Workday confronts existential threat as customers freeze hiring
Workday is confronting a troubling reality. Customers aren't hiring much and some are actively cutting staff. The solution? Cross-selling to squeeze more revenue per user out of its installed base.
The SaaS finance and HR company posted a 12.6 percent year-on-year rise in revenue to $2.4 billion for Q3 of its fiscal 2026 ended October 31. Net income jumped to $252 million, up from $193 million.
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Subscription revenue and forecasts met expectations, but Wall Street still wanted more, and Workday's share price fell about 7 percent.
CEO Carl Eschenbach said the company had added new customers and expanded deployments within companies such as Levi Strauss and Novartis. However, as in recent quarters, customer headcount levels "continue to grow modestly."
Since Workday's revenue model depends on per-employee seat licenses, stagnant or declining customer headcount directly threatens growth.
Under questioning, he said the headcount of Workday's customer base was up year-over-year, but admitted some customers were also laying off staff. One investment analyst asked if this might lead to the ending of subscription discounts or more substantial cross-selling.
Eschenbach said: "We're focused not on just seats, but actually revenue per seat."
The strategy involves aggressive cross-selling new solutions developed by Workday and recent acquisitions, including contract management software Evisort, talent software vendor HiredScore, task automation software Sana, "candidate experience" software Paradox, and AI agent platform Flowise.
"We have so much more to sell back into our customer base, and that drives strength for us and offsets any potential impact we might see from headcount reductions in our customers," he said. "Also, our customers do true-ups with us both annually on their headcount... and we do have floors and minimums that the customer can bring their headcount down, and that gives us some protection."
The Register notes that if customers adopt the new software – and AI delivers the promised productivity gains – it could prompt further headcount cuts, raising the question of who actually benefits from this doom-cycle beyond Workday.
Other SaaS vendors are grappling with the same problem. Salesforce, for example, got a similar thorny question from an investment analyst last year.
CEO Marc Benioff said Salesforce would respond to the headcount reduction prompted by the rollout of AI agents by introducing a new charging model based on software consumption or AI agent conversations.
He assured investors that it would be "a very high margin opportunity" for Salesforce.
Analyst firm Forrester said that as vendors inject AI into application software, they will adopt strategies that "dramatically increase vendor lock-in" by "rebundling" products and pushing customers to see their wares as a "platform of platforms." ®
