The modern workplace is starting to split into two groups: employees who can work alongside intelligent systems, and those whose roles will fall behind. The new tools still automate workforce management, but now also track skills, expose gaps, and show managers in real time who can adapt and who is at risk of being left out of the next restructuring cycle.
This tension surfaced repeatedly at Workday Rising 2025 in Barcelona this week, where global workforce software company Workday hosted its annual Europe, Middle East and Africa conference.
The company’s leadership framed this divide as the defining pressure on organisations over the next decade.
“Because of AI, the vibrancy in the workforce is unlike anything we’ve seen in the last two decades,” said Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach during his opening keynote address. “This is an opportunity of a lifetime for the next generation of workers.”
He told the 6,000 delegates attending Workday Rising that “technology is changing the workforce, and it’s happening faster than ever,” and pushed leaders to confront an uncomfortable question: “Is the world outside our company moving faster than we are?”
He cast the moment as a pivot point where the speed of intelligent systems now outstrips the speed at which organisations develop their people.
That urgency runs through Workday’s rapid expansion of its product portfolio and its investment in other companies. Eschenbach told Gadget on Wednesday this was one of the reasons the company had accelerated its acquisition strategy.
“When the market is moving as fast as it is, how long would it take (us) to develop these products and take them to market ourselves, versus if we find someone who has a strategic fit with us?”
Earlier this month, Workday completed the acquisition of Sana, a startup focused on AI-powered skills mapping. The company’s latest deal, to buy cloud management tool Pipe Dream, was announced during the conference.
Workday’s acquisition strategy is fed by its investment arm, Workday Ventures, which Eschenbach described as a core part of how the company scouts emerging technologies before rivals do. This team tracks early-stage firms long before they reach scale.
“We were investors in Sana, so we knew them well. We had already started to integrate with them. We keep a close eye on their business, and then we saw the strategic fit. We bring them in, and off we go, integrating it and then taking it to market.”
Ventures allows Workday to run a parallel innovation pipeline, watching in real time how new products behave inside customer environments. Eschenbach called it “an opportunity to get an early preview” of companies that may complement Workday’s own direction. It gives the company a head start: if a startup’s technology begins to fill a gap emerging in customers’ systems, Workday can move before the market shifts.
This becomes another hedge against the widening divide between the pace of technology and the pace of organisational change.
“Pipe Dream has 3000 integrations the day we buy them. For us to go do that would have taken us one, two, maybe three years.”
Years lost in development, he said, translate into wider gaps inside the workforce.
Rob Enslin, Workday’s South African-born president and chief operating officer, said the consequences extend beyond companies to entire economies. He told Gadget: “The world of agentic (AI) is really going to help all economies or countries, and how you use it is going to be really important. Places like Singapore or United Arab Emirates or Saudi all have different demographics. The Singapore government is figuring out how agentic actually helps deliver a better experience for the workers in Singapore. They’re thinking about how they take the human worker, and augment the human worker so the skills are higher.
“The United Arab Emirates is very similar. A defined set of workers, but managerial skills are very limited. And so again, AI can really help them.
“This could be a game changer for Africa, if implemented and delivered into the community in a very different way. You could see high school graduates going into the workplace and getting skills that they would normally take four, five, six years to get.”
Michael Douroux, Workday global sales leader for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, who has managed the South African market directly and indirectly for many years, said there were practical constraints companies faced when trying to modernise.
“The challenge that the South African economy had going into Covid was that there was already some recessionary headwinds and some structural issues,” he said. “And then Covid hit, and there’s almost this double dip.”
In that environment, he said, transformation depended on leadership conviction more than market conditions. It required “finding the right person and team that know they need to disrupt in a positive way how they’re looking at HR, people, money, if they are to remain competitive”.
“A lot of South African businesses have been burned by never-ending deployments of enterprise back office software. They’re looking for offerings that bring in a lot of pre-built integration, that take a lot of the complexity out of their businesses, and have a package of subscription and services that are very affordable, that have fast time to value.”
While most enterprise software makers target giant corporations, Workday has recognised a gap in the mid-market, which defines much of the South African corporate environment. It is targeting this sector with Workday Go, a streamlined offering for companies with between 500 and 3,500 employees. Go’s sweet spot, said Douroux, was around 1,500 employees, which mirrors the structure of South African mid-market companies.
Payroll was often the deciding factor, and Workday’s earlier absence of a strong local payroll partner slowed its expansion, he said. Go’s partnerships aim to close that gap.
However, Douroux said, South Africa’s regulatory and social context could not be treated as an afterthought.
“Without an understanding of what triple-BEE means to the country, it’s difficult to be successful and gain the confidence as an American company. Developing those partnerships is critical for us to continue to grow in that market.”
Workday also sees South Africa as an anchor for its African growth strategy, he said.
“I was fortunate to work on the ground my first few years in region, pretty extensively helping build and refocus that team to figure out how to best serve the South African market. As you fast forward now into the future, we see South Africa as pivotal to understanding our expansion strategy into neighboring countries where we have a good fit in terms of the service that we provide and the markets we’re looking for.
“The South African economy is critical on the entire continent, and we need to continue to invest – and we will – in terms of head count, in terms of resources. We see a big opportunity for deployment resources as well. South Africa has been quite successful serving in near-shoring to a degree, because there’s a high level of services capability in region.
“So we would continue to grow through the right ecosystem strategy, but also see South Africa as a hub, to be able to serve Namibia and Botswana, and be the hub for the African continent.”
* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.