Following Vietnam expansion, Workday foresees greater opportunities in Southeast Asia driven by AI
From its Southeast Asian headquarters in Singapore, Workday’s regional presence now spans Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
With Workday expanding in operations into Vietnam recently, the enterprise AI platform remains bullish on its performance and growth in the Southeast Asian region. With greater regional demand for its platform, Workday is now working towards the next step of empowering its customers in its offerings.
The expansion in Vietnam will be supported through its partner ecosystem, which continues to play a key role in Workday’s expansion plans in the region. Workday brings the expertise of supporting more than 11,500 organizations globally to Vietnam’s evolving business landscape.
From its Southeast Asian headquarters in Singapore, Workday’s regional presence now spans Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. To understand more about how partners are supporting Workday in its growth as well as the innovations that are being planned and deployed, CRN Asia caught up with Sarang Chipalkatti, Senior Director, APAC Partner Ecosystem, Workday.
According to Chipalkatti, while there is a huge opportunity from an AI adoption perspective, it’s a perfect spot for Workday to be in.
“If you look at the way the market is now revolving around AI adoption, we believe we are in the right enterprise space where we bring the clean enterprise data based on which the AI predictability becomes much more authentic. The whole idea is how do we get closer to our customers and the best way to get close to our customers,” he said.
For customers, Chipalkatti said that the focus is on managing those two assets which are the most important to any company right now, which are people and money. Given the increasing expectancy on ROI, it's key to provide the security and governance that customers are looking for today.
For Workday, there are four sub-regions in Asia – ASEAN, Korea, a combination of Hong Kong and Taiwan and India. Of those four sub regions, Workday has been in Hong Kong and Singapore the longest, with every other market a growth area.
“The newer territories or the growth market is basically Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines and India now. Vietnam has been very exciting. India is the second market, which I would say is quite exciting because we didn't really sell in India market. But if you look at some of the companies there, they approached us even before we did our market entry and they have been talking to us to get the HR transformations specifically,” Chipalkatti explained.
Being ahead of the game
Looking at the competition in the region, Chipalkatti pointed out that Workday currently has a userbase of around 75 million globally. What differentiates them from the competition in the industry is that Workday runs all its AI and ML models and learns from its 75 million models globally.
“We see AI as more probabilistic. So, the probabilistic AI helps you try and get into predictions, but the deterministic side of it, which is the Workday side of it, gives you a consistent performance, consistency, and workflows. It gives you consistent decision-making. So, when you get these two things together, the deterministic piece and the probabilistic piece, that's where the magic happens. That is where we get speed, and we get more adoption from our users, and we are bringing this together through Workday Sana,” he said.
Workday Sana (originally Sana Labs, acquired by Workday) is an AI-powered enterprise experience platform that acts as a unified, conversational interface for Workday and other business applications. It allows users to automate tasks, access company knowledge, and execute complex workflows through simple, natural language
“Sana is a new user interface, and we are putting that in front of our users as a new Workday completely because we are changing the way our intuitive interfaces with our users. It's more like an AI-driven interface which allows you to get things at speed and also makes decision-making easy for a user. And it's going to be magical as we start having most of our customers start using it,” he explained.
Workday Sana was released during the company’s sales kickoff in March this year. Currently, 70% of Workday’s customer base are using the AI tools, but Sana is something which Workday is slowly releasing it to users and that's going to be a single user interface for Workday.