Item 1. BUSINESS

Overview

Workday is the AI platform that helps organizations manage their most important assets – their people and money. Workday provides more than 11,000 organizations with cloud solutions powered by artificial intelligence (“AI”) to help solve some of today’s most complex business challenges, including supporting and empowering their workforce, managing their finances and spend in an ever-changing environment, and planning for the unexpected.

We strive to make the world of work and business better, and hope to empower customers to do the same through an innovative suite of solutions with more than 70 million users under contract around the world and across industries – from emerging and medium-sized businesses to more than 60% of the Fortune 500. Central to our purpose is a set of core values – with our employees as number one – along with customer service, innovation, integrity, profitability, and fun. We believe that happy employees lead to happy customers, and we are committed to helping our customers adapt and thrive in this increasingly dynamic business environment.

As organizations face changing conditions, we believe the need for an intuitive, scalable, and secure platform that provides unified management of finances, people, suppliers, and planning is more important than ever. In fiscal 2025, we announced Workday Illuminate, the next generation of Workday AI, designed to help our customers accelerate manual tasks, assist their employees, and transform their business processes. Workday Illuminate is built into our platform, allowing us to rapidly deliver and sustain models that can solve countless business problems. As a result, Workday Illuminate helps deliver better employee experiences, increase productivity, improve operational efficiencies, and provide insights for faster, data-driven decision-making. To support our customers and help them continuously adapt how they manage their business and operations, Workday delivers weekly product updates in addition to major feature releases twice a year. Through this model, Workday customers are able to deliver and adopt innovations quickly and adapt at a time that fits their business needs. We sell our solutions worldwide primarily through direct sales by our field sales teams. We also offer professional services, as do our Workday Services Partners, to help customers deploy our solutions and continually adopt new capabilities.

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In fiscal 2025, we announced several Workday Illuminate-powered capabilities that are expected to be generally available to customers in fiscal 2026, including a set of new role-based AI agents for recruiting, talent mobility, succession, and optimization, and a new Workday Assistant to help simplify common human resources (“HR”) and finance processes. Workday Wellness, another new Workday Illuminate-powered solution, will help provide companies with a real-time view into which benefits and wellness offerings their employees want and use and give AI-driven recommendations on how to improve their benefits programs. In February 2025, we announced additional role-based AI agents for contracts, payroll, financial auditing, and policy. We also announced the Workday Agent System of Record, which is designed to help our customers embrace agentic AI by providing a centralized system for managing, tracking, integrating, and optimizing AI agents that are built by Workday, the customer, or third parties. The Workday Agent System of Record and new role-based AI agents are currently in development and are expected to become available later in fiscal 2026.

Our Capabilities

Workday’s suite of enterprise cloud applications addresses the evolving needs of the C-suite across various industries and is designed to be open, extensible, and configurable, allowing integration with other applications and the ability for users and our partners to build custom applications. Workday offers Financial Management, Spend Management, Human Capital Management (“HCM”), Planning, and Analytics applications.

Financial Management: Solutions for the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (“CFO”)

Workday helps organizations accelerate their journeys towards becoming truly digital finance organizations by giving them the tools they need to manage the strategic direction of their organizations while also supporting growth, profitability, and compliance and regulatory requirements. Workday’s suite of financial management applications, built on the Workday platform with Workday Illuminate at the core, helps enable CFOs to maintain accounting information; manage core financial processes such as payables and receivables; identify real-time financial, operational, and management insights; perform financial consolidation; reduce time-to-close; promote internal control and auditability; and achieve consistency across global finance operations. Our AI-powered capabilities for finance are designed to transform certain accounting, finance, and procurement processes by anticipating and streamlining common actions and workflows to help increase productivity.

Spend Management: Solutions for the Office of the CFO

Workday helps enable procurement professionals to support their businesses throughout the source-to-contract process, including a user experience designed for ease of use and collaboration. Workday offers a set of spend management solutions that help organizations streamline supplier selection and contract management, build and execute sourcing events, such as requests for proposals, and manage indirect spend. Additionally, Workday offers an expense management solution that provides users with flexible ways to submit and approve expenses, while providing leaders the ability to set controls and analyze spend.

Human Capital Management: Solutions for the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer (“CHRO”)

Workday delivers HR solutions to help organizations build a skilled workforce, drive productivity, and create an engaging workplace. Workday’s suite of HCM applications allows organizations to manage the entire employee lifecycle – from recruitment to retirement – enabling HR teams to hire, onboard, pay, develop and reskill, and provide meaningful employee experiences that are personalized and helpful, based on listening to the diverse needs of today’s workforce. For example, we are helping organizations manage their total workforce in one seamless experience on Workday through our solutions, including Workday Adaptive Planning, Workday Illuminate-powered recruiting agent, Workday VNDLY, and Workday HCM.

Planning: Solutions for the Offices of the CFO and CHRO

In today’s dynamic environment, businesses need to continuously plan and model various scenarios to quickly respond to change. Workday provides an active planning process that can model across finance, workforce, sales, and operational data, helping organizations make more informed decisions and respond quickly to changing situations. Workday Illuminate assists in creating forecasts that incorporate historical and third-party data, such as economic data and labor statistics. When combined with Workday’s Financial Management and HCM solutions, organizations are able to leverage real-time transactional data to dynamically adjust and recalibrate their plans.

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Analytics and Reporting and Workday Platform: Solutions for the Offices of the Chief Information Officer (“CIO”), CFO, and CHRO

Workday helps leaders make sense of the vast amount of data they collect enterprise-wide. For example, information technology (“IT”) leaders are navigating the complexities of supporting employees in new environments, which requires them to deploy an adaptable, secure architecture to help ensure global continuity and productivity while remaining agile. Workday provides applications for analytics and reporting, including augmented analytics to surface insights to the line of business in simple-to-understand stories. The Workday Platform combines both the innovation built by Workday and on Workday by our customers and partners, providing organizations with the flexibility to integrate third-party applications and services directly into Workday. By managing their people and money together on the Workday platform, our customers can gain new possibilities for increased agility, transformation, and performance.

Industries: Solutions for the Offices of the CIO, CFO, and CHRO

Workday offers businesses flexible solutions to help them adapt to their industry-specific needs and respond to change. Workday’s applications serve industries such as financial services, healthcare, higher education, state and local government, and professional services. For example, Workday provides supply chain and inventory solutions to healthcare organizations, allowing them to purchase, stock, track, and replenish their inventory to help support patient care. In addition, higher education institutions can deploy Workday’s solution to manage the end-to-end student and faculty lifecycle. Workday also enables its partner ecosystem to build industry-specific solutions. With Workday Extend, customers and their developers can build custom applications that can accommodate their unique industry business needs, complete with the same experience, security model, and reliability of the native applications offered by Workday.

Product Development

At Workday, innovation is a core value, which encourages out-of-the-box thinking and creativity, enabling us to create applications designed to change the way people work. We invest significant resources into product development and are committed to rapidly building and/or acquiring new applications and solutions. Our product development organization is responsible for product design, development, testing, and certification. We focus our efforts on developing new applications and core technologies, as well as further enhancing the usability, functionality, reliability, security, performance, and flexibility of existing applications. To grow our suite of Workday applications, we primarily invest in research and development, but we also selectively acquire companies that are consistent with our design principles, existing product set, corporate strategy, and company culture. For example, in fiscal 2025, we acquired HiredScore, Inc. (“HiredScore”), a leading provider of AI-powered talent orchestration solutions, and Evisort Inc. (“Evisort”), a provider of an AI-native document intelligence platform. We also manage a portfolio of strategic investments through Workday Ventures, our strategic investment arm. We invest primarily in enterprise cloud technology companies that we believe are digitally transforming their industries, developing innovative AI-powered technology, improving customer experiences, helping us expand our solution ecosystem or supporting other corporate initiatives. We plan to continue making these types of strategic investments as opportunities arise that we find attractive.

Sales and Marketing

We sell our subscription contracts and related services globally, primarily through our direct sales organization, which consists of field sales and field sales support personnel. The Workday Field Sales team is aligned by geography, industry, and/or customer size. We also segment our sales teams into two distinct groups: those focused on landing new customer relationships, and those focused on expanding our relationship within our existing customers. We generate customer leads, accelerate sales opportunities, and build brand awareness through our marketing programs and strategic relationships. Our marketing programs largely target senior business leaders, including CFOs, CHROs, and CIOs. We also generate customer leads and transact through our partner ecosystem, including through resellers.

Our sales strategy is focused on both adding new customers and on growing our relationships with our existing customers to expand the adoption of our suite of solutions over time. As our customers realize the benefits of our entire suite of service offerings, we aim to upgrade the customers’ experience with new products and features, and gain additional subscriptions by targeting new functional areas and business units. Additionally, by extending our go-to-market capabilities globally, we aim to grow our business by selling to new customers in new regions.

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Partner Ecosystem

As a core part of our strategy, we have developed and continue to grow a global ecosystem of partners that build and sell new applications on the Workday platform, source new business with Workday, and deliver quality services and customer outcomes with Workday. These relationships include innovation partners, sales partners, and services partners. Together, Workday and our partners help our customers to better manage their people and their money. The Workday Marketplace allows customers to find Built on Workday applications, Industry Accelerators, packaged solutions, and other integrations and solutions that are purpose-built to complement the Workday platform in targeted countries and industries. Strategic partnerships with public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”) and Google Cloud, allow our customers to reduce their committed spend on cloud. Our global partnerships with payroll providers, including Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (“ADP”) and Strada, enable integrated and streamlined payroll solutions across the world. Our Industry Accelerator program, including 12 new Industry Accelerators announced during fiscal 2025, combines Workday partners, solutions, and services to help speed cloud transformation efforts tailored to solve our customers’ industry-specific challenges.

Customers

We sell to emerging, medium-sized, and large global organizations that span numerous industry categories, including professional and business services, financial services, healthcare, education, government, technology, media, retail, and hospitality.

We have built a company culture centered around customer success and satisfaction. As part of their subscription, customers are provided support services and tools to enhance their experience with Workday applications. This includes 24/7 support; training; a Customer Success Management group to assist customers in production; and Workday Community, an online portal where customers can collaborate and share knowledge and best practices. In addition, we offer Workday Success Plans, a comprehensive, add-on subscription service that delivers continuous value for our customers through strategic advice, product expertise, adoption resources, on-demand education, and technical guidance. We also offer extensive customer training opportunities and a professional services ecosystem of experienced Workday consultants and system integrators to help customers achieve a timely adoption of Workday and enable them to enhance the value of our applications over the life of their subscription.

Seasonality

We have experienced seasonality in terms of when we enter into customer agreements for our services. Historically, we have signed a significantly higher percentage of agreements with new customers, as well as renewal agreements with existing customers, in the fourth quarter of each fiscal year due to customer buying patterns. Although these seasonal factors are common in the technology industry, historical patterns should not be considered a reliable indicator of our future sales activity or performance.

Competition

The overall market for enterprise application software is rapidly evolving, highly competitive, and subject to changing technology, shifting customer needs, and frequent introductions of new products. We currently compete with large, well-established, enterprise software vendors, such as Oracle Corporation (“Oracle”) and SAP SE (“SAP”). We also face competition from other enterprise software vendors, from regional competitors that only operate in certain geographic markets, from vendors of specific applications that address only one or a portion of our applications, and from vendors that specialize in specific industries in which we provide services, some of which offer cloud-based solutions. These vendors include, without limitation, Anaplan, Inc.; ADP; Coupa Software Inc.; Dayforce, Inc.; Infor, Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; and UKG Inc.

In addition, other cloud or AI platform companies that provide services in different target markets or industries may develop applications or acquire companies that operate in our target markets or industries, and some potential customers may elect to develop their own internal applications. However, the domain and industry expertise that is required for a successful solution in the areas of financial management, HCM, and analytics may inhibit new entrants, who may also be unable to invest the necessary capital to accurately address global requirements and regulations. We expect continued consolidation in our industry that could lead to significantly increased competition.

We believe the principal competitive factors in our markets include:

• level of customer satisfaction and quality of customer references;

• speed to deploy and ease of use;

• breadth and depth of application functionality;

• total cost of ownership and flexibility of payment terms;

• brand awareness and reputation;

• adaptive technology platform;

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• capability for configuration, integration, security, scalability, and reliability of applications;

• operational excellence to ensure system availability, scalability, and performance;

• ability to innovate and rapidly respond to customer needs, such as the integration of AI into product offerings;

• domain and industry expertise in applicable laws and regulations;

• size of customer base and level of user adoption;

• customer confidence in financial stability and future viability;

• existing relationships with key senior business leaders; and

• ability to integrate with legacy enterprise infrastructure and third-party applications.

We believe that we compete favorably based on these factors. Our ability to remain competitive will largely depend on our ongoing performance in product development and customer support.

For more information regarding the competitive risks we face, see “Risk Factors” included in Part I, Item 1A of this report.

Human Capital

Workday was founded with the idea of putting people at the center of enterprise software, which is why employees are our number one core value. As of January 31, 2025, our global workforce consisted of over 20,400 employees in 34 countries, of which approximately 63% were located in the U.S. and 37% were located internationally. These numbers do not reflect the impacts of our restructuring plan announced in February 2025 (“Fiscal 2026 Restructuring Plan”), which is currently expected to result in the reduction of approximately 8% of our workforce. Maintaining strong employee relations is a priority and we consider our relations with our employees to be positive.

Our Chief People Officer is responsible for developing and executing Workday’s human capital strategy, including programs focused on total rewards; workforce planning and our skills-based hiring approach; employee skills, development, engagement, and wellbeing; and our inclusive, high-performance culture. Our Chief People Officer and our CEO regularly update our Board of Directors and the Compensation Committee on human capital matters and seek their input on subjects such as succession planning, executive compensation, and our company-wide people programs.

Total Rewards

Our compensation philosophy is designed to establish and maintain a fair and flexible compensation program that attracts and rewards talented individuals who possess the skills necessary to support our near-term objectives, create long-term value for our stockholders, grow our business, and assist in the achievement of our strategic goals. We believe that providing employees with competitive pay, ownership in the company, and a wide range of benefits is fundamental to employees feeling valued, motivated, and recognized for their contributions. Equity ownership is a key element of our compensation program, allowing employees to share in Workday’s successes and aligning the interests of our employees with our stockholders. Additionally, our total rewards package includes a cash bonus program, an employee stock purchase plan, healthcare and retirement benefits, paid time off, family leave, and other wellness programs. We also offer specialized benefits such as a holistic global mental and emotional health program, onsite and virtual healthcare resources, a financial wellness program, and support for fertility options and new parents, as well as reimbursement of adoption costs.

Our Commitment to Pay Parity

We believe that all employees deserve to be paid fairly and equitably and be afforded an equal chance to succeed. We have a market-based pay structure that compares our roles to those of our peers in each region. This process helps ensure we pay according to the market value of the jobs we offer. We also have processes in place to make pay decisions based on internally consistent and fair criteria. Each year, we conduct a company-wide pay equity analysis to help ensure pay equity among employees in similar roles. If we identify differences in pay, we research those differences and, where appropriate, make adjustments to employees’ pay.

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VIBE: Value Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity for All

We strive to be a workplace where all employees are valued for their unique perspectives and where we collectively contribute to Workday’s success and innovation. Value Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity for all (“VIBE”) is our vision for cultivating an environment where all employees can thrive. Whether through creating resources and initiatives that enable and strengthen our culture, building inclusive products and technology, or hiring and developing great talent, we are building a vibrant workplace that fuels innovation and collaboration. Our 13 Employee Belonging Councils (“EBCs”) play an integral role in fostering a culture of VIBE. Our EBCs, including Families @ Workday, Black @ Workday, Military and Veterans at Workday, and Workday for People with Disabilities, among others, cultivate a culture of VIBE by providing spaces open to all employees to foster ideation, advance inclusion, and drive innovation. As of January 31, 2025, over a quarter of our employees were members of one or more EBC.

We acknowledge that skills, education, and lived and learned experiences are gained in a variety of ways that are often not recognized in the traditional recruiting process, which is why we take a holistic approach to talent acquisition that prioritizes a skills-based approach. By standardizing practices to attract and evaluate talent fairly, minimize barriers and biases, and promote a skills-first hiring approach, we aim to deliver a meaningful and positive experience for all.

Learning and Development

Our employees tell us they are most engaged when they are continuously being exposed to new things, empowered to build new skills, and able to make an impact. Our employees have instant access to training via several industry-leading learning platforms, which provide our global workforce with convenient, timely access to content from subject matter experts. We offer a number of educational resources, development opportunities, and a support community to guide employees throughout their Workday careers. For example, we developed Career Hub which helps our employees share skills and interests and receive relevant connections, curated learning content, and recommended jobs to help them on their career journeys. Using Workday Illuminate, Career Hub provides workers with suggestions to grow their skills and capabilities and encourages them to build a plan as they explore opportunities for continued career development.

Additionally, to foster a strong culture of compliance and ethics, we conduct annual compliance and ethics training of our Code of Conduct for all employees. In fiscal 2025, we had a 100% completion rate for our annual Code of Conduct training.

Communication and Engagement

Our culture and how we treat people are paramount at Workday, and we believe that being transparent and facilitating information sharing are key to our success. Workday leverages multiple communication channels to engage and inform employees, including company meetings, functional town halls, internal websites, and social collaboration tools. We also encourage regular 1:1 sessions and quarterly check-ins between managers and employees to provide individual performance feedback, and the use of our peer recognition platform. We believe that understanding what our employees want and supporting them effectively is critical to retaining our highest performing employees and attracting top talent. We use Workday Peakon Employee Voice, powered by Workday Illuminate, to collect and analyze feedback in real time from our employees, garner insights and recommendations, and turn that feedback into dialog and action. Since we introduced Workday Peakon Employee Voice in fiscal 2022, employees have provided over 600,000 confidential comments on the platform through weekly surveys and 91% of our employees have taken part in at least one survey, which reflects strong engagement by our employees. We receive data points from these surveys that help us identify actions to take to improve our company and our culture.

Buoyed by the opportunities offered by our own technology, our talent philosophy puts employees at the center of their own career and performance journey by providing them the tools and framework to further their careers. We have done this by establishing a clear philosophy and set of expectations. Every employee receives enablement on our performance and growth philosophy, what’s expected of them, and how to leverage these practices to ensure their own personal success and career growth at Workday. Our talent and performance dashboard provides a snapshot view of performance-related tasks, with a visual summary of goals, feedback, and growth opportunities. Employees can take action to update their contributions, capabilities, career, and connections using the quick links provided in the dashboard.

Health, Safety, and Wellbeing

At Workday, we take a holistic approach to our employees’ health and wellbeing and have created programs that focus on four core dimensions: Physical; Mental and Emotional; Financial; and Social and Flex. These programs go beyond traditional medical benefits and wellness offerings and allow employees to focus on their personal wellness goals as well as their mental health.

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Our hybrid work model provides flexibility for our employees to work from home, while still bringing people together to foster collaboration and innovation. We offer new remote-based employees a stipend to enable them to have a comfortable work-from-home environment. To help keep health and mental wellness top of mind, we offer a series of programs and communications focused on mental health. These included tools and resources related to sleep, healthy eating, and mindfulness, as well as our Employee Assistance Program to, among other things, facilitate timely access to culturally responsive mental health support for employees and their family members.

Our Global Workplace Safety team supports the traditional corporate areas of employee health and safety and physical security for Workday on a global scale. From the workplace to work-related travel, we strive to keep our employees safe with programs including safety awareness training, emergency response protocols, and our ergonomics and life safety team programs.

Giving and Doing

Workday’s Giving & Doing program embodies our belief in making a positive impact beyond our organizational walls, empowering employees to engage in charitable efforts, community service, and volunteerism. On top of our strategic, company-led social impact and employee volunteerism efforts, we also believe that giving back is even more rewarding when people get to make an impact through their favorite causes. We encourage and support employee giving and volunteering through programs such as our charitable donation matching gift program, our volunteer grant program, our paid time off benefit for employees to volunteer and give back to their communities, and our team volunteer experience, where employee teams of five or more can volunteer with a charity partner of their choice and receive grants of up to $5,000.

Intellectual Property

We rely on a combination of trade secrets, patents, copyrights, and trademarks, as well as contractual protections, to establish and protect our intellectual property rights. We require our employees, contractors, consultants, suppliers, partners, and other third parties to enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements, and we control access to software, documentation, and other proprietary information. Although we rely on intellectual property rights, including trade secrets, patents, copyrights, and trademarks, as well as contractual protections and controls to establish and protect our proprietary rights, we believe that factors such as the technological and creative skills of our personnel; creation of new products, features, and functionality; and frequent enhancements to our applications are more essential to establishing and maintaining our technology leadership position.

Governmental Regulation

As a public company with global operations, we are subject to various federal, state, local, and foreign laws and regulations. These laws and regulations, which may differ among jurisdictions, include, among others, those related to financial and other disclosures, accounting standards, privacy and data protection, cybersecurity, intellectual property, AI ethics and machine learning, corporate governance, tax, government contracting, trade, antitrust, employment, immigration and travel, import/export, and anti-corruption. The costs to comply with these governmental regulations are not material to the understanding of our business. For a further discussion of the risks associated with government regulations that may materially impact us, see “Risk Factors” included in Part I, Item 1A of this report.

Available Information

Our website is located at www.workday.com and our investor relations website is located at www.investor.workday.com. Our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), and all amendments to these filings, can be obtained free of charge from our website at www.workday.com/sec-filings as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file them with or furnish them to the SEC. The SEC maintains an Internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. Workday also uses its websites, including its investor relations website and blogs.workday.com as a means of disclosing information about Workday, including information that could be deemed material by investors. Information contained on or accessible through any website referenced herein is not part of, or incorporated by reference in, this Form 10-K, and the inclusion of such website addresses is as inactive textual references only.

Workday, the Workday logo, Workday Illuminate, VIBE, Peakon, Evisort, HiredScore, VNDLY, and Adaptive Planning are trademarks of Workday, Inc., which may be registered in the United States and elsewhere. Other trademarks, service marks, or trade names appearing in this report are the property of their respective owners.

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