This year, cloud software company Workday made the Fortune 500 for the first time. CEO Carl Eschenbach reflects on lessons learned over the years.
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00:00 We're humbled and honored to be part of the Fortune 500 list,
00:03 and especially since it's your 70th anniversary.
00:07 It's a huge milestone for us as a company.
00:10 The other thing that's really exciting for us is we are now joining more than 60% of our companies
00:16 who are on the Fortune 500 list as being part of that list with them.
00:20 19 years ago, our founders, Dave and Anil, set out to build an iconic software company,
00:27 one that would help people move their HR infrastructure and their financial
00:31 infrastructure to the cloud and create a system of record that was never done before.
00:36 And it would revolutionize an industry specifically around HR and financials.
00:43 When they sat down and talked about building this iconic software company,
00:47 they wrote on a piece of paper what was most important in how to build a long-term,
00:52 durable business, and that was around values. And that's when they came up with our six core values
00:58 19 years ago, which is our employees, our customers, its innovation, its integrity,
01:05 its fun. And if you do all five of those things right, you'll be a profitable company,
01:12 which is our sixth value. I think the most important thing when anyone talks about AI
01:17 or generative AI is how you're actually leveraging the technology. If you are not doing it in a
01:24 responsible, ethical, and safe way, you're in trouble. For more than a decade, we hadn't built
01:30 AI deep into our platform. We haven't bolted it on. The reason we think we're in a significantly
01:37 different position than most out there is because the output of your AI results is only as good as
01:42 the AI and the data you're training off of. And in the case of Workday, we have more than 65 million
01:49 users on our platform today, processing over 800 billion transactions a year. So this gives us a
01:56 highly curated set of data for us to train off of and drive results for our customers. And we have
02:03 proven over the last 19 years that we are protectors of that data. And because of that, we
02:09 burden the trust and respect of our customers and they want to lean in with us specifically around
02:16 AI because they know we will always do the right thing. The biggest piece of advice I got was about
02:22 servant leadership. Many, many years ago, I changed my life from focusing on success of myself to
02:29 focusing on the impact I have on others. As I focused on significance and impact on others,
02:36 my success took care of itself. The first word of servant leadership is to serve,
02:42 and the greatest leaders in the world serve others, not themselves.