Workday, Inc. Price & Performance (WDAY)

In addition, during today's call, will discuss non GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Workday's performance. Isolation from GAAP results. You can find additional disclosures regarding these non GAAP measures in reconciliations with comparable GAAP results in our earnings press release in our investor presentation and on the Investor Relations page of our website. The webcast replay of this call will be available for the ninety days on our company website under the Investor Relations link. Additionally, the transcript of this call and our quarterly investor presentation will be posted on our Investor Relations website following this call. Also, the customer's page of our website includes a list of selected customers, is updated monthly. Our first quarter fiscal twenty twenty six quiet period begins on 04/15/2025. Unless otherwise stated, all financial comparisons in this call will be to our results for the comparable period of our fiscal twenty twenty four. With that, I'll hand the call over to Carl. Thank you, Justin, and thank you all for joining us today. Workday delivered another solid quarter in Q4, with 16% subscription revenue growth and 26% non GAAP operating margin. These results are a testament to how businesses of all sizes, industries and geographies are increasingly turning to Workday as their trusted partner.

And I'm incredibly proud of how our teams executed in Q4 to deliver a solid year. As organizations look for ways to boost productivity, and run more efficiently, our value proposition has never been stronger. Workday gives them the ultimate advantage helping them manage what matters most, their people and their money. And with our unified platform, our customers can unlock value faster. Reduce our total cost of ownership and harness the power of AI across our best in class On the AI front, we just launched the agent system of record. A centralized system to manage all of an organization's AI agents from Workday and third parties alike. With this innovation, our customers will be able to manage their humans and digital on our trusted platform. I'll talk more about this exciting announcement later in the call. But now let's turn to our customers and industry momentum in the quarter. During Q4, we welcomed incredible new Henkel, IberoStar, the State of North Carolina and First Citizens Bank and Trust Company. We also expanded with industry leaders including Cisco, Mandalis Sutter Health and Toyota. Workday now serves more than 11,000 including more than 60% of the Fortune 530 And that says a lot about the strategic nature of our platform.

Our industry focus is a huge contributor to this growth and Q4 was no exception. INFLED, the City of Minneapolis St. Louis County and City University of New York all chose our full suite in Q4. We also signed our largest Workday Student deal ever with the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. This is a massive project to improve the experience for 270,000 students and 14,000 faculty. Workday Student is quickly gaining traction as the top choice for higher education institutions. We now have more than 135 customers and we expect roughly half of them After rapid adoption here in The U. S, we're excited to expand Workday Student into Canada and the Australia, New Zealand markets this year. We also have a growing opportunity with the U. S. Federal government thanks to the administration's strong focus on driving efficiencies and IT modernization. Our recent wins at the DOE and DIA have helped set a solid foundation in this sector. Opening up a number of exciting Fed opportunities. Financial services continues to be one of our largest industries In Q4, we had significant expansions with Aon and Sallie Mae Bank, and we closed a large core Fins deal with a Fortune 500 organization.

Healthcare also once again delivered with notable full suite wins including North Mississippi Medical Center, Hackensack Meridian Health, and UnityPoint Health. More than 30% and across our focus industries of SLED and healthcare, that number climbs to 50%. In both Q4 and the full fiscal year. We now have over 6,100 core HCM and financials [indiscernible] and more than 2,000 of them are leveraging our full suite. Our investments in financials both in innovation and go to market, continued to pay off with strong growth in new ACV in Q4. Addition to a record number of core financials wins, we saw strong momentum for our financial planning accounting center, [indiscernible] And we continue to see increasing demand for AI solutions In fact, AI is front and center in every conversation I have with customers, prospects and partners. They want to move beyond incremental productivity gains They're also looking for ROI that helps them drive growth back into their business. Similar to Q3, we once again saw 30% of our customer expansions involve one or more AI SKUs including Xtend Pro, Recruiting agent Eversource, and our recently rolled out Talent Mobility Agent. Xtend Pro, which enables continues to be one of our fastest growing SKUs.

In Q4, new ACV more than doubled over Q3. Developer Copilot, which is part of Xtend Pro is delivering real results. We're hearing from customers that they're seeing productivity gains of over 50%. This is helping them build apps much faster. Recruiting agent had an Genpact and many more. New ACV in Q4 nearly doubled from Q3. And this product continues to boost the average selling price of our core recruiting solution. In fact, in Q4, it was even higher than the 1.5x uplift we reported in Q3. A great example of customers willing Our approach to AI has always been customer centric. While others rush to charge for early Gen AI features, we integrated them into our core offering. Now that our AI has evolved, and delivering tangible ROI, we have new monetization opportunities that will fuel our long And perhaps more importantly, we are further distancing ourselves from the competition. With more than 1,000,000,000,000 transactions processed on our platform in FY 2025, Our AI leverages the world's largest and cleanest HR and financial data set And the combination of this data with our ability to understand the context behind it puts Workday in a unique position. Following the announcements of our new role based agents at Rising, we we launched four more agents for contracts, payroll, financial auditing and policy.

These are not task based agents like most of the market today. Our role based agents contain a configurable set of skills that give them greater ability to support people in their roles. Each has multiple skills and can perform a large number of [indiscernible] That's where true ROI is. And where we see that customers are willing to pay. Over the past year, hundreds and maybe thousands of agents have been introduced into the market across a number of vendors. As more agents are deployed, organizations risk fragmented operations, increased security risks and difficulty measuring the true value of their AI investments. At this point, there's no central place to manage agents. And there's a real risk of sprawl. That's what the Workday agent system of record aims to It will manage a business's entire fleet of AI agents alongside their human workforce. All on a trusted platform. And it won't just manage Workday agents, it will also manage customer bill agents and partner bill agents. Since the launch, we've had strong interest from our customers and technology partners. Who'd like access to the Workday agent system of record to mitigate risk in the enterprise. Partners continue to play a strong role in work [indiscernible] and they also extend the power of the Workday platform.

In Q4, more than 15% of our net new ACV was sourced through partners. Up from more than 10% last quarter and we're just getting started. Not only are we leaning into partners to drive increased pipeline, for our core products, we're also collaborating with them to create new lines of business through partner programs like Workday Wellness, where we signed five strategic partners in Q4. And we're innovating with them as well. Our Bill on Workday program continues to gain traction. Since its launch at the June, we have 72 partners building and selling applications on the Workday platform Finally, in the quarter, we also signed our first strategic talent partnership with Ronstadt, which brings together the power of Workday recruiting agent with the global candidate data pool of the largest talent company in the world to help our customers increase hiring efficiencies and drive better talent outcomes. Turning to International, we delivered solid performance across a number of our key geographies in Q4, We also hosted a record breaking EMEA rising in December, which helped drive momentum in the quarter. Despite the continued macro headwinds in EMEA, our two largest markets The UK and Germany, had their strongest quarter of the year.

This shows what I've said many times. When customers are ready to make a spending decision, Workday is the choice. In the Dock region, we formed some fantastic new relationships in our competitors' backyard In Q4, with great German companies like Bayer and Henkel selecting Workday Core HCM. In APAC, we had several important wins including Binance, Nine Entertainment and Jingdong. And in Japan, we're continuing to build the foundation to grow in this important market with the opening of our Osaka office. I want to thank my workmates, our customers and our partners for helping us end FY 2025 strong. I'd also like to recognize Doug Robinson, for helping us close the quarter on a high note. For your dedication to building this company. Before we close, I'd like to share a couple other leadership updates. After ten incredible years, Cheyenne Chakraborty has decided to retire from Workday. He has been a driving force for our innovation strategy and we can't thank him enough for the impact he has had. With Cheyenne's retirement from Workday, we're excited to welcome Garrett Kasmeyer as our new President of Product and Technology. Eric joins us from Google. Where he led data analytics and BI for Google Cloud.

Prior Workday, he spent nearly eleven years with SAP. With his expertise in AI, [indiscernible] ERP and enterprise business processes Garrett is the ideal person to lead our product and technology Garrote will start on March ten and Cheyenne will stay on as an advisor through the May to help with the transition. It's been a year of change at Workday. And will continue to evolve in the coming years to go after the mass of opportunity ahead of us. Our recent restructuring was a tough but necessary decision that will help us invest in the business to meet our customers' needs. We're entering FY '26. Our twentieth year in business, with an amazing team renewed energy and a clear view of how we can fulfill our founder's vision to revolutionize enterprise software. This time with AI. Thank you again for joining us. And with that, I'll hand it over to Zane. Thanks, Karl, and thank you to everyone for joining today's [indiscernible] Our Q4 results were driven by solid performance across key growth areas of the business, including continued momentum with full Growing demand for our AI SKUs and strong execution across key industries. Turning to results. Subscription revenue in Q4 was $2,040,000,000 up 16%, benefiting from favorable linearity of new ACV Full year FY 2025 subscription revenue was $7,718,000,000 growth of 17%.

Professional services revenue was $171,000,000 in the quarter and $728,000,000 for the full year. Total revenue in Q4 was $2,210,000,000 growth of 15% and for the full year was $8,450,000,000 up 16%. U. S. Revenue in Q4 totaled $1,660,000,000 up 15% and international revenue in the quarter was $556,000,000 growing 16%. For the full year, U. S. Revenue was $6,330,000,000 up 16% international revenue was 2,110,000,000.00 up 17%. Twelve month subscription revenue backlog or CRPO was $7,630,000,000 at the end of Q4, growing 15%. Early renewal activity in the quarter was slightly higher than expected and contributed to the outperformance. Total subscription revenue backlog at the end of Q4 was $25,060,000,000 up 20% and gross revenue retention rates remained strong at 98%. Non GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $584,000,000 representing a non GAAP operating margin of 26.4%. The year over year improvement benefited from a combination of revenue outperformance, ongoing cost discipline and improved efficiencies across the company. Full year non GAAP operating income was $2,190,000,000 reflecting a non GAAP operating margin of 25.9%.

GAAP operating income in the quarter was impacted by a $75,000,000 charge primarily related to the previously announced restructuring. Q4 operating cash flow was $1,110,000,000 resulting in full year operating cash flow of $2,460,000,000 growth of 15%. We repurchased $99,000,000 of our shares during the quarter and $700,000,000 for the full year, helping drive annual dilution below 1% for the year. The timing and amount of our repurchase activity in the quarter was impacted by trading We had $8.00 $2,000,000 in remaining authorization as of year end. We ended the year with $8,000,000,000 in cash and marketable securities. Our headcount as of January 31 was approximately 20,400 Workday, not reflecting we expect will reduce our workforce by approximately 8%. Now turning to guidance. We're pleased with the execution we are driving across several of our key strategic [indiscernible] Expect FY 'twenty six subscription revenue of approximately $8,800,000,000 growth of 14%. This outlook incorporates the impact of the continued strengthening of the U. S. Dollar, which is a roughly $20,000,000 incremental headwind since we provided guidance last quarter. We anticipate Q1 FY twenty six two point zero five billion dollars growth of 13% or 14% when normalizing for the effect of the leap year last Q1.

We expect CRPO to increase between 14.515.5% in Q1. We expect subscription revenue to increase roughly 5.5 We continue to expect a slightly faster pace of year over year subscription revenue growth in the second half of FY twenty twenty six relative to the first half.

This is driven by continued momentum across our investment initiatives in addition to revenue building from certain deals we closed in FY 2025 and discussed on our last earnings call. We anticipate FY '26 professional services revenue of approximately $700,000,000 as we continue to leverage our partner ecosystem, For Q1, we expect professional services revenue of $165,000,000 We expect FY 2026 non GAAP operating This outlook incorporates an accelerated pace of AI investment across our platform and targeted investments across key areas of the business. We will also continue to drive efficiencies and look for improvements in operating our business at scale. For Q1, we expect a non GAAP operating margin of 28%.

GAAP operating margin for the first quarter is impacted We expect to incur an additional restructuring expense of approximately $180,000,000 in the quarter, which will be We expect the GAAP operating margins to be approximately thirty and twenty one percentage points lower than our Q1 and full year FY 2026 non GAAP operating margins, respectively. The FY '26 non GAAP tax rate is expected to be 19%. We expect FY 2026 operating cash flow of $2,750,000,000 which includes roughly $180,000,000 of cash outflows related to the restructuring. Which we expect will be incurred in the first half of FY twenty twenty six. We expect FY 'twenty six capital expenditures of approximately $250,000,000 down slightly from FY '25.

We enter the new fiscal year with clear momentum and are focused on investing strategically to support our medium term objectives of mid teen subscription revenue growth and 30% non GAAP operating margin while building the foundation to support enduring growth and margin expansion. With that, I'll turn it back over to the operator to begin Q and A. First question is from Mark Murphy from JPMorgan.

Thank you very much. Congrats. It's nice to see the CRPO dollars added figure, I believe, reached its highest level ever. I wanted to ask if you can walk us through the vision and the scale of the investment that you think is required for the agent system of record I'm curious if a chunk of the savings from the restructuring are going to be redirected into building that agent system of record and then do you relating to that, do you have any Lighthouse customers that are raising their hand in some way saying we want to manage entire fleets of agents, including some third party agents using that product. Yes. Hi, Mark. This is Carl.

I answer your question, if you don't mind, I'd just like to again thank my Workday partners and customers on a really good Q4 and a solid FY 'twenty five finish. The diversity and durability of our business and the demand for the Workday platform [indiscernible] has continued to help us drive towards our goal of delivering durable growth as scale and expanding operating margins. Again, thank you to everyone So let me start by answering your question around investments. As we said in my prepared remarks, restructuring is never something easy to do. But we thought it was absolutely necessary for us to be able to reinvest back in specifically into the product and technology organization around our agent system of record that we announced two weeks ago. We have seen since that announcement an incredible uptake in interest both from customers and from our partner community who want to build agents and under [indiscernible] So there's no doubt this investment is required because the demand we're seeing. It's also required on the go to market side where we're going to continue to invest to be able to take the agent system of record along with all of our role based agents deeper into the enterprise.

Yes. No, I mean, I think, we've been extremely pleased with the response that we've gotten and you mentioned this Carl, not with just customer response in terms of agent system of record, but also from partners And yes, there I think this one of the specific questions you asked was interest in not only managing Workday agents within that product, but also third party agents. And we see a lot of interest in both of those areas, whether that's customer built agents or even third party partner built agents being managed within the agent system of record. So once again, significant opportunity we see to deliver value to our customers there.

Thanks, David. Yes.

Thank you.

The next question is from Akash Rangan from Thank you very much and congrats on the nice finish to the year. Karl, one question for you. You guys have tremendous visibility in your business. Your backlog is CRPO three times over, right? So But on the flip side, as you have contracts that come up for renewal, from presumably 2022 levels to the What is the health of that renewal base look like, especially a world with AI, without AI that there is workforce reductions happening And as you overlay your AI upsell on top of that, what are the opportunities for the company to upon the renewal to attach itself and its impressive list of AI products. So it's supposed to ensure that your able to grow to meet your goals? Thank you so much. That's it for me.

Yes. Thank you, Kash, and thank you for the question. Yes, we do have good visibility for the next many years on the renewal opportunity we have here. At Workday. That being said, as you know, we do not wait for the renewal opportunity to sell back into our customer base. For example, we highlighted again for the second consecutive quarter that we were able to sell an AI SKU back into our customer base more than 30% of those transactions, which is second quarter in a row and specifically the uptake we're seeing on our recruiter agent and XtendPro allow us to sell back into that customer base. Both of them almost doubled quarter over quarter. So we have great visibility in our existing customer base the renewals, but more importantly cash as we've been doing the last couple of years, we're not waiting for renewals to sell back into the customer base, the products and SKUs we have today. We also know that we have a number of new AI agent SKUs that we'll be rolling out over the next six to twelve months. And they also give us a great [indiscernible] which is now the more than 6,100 customers.

And we're excited about how we're selling to them today and what the future looks like with all of our new agents that we're bringing to market.

Hey Kash, it's Zane. I'll just add. If you look at that renewal opportunity, just that baseline opportunity that Karl is going to leverage off, the growth in the upcoming year is very similar to what we saw in the prior year. So there's obviously some variability quarter to quarter. But we feel good about the growth and the opportunity heading into FY twenty twenty six as well. And that was part of the reason you attributed to the strong CRPO as well. Obviously, it's that go to market motion and how we're selling back into the base and growing from that. The other thing I should probably highlight, Zane, is the fact that our create and close momentum in the quarter where we did not see an opportunity in the pipeline that we ended up selling back into our customer base was the strongest we'd seen all year. So that was another good selling motion And I was really proud of how the team executed on creating opportunities in a given quarter and closing them at the same time.

Good proxy for SMB business, I'd take it. Thank you so much, Carl and Zay. Thanks, guys. Next question is from Kirk Materne from Evercore ISI.

Please go ahead.

Yes. Thanks very much and congrats on a nice finish to the year. I think this one is probably for Zane. Zane, obviously your guidance for the year sort of infers a little bit acceleration from the first half to the second half. You went through some of the reasons why Just two part question around that. I guess one, in the back half of the year, are you guys expecting much [indiscernible] put out over the last six months? And then I guess, secondly, you had a strong fourth quarter. Do you feel better about that sort of opportunity or sort of the just the visibility, I guess, into the back half of the year today versus three months? I know 4Q is a big bookings quarter for you, so I think that your visibility is perhaps a little bit better today than it was then. I realize you just reiterate guidance, so that would infer that. But I was wondering if you could just put a little bit more color around that?

Thanks. Of course, Kirk. I'll start, then I think Carl probably want to add to it. I mean, as you point out, we're very pleased with the strength in Q4. In a variety of areas, most notably some of the newer opportunities that we have, in particular around AI.

As it relates to your first question on agents, we haven't built in I'd say, meaningful amount of dollars tied to agents just as we expect to roll them out through the course of the year. So there's not a meaningful amount attributed to agents I also called out the fact that we've got a little bit more headwind related to FX and we updated you last quarter, we had incorporated that into that visibility and into that forecast. Obviously, now we've taken that into account the additional I think I called out about $20,000,000 in my prepared remarks. So we see a little bit of pressure there, but the underlying business was really strong in the fourth quarter. And as you point out, we've got better visibility as we look at FY 2026 in a number of key growth areas that are well supporting the outlook we have. In addition to that, while it's not always tightly correlated, we feel very good about the CRPO that we've built and it's that aggregate level that we focus on.

Yes. And as it relates to AI and its contribution, we're already seeing the contribution from our recruiter agent and things like Xtend Pro, which I indicated earlier, have grown now 100% quarter over quarter, but we're also seeing early evidence in something like Evosor And then we did announce four new agents at our Agent System of Record event two weeks ago. That will not be available to the second half of the year. They were the policy agent, contract agent financial audit agent and payroll agent And we don't see them attributing a whole lot to the current guidance we have for FY 2026 at rising later this year.

Super. Thank you all. Next question is from Brad Sills from Bank of America.

Please go ahead.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. I wanted to ask question about international. We haven't heard from a lot of companies that Europe was a source strength this quarter. And I know it's been a focus area for you I would love to get some color as to where you're seeing strength in Europe, How do you feel about the feet on the street that you have over there? Which countries are working nicely in the go to market in some of the progress and which ones would we expect to see more progress from going forward?

You.

Yes. Thanks, Brad. As you know, we've out for the last couple of years. We have a significant opportunity internationally You guys know the math. 75% of our revenue comes from The U. S. And only 25 outside of The U. S. Yet more than 50% of our address and that hasn't changed. Specifically, as we think about EMEA, I think for the entire year, we've called out that it was more of a headwind than a tailwind compared to the years past. And that was quite honestly no different for us in Q4. That being said, the teams had a really strong finish to the year in Europe. Specifically in two of the biggest markets, both The UK and Germany delivered really solid results. Now we wouldn't say one quarter of strength is a trend, so we expect more of the same in 'twenty six, but we do expect to continue to invest in the business internationally because of the size of the market we have to go after. And we expect when customers do ultimately make a decision to move forward with a large transformation project, they always go or should I say most of the time go with Workday.

In two examples of that were in our one of our biggest competitors backyard. I called them out my prepared remarks, in Germany, we closed two large HCM opportunities with Henkel and Bayer, and they were out there for many quarters. They finally decided to move forward and selected us. So that's just an example of the momentum when someone does make a decision that we have around our solution and the value we're bringing to our customers and prospects.

Hey, Brad, and just to tie that to our forecast as we look at FY '26, we're not considering any meaningful change in the environment, at least from the macro macro perspective in Europe. So we're still very pleased with the product that we're continuing to build there. The team we have on the go to market side and our deliverables but we're not having we're not expecting any material change at least from the environment. Understood. Wonderful. Thanks so much, Dane and Carl. Thanks, Brad. The next question is from Raimo Lenschow from Barclays. Hey, perfect. Congrats for me as well. Any expectations for a change in go to market now with Rob Enslin kind of finally coming on board and I'm thinking more international. As well since you have that success. Is your any change or are you doubling down on that one the way you do it?

Hi, Raimo. Thanks for the question. First, I just want to again thank Doug Robinson for fourteen years of service here at Workday. He was an incredible asset and I think we all get to see here at Workday because of his success. So I just want to thank him again And I actually think between Rob now on board for three months and Doug, we've had a seamless and smooth transition. Rob obviously has a tremendous amount of experience, especially in both Europe and he's been in Japan already and he'll be traveling more over the next coming months in international markets to help us expand and take advantage of the opportunity we have, but also the deep network that he has across customers, as well as partner communities. So that being said, not a lot of changes. As you saw from our Q4 performance, I think the go to market engine is working really well under the leadership [indiscernible] refinements to the go to market motion to only improve it from here, but no major changes at this time.

Perfect. Thank you.

The next question is from Michael Turrin from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks very much. Appreciate you taking the question. Zane, I just want to go back to the margin potential relative to the guidance and how you're thinking about that. It's clear there are product areas you can reinvest into. I don't think we would have expected all of the leverage from the headcount reduction and potentially flow into the initial guide for the upcoming year. But can you just kind of speak to the trade offs you're evaluating currently? And then we should think about those in the context of the overall margin potential of Workday from here? Thank you.

Yes. Michael, we've obviously laid out a midterm plan to get to 30% plus through FY 2027 and what we've put out this year moving it up incrementally to 28% allows us to get there. Candidly, as Carl mentioned earlier, we see tremendous opportunity in AI. So we're, I think, doing a good job balancing those in investments. We've got David here and his team leaning as heavily as they ever have into our AI investments and our strategy surrounding AI. And concurrently, while we do that, seeing opportunities to continue to scale the business, obviously, as you grow in the mid teens of allows you and affords you that opportunity to continuously think about balancing investments with margin appreciation. And that's what we're focused on and we're literally looking at every part of the organization on how we scale, how we think of efficiencies. And at the same time, how we continue to invest both organically and inorganically. So I think we've got a good balance here. We've got a lot of focus across the company and ensuring that we achieve our objectives. And as you saw where we see some opportunities, you saw with this year, we'll give it back and provide some upside to margin.

But we've got a good balance there. We think we still got a tremendous opportunity ahead to invest Very clear. Thank you. Thank you. Next question is from Brent Thill from Jefferies.

Please go ahead.

Thanks. Carl, on federal, you've mentioned good wins and you feel the momentum there. I think there's been also some concerns could things kind of go a little sideways till they figure out the exact direction where they're going with the new [indiscernible] lay out how you think that plays out for you over the next year?

Yes. Thanks, Brent. As you know, over the last eighteen months, we've started to lean into the federal business and opportunity. More aggressively than we've historically done. And the reason for that is if you look at the federal government, while they spend a tremendous amount of money on technology, the systems they have, specifically ERP, or financial systems are very antiquated. In fact, the majority of them are still on [indiscernible] which means they're inefficient. And as we think about Doge and what that could potentially do going forward, if you want to drive efficiency in the government, you have to upgrade your systems. And we find that as a really rich opportunity. And in the last year, we've laid the groundwork with a couple significant wins, for example, at the Department of Energy and the DIA to allow us to springboard our momentum in the federal market moving forward. So yes, there's some uncertainty, but there's still tremendous opportunity. And if you want to drive efficiencies across the government, There is a starting point called on premises solution, getting them to the cloud And as we speak to the customers, all of them are looking to leverage Workday and what we have in our best of breed platform and applications to better service them more efficiently.

Thank you. The next question is from Alex Zukin from Wolfe Research.

Please go ahead.

Hey guys, congrats on a solid end to the year. I guess maybe just a two part for me. Maybe first, Carl, on the AGENTIC front, we're all trying to kind of grapple with what means from a TAM expansion point for the systems of record. I'm curious how you guys are framing it in terms of the ability to really monetize and add a tremendous level of new value to your existing customer relationships? And then maybe Zane, what it felt like was there a change in calculus that accompanied the rift in terms of freeing like seeing something that maybe you want to move faster to free up more Or was that always kind of in the cards for the previous margin guidance? Thank you, guys.

Yes, sure. Maybe I'll start. So we are quite excited about the opportunity to bring agents and specifically role based agents into the enterprise. To do that, you need to bring them in very similar to you bringing your human work force today, which no one is better at than Workday. We're taking that same framework to securely onboard right, new agents and digital workers in the same way we have done with human workers in the past. So if there's ever a shift from human work workers to digital workers, we're going to still be able to capture the revenue for that as they land on our Workday agent system of record. So we think the monetization opportunity we have for both our own role based agents as well as David said earlier new agents either that our customers are building our partners or even in some cases our competitors they have to somehow come into the enterprise and they're going to do that through a system of record and we believe we're uniquely positioned with our gateway to onboard all agents into the enterprise and we will be able to monetize that. It's also important to note that we have multiple ways to monetize AI.

Today, we're monetizing in the platform because we have a lot of functionality around AI in the platform itself. We're monetizing it through some of the things we rolled out in the last year, the Recruiter Agent, Extend Pro. We have things like Eversort, And all of these new agents now we're bringing to market is another way for us to monetize it and it's both seat base and consumption base. So we have lots of opportunity to monetize it. And we're excited about what the future looks like, specifically after our last two quarters of performance around AI. Alex, and I'll just add as a relates to the margin profile. There's no change in thought and in process. Have our parameters and obviously we have a framework that we work by. Karl has talked about the opportunity that we have in AI and we've always talked about growing our top line as well as our operating margin in order to get there. And we see this as a tremendous opportunity. To not only invest in the company, but also think about different ways that we can scale the business and obviously become more efficient in a variety of areas.

So I'd say no balance there. Sorry, no change there in how we think about that balance. Not only for the next year, but in years beyond.

Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from John DiFucci from Guggenheim.

Thank you. I think my question is sort of been touched on guys, but it's something that I struggled with the last couple of years actually. And we all know that the last couple of years have been challenging, not just for you, but for everybody.

But we've always thought of Workday as a good house in a tough neighborhood.

Your core business of large transformational deals just hasn't been prioritized in recent years, but you've done a good job, we think anyway, doing a lot of things like to offset that, like leaning into partners in a way you never did going down market, and Doug will have a big part of that too and continued selling back into the base. I guess my question and I think it's just a general question, but are we now at a point where the numbers are doable? And if, when things improve, meaning things you don't have control over, you'll come out of this actually stronger than you were during the post COVID sort of Workday Gras Hi, John. Thanks for the question. I think you touched on what we're seeing in the market and the opportunity for us going forward. If you just look at some of the areas we've invested in the last few years, we focus on driving our AI solutions back into our customer base. And that motion is Workday. And not just for AI SKUs, but many of our other SKUs like our financial SKUs, whether it's sourcing, whether it's planning, whether it's accounting center, or a second area of focus is to drive our Fins business back into our That's working really well.

The other motion that working is we are focused on selling a full suite solution into the market. And we talked about more than 30% of our new business in the quarter was full suite. And if you look at some of our key industries where we focus, whether it's state and local government, higher ed, and healthcare, it was greater than 50% of new wins included full suite. So that motion is working and that investment in financials has paid off. And then this quarter, we had record impact from our partners where they contributed greater than 15% to our new ACB in the quarter. So all of these areas that we've been focused on and we're leaning into, we're starting to see payoff. Now we got to keep that going as we go into FY 'twenty six, but we're pretty optimistic about the investments we've made, the results we're seeing and the momentum we carry into the New Year.

Carl, is Global Payroll Connect is that part of what's happening to are you seeing benefit from that yet? Or is that just still still too early?

Yes, we are. We have more than 150 partners now part of Global Partner Connect already today. Yes, real quick, we since our October when we launched that, this is David by the way, we've Global Payroll Connect has been in 150 deals.

Since we launched back in October, we now have well over 22 partners now leveraging and building on top of GPC already as well. And there's a whole slew in the pipe that are looking to build on top of that capability as well.

Yes. And the other things, David, we're doing is on the platform side Workday Wellness. Has momentum where benefits providers can now build into platform. We see momentum around obviously Workday extend and Xtend Pro. And the built on Workday platform, we have many of our partners now building and innovating on top of the platform. So our platform approach is clearly paying off as people look to consolidate on work day?

Yes, I was going to say the exact same thing. I mean, I think what we are seeing is we're we're still early days, but you're seeing a lot of the investment that we done over the past few years on the platform itself. Start to actually pay dividends and a lot of things things we've been talking about, including as we look AI and what other agents that we think we're going to build And we've got lots of plans to build more there as well.

Good stuff. Thanks guys. [indiscernible] We will now take two more questions. The next question is from Karl Keirstead from UBS. Please go ahead.

Okay, great. I just wanted to go back to the point around your decision to reinvest what appears to be most of the savings from the headcount cuts and in particular maybe to get a little bit of better understanding on how your spending mix is is changing. So maybe what areas are you trimming as a result of the RIF, whether it's focused on functional areas or geos that you're downsizing And then conversely, where are those new dollars being freed up to invest in It sounds certainly like AI, but are there any other new investment areas that you'll direct the funds to maybe an uptick in certain sales rep capacity. So maybe you could describe what what's getting cut, what's getting increased to help us understand how the spending mix is changing as a result of the headcount cut? Thank you.

Yes, sure, Karl. I'll start and then Zane, obviously, add anything on the investment or margin front there. So I would expect that this time next year, [indiscernible] and there's probably multiple areas we're looking to invest. Yes, it's in AI and the product and technology organization as we expand our agent system of record and we bring more and more role based agents into the market. We continue to invest internationally. And when I say invest internationally, it's not just in go to market, but it's on the product side. And it's also to build out more capacities in locations like India and Costa Rica as we look to service a more global footprint of customers. And then two more areas of focus. We're going to continue under Rob and Patrick continue to build out go to market capacity from a sales perspective. And then as you've seen, the momentum we have around our partner ecosystem is something we want to continue to invest in because we're already seeing great uptick like 15% of our new ACV this quarter coming from our partners. So they're the key areas that we're focusing our investments on and we are going to lean heavily into the opportunity in the TAM that we see in front of us.

Yes, Carl, I would just add it's not like it's sort of binary as far as there are number of areas that we always investing in. And obviously, what you see here is a more of a mix shift into AI and into some of those growth elements.

And at the same time, across really across the company, we're all looking at how we scale, how we build inefficiencies as well as invest in both people, process and systems to continue to drive that next leg of growth. So a lot of these investments are investments that also scale and will enable us to grow our margin beyond just FY 'twenty seven.

So we feel good about the balance. We're also becoming more global And with that, we'd expect to see more Workday around the globe to balance that out as well.

Okay. Thank you both. [indiscernible] The next question is from Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley.

Hey, Carl. Hey, Zane. This is Chris Quintero on for Keith here. Thanks for taking our questions. Actually, I wanted to go back to the Asian partnership you announced with Salesforce last year, which is super interesting. But didn't hear you call it out in the prepared remarks. So just curious to hear how that integration has gone and has it contributed at all to potentially better win rates at all? David, do you want to take the partnership with Salesforce?

Sure.

I'll jump on that. Yes. And Chris, good talking to you. Yes, I mean, we continue to work on that partnership with Salesforce. As a matter of fact, I'd say we a lot of what we've done there early days was cutting our teeth and has actually, I think been instrumental in some of the innovation that we just recently announced in terms of agent system of record and actually understanding and working with them through issues like do you get an agent from Salesforce to talk to an agent on the Workday side. So So we're still progressing with Workday or sorry, with Salesforce on that. I would say the partnership is going really well. It's still once again continues to be early days in that partnership.

Excellent. Thanks so much.

In today's conference. I'll now turn it over to Mr. Essen Essentchnebak for final comments.

Thank you, operator. And again, thank you all for joining today's call. To close, Q4 was another solid quarter, capping off a really good year for Workday. Our results, especially our customer momentum across industries and geographies demonstrate the diversity and durability of our business and the increasing relevance of Workday's platform. And with our Illuminate AI strategy, our new agent in most importantly, our new agent system of record, we're unleashing new innovation across across our platform that will continue to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers and partners and continue to fuel our growth. With that said, I'll turn the call back over to the operator to close out today's call.

Conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.