of low-hanging fruit and great opportunity. By industry, industries behave differently. I highlighted that in the last year, we've seen 1 out of 3 land customers come into us as full platform.
It's much higher than that in certain industries: healthcare, higher education, and the government segment as well. So you could think then, therefore, about all the other industries that we're selling into have an opportunity to expand pretty significantly across that bar stack bars of attach.
Just here up front.
Hi.
Stefan Slowinski from BNP Paribas. Question for you, Aneel. You talked about a few different ways of monetizing GenAI, including in the pricing, new SKUs. Others are talking about more consumption-based pricing. Where do you think this all ends up over time for Workday and for the industry, especially with the cost of delivery coming down?
Well, I don't think the cost of delivery is gonna come down that dramatically on GenAI. GenAI is expensive, and I'm gonna ask Sayan to weigh in on that. You know, honestly, I don't think anybody knows exactly how the values can attribute. I think number one, it's gonna be higher win rates, and that's important. I think it'll be lower discount rates because our product will be viewed as a lot stronger than our competitors. There will be products like Skills Cloud that'll be brand-new SKUs. I think you'll see from Workday more SKUs that could not exist without AI, that exist and that we charge for that, and Skills Cloud is a great example of that. You know, some of the...
All of these copilots, I've gotten quite a bit of negative feedback from customers that, "You know, I don't, I don't wanna buy these copilots from, from some of the other, from some of the other vendors." So, I think the jury is still out on all those copilots. I think there are lots of other ways to monetize it. Consumption's another way, but I'd be curious what you think, Sayan.
Well, I think, like, you know, I do think that continued investment will bring expense down. This is a very expensive thing to run. I think a bigger lever for expense long term is using GenAI with what it does well, which it has human or human beyond language capability. That's a thing it is exceptional at, but, you know, good old-fashioned ML, like K-means clustering, is probably a better classifier, quite frankly. And so building ensemble models, some of which are much, much cheaper to run, and using the human interaction, the language interaction skill set of generative, allows you to deliver, actually a higher quality experience, net at a lower cost. And so I think there's a lot of room to run on the algorithmic side. I think we're at the very, very beginning of this innovation.
We're not in the middle yet. So I think that, that's one aspect. Given that, I think that inevitably, this is going to be a price of entry. This is not going to be sustainable long term as this feature that you can charge a 30% uplift or 40% uplift on top of a base product. In the same sense that, you know, none of us are gonna, you know, buy an AirPod with machine learning noise-canceling for more than the one that doesn't have machine learning noise-canceling. It's just gonna be part of the product, and it's gonna be an expectation to be competitive in the marketplace. And so we are actually building with that destination in mind. You know, yes, we have to protect the business model on a usage standpoint because these, especially when we're using third-party models, are very expensive.
And we will do that to protect the business, but-
We are also building the business in such a way to kind of go where the puck is going, which is, this is gonna be built in.
You know, over time, all technology areas get commoditized, and I think AI is this opportunity to un-commoditize enterprise applications, where the products are so highly differentiated, and you're just like it was for many of the early years at Workday, people jumped, and they had a massive competitive advantage versus their competitors who were running SAP and Oracle. And I think that same opportunity exists with AI. We all see this as a way to make our customers more successful and productive, and I think they'll pay for that. How it gets monetized, I think it's still up in the air.
Yeah. A little bit of the revenge of the system of record, right? I mean, like, you know, you get, "Oh, you're this back office thing, and all you're doing is collecting data." Well, it turns out that we have this technology that really, really wants access to that data, not just, you know, kind of core HCM and Financials, but Accounting Center, which is collecting massive amounts of data, and identification of interesting patterns, like in Accounting Center data, is a huge opportunity for us.
Okay, we're gonna do two more questions, so I'm gonna go right here to Derek, who's right next to me.
Great. Thanks, Derek Wood at TD Cowen. Zane, a couple questions for you on the model. First of all, to this point on generative AI, do you anticipate any headwinds to gross margins over the next few years? And then last year, when we saw the margin framework, it was broken down by lines, and sales and marketing was kind of expected to go up, R&D, a little bit more leverage. Is that still the right way to think about the model in the medium term?
Yeah, that's right. That's the right way to think about it, and I would say, I mean, obviously, there's some latitude on our gross margins. We believe we'll be able to improve them in some respects, and obviously, Gen AI will counter that to some extent as well. But we, we believe it'll be consistent with where it is today, at least over the medium term. And then the model that we've talked about previously with incremental spend on the sales and marketing side, and re-recognizing some efficiencies on the R&D side is still consistent with where, where we, where we are.
Good afternoon, Brent Bracelin, Piper Sandler here. While there's a lot of focus on prime time, as an Oregon Ducks fan, sometimes wins are bigger than clicks, so, just weighing in there. No, seriously, one of the things that stood out to me was less than 3% of ACV sourced through partners. If I look at the floor today, there's some really big partners you have today. So my question's really around: How quickly can we convert partners from assistance to new sources of revenue? And as we think about that transition, is that going to be incremental to your direct sales efforts, or does it really become a, an environment to hire less direct salespeople, and it's really about margin leverage? Just trying to understand the logic and how you're gonna frame that partner opportunity.
Yeah, you know, I'm gonna let Doug answer this question because I think my team is tired of me answering this and pushing them hard on partners, but those statistics are real statistics, and I'm gonna let Doug answer why. To be honest, in the last five months, we were just in the back, he kept just telling me how fired up he is. Being at this conference, talking to our biggest partners, saying how excited they are, not just to deploy us, but actually take us to market, and some of the biggest SIs in the world were saying: "We wanna resell you. We have opportunities, but we've never been capable of doing that." So, Doug, why don't you share your excitement? 'Cause obviously, mine is pretty obvious.
Yeah, I like how Carl answered the question for me and then said, "Doug, the floor is yours.
I just want to make sure he's on this journey with me.
Thank you, Carl. I don't think f irst of all, I don't think this impacts our sales capacity hiring. What I think it totally changes is our pipeline development. It's the top-of-funnel growth that we can drive more and better qualified. When you go arm in arm with these partners into accounts, it's very different. And, you're talking value from the start, you're talking the company's strategic objectives and how together, and again, you saw the partners who were listed there, us plus the partner can bring that value to our customers. So I don't think that changes our sales capacity modeling. I think it changes our throughput, our volume, and the amount of business, that will show up in productivity, account executive productivity.
I would just really credit Carl for coming in and recognizing that we were under-leveraging the partners. I'll take some of the blame there. In the many early years at Workday, the large partners didn't really wanna work with Workday 'cause they made a lot more money on the other vendors, so we kind of went our own. Then, over time, as we started building partnerships with them, it was really just about integration and implementation, not about actually selling together. So it's a new motion for us, and I'm seeing firsthand the change in their mindset because they now feel like a real partner, not just a back-end implementation partner.
Yeah. We didn't even talk about it to your point, and you know, just selling through the AWS Marketplace , you know, just started six months ago. Doug put some statistics up there, and you saw what's happening so quickly there. There's a lot of unspent capacity and credits with AWS that people can now use to get access to the Workday technology, and we can deploy on top of their platform very easily around the world.
Okay, we are gonna wrap it there. I'm gonna have Carl just kind of close us down, just with a few final thoughts. And then for all of you in the room here, we're gonna have happy hour cocktails just outside these doors, and so a lot of the folks here will mingle over there as well. So, Carl, any last thoughts before we wrap?
Well, first, we all wanna thank you for coming and spending your afternoon with us here at Rising. We hope you spend more time than just this afternoon, and you get to go out and have time with our customers, our partners, and get a sense from them what they're seeing from Workday and why we sit up here so excited about the durable opportunity we have going forward. We're gonna grow in the high teens. We're proud of that. We're gonna expand operating margins at the same time, while investing heavily across all functions in the business, and we're gonna continue to share with you where we think the business will go, both short term and long term, and we're gonna deliver against those guidance numbers. We're confident, we're proud of our business.
It's durable, it's resilient, and we're gonna continue to prove that to you year after year. So thank you for coming, and we'll see you at the happy hour outside.