Workday layoffs and AI: CEO Aneel Bhusri says Workday's own job cuts were not about AI, but warns entry-level jobs are at risk

Workday chief executive Aneel Bhusri says his company's job cuts this year were not driven by AI, even as he warns that AI threatens entry-level jobs. "All these companies talk about cutting jobs because they're using AI, and that's not what we were doing," he said at the company's Workday Rising conference, according to Diginomica's report from the event on 14 October 2026. He put the cuts down to "corporate bloat", meaning too many management layers in development, and said affected managers were offered individual-contributor roles. Workday disclosed about 525 job cuts, mostly in its product and technology team, on 29 September; its filing gave strategic priorities as the reason and did not mention AI. On the wider labour market Bhusri was blunter: entry-level work "is going to be impacted and that is not a good sign", because many of those jobs "probably AI could do". He said reskilling is "the answer to all of this" and that tech companies have funded programmes for it. Bhusri has a stake on both sides: Workday sells AI agents to the HR and finance departments of large employers. Because Workday denies that AI caused its cuts, its job reduction is not in the AI layoffs tracker.