Cloud Stocks: Workday Leverages AI In Its Acquisitions
Enterprise services provider Workday (Nasdaq: WDAY) recently announced its first quarter results that surpassed the market expectations. The company continues to expand its offerings to diversify its reach within the organization.
Workday’s Financials
Workday’s first quarter revenues grew 17.4% to $1.68 billion, ahead of the Street’s forecast of $1.66 billion. Non GAAP EPS was $1.13, ahead of the market’s forecast of $1.11.
By segment, Subscription services revenues grew 20.1% to $1.5 billion. Professional services revenues fell 3.8% to $156.4 million.
For the second quarter, the market estimates revenues of $1.78 billion and an EPS of $1.17. It expects Workday to end the year with revenues of $7.2 billion and an EPS of $5.02. Workday did not provide an outlook.
Workday’s Partnerships
Recently, Workday announced the expansion of its partnership with Alight, bringing a simplified and unified payroll experience to HR and other payroll professionals globally. The partnership combines Alight’s employee experience technology platform Alight Worklife with Workday’s Human Capital Management (HCM) to provide organizations with a streamlined and standardized experience to help manage the complexities of a multinational workforce. The partnership will also assist customers in accelerating their innovation by replacing siloed and disconnected processes and systems with a global solution, elevating employee experiences and automating workflows.
Workday Leverages AI
Workday introduced its first set of ML APIs in Q1 to enable Workday Extend customers to build extensions that leverage ML. For the Workday platform, it is continuing to deliver tools and capabilities that simplify and enhance application development with Extend. It has released a low-code/no-code development functionality with App Builder, enabling developers to create apps with Extend via a simple drag-and-drop user interface. Extend, recently surpassed 500 customers in Q1, and continues to be a major differentiator for Workday with the office of the CIO.
Workday recently released semantic search capabilities for its Peakon Employee Voice platform. They leverage AI to analyze millions of employee comments and present meaningful insights. Manual keyword searches take longer, but semantic search can analyze employee comments quickly to provide leaders with the insights they need to address emerging workplace trends. Workday had acquired Denmark-based Peakon, an employee engagement platform, for approximately $700 million in 2021. Today, it is part of Workday Peakon Employee Voice and in Q1 had over 500 million total survey responses and 70 million written comments, providing Workday with one of the world’s largest standardized data sets on employee sentiment.
Another acquisition using AI is Adaptive Insights, which was acquired in 2018 for $1.6 billion. It recently released Predictive Forecaster, a capability within Workday Adaptive Planning that creates ML-based forecasts, with the ability to add additional regressors and data sets. Being embedded into the next evolution of Workday Adaptive Planning, the new feature will produce predictive plans and enhance insights for CFOs.
Its stock is trading at $213.48 with a market capitalization of $55.6 billion. It hit a 52-week high of $218.88 earlier this month and a 52-week low of $128.72 in October last year.
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Disclosure: All investors should make their own assessments based on their own research, informed interpretations, and risk appetite. This article expresses my own opinions based on my own research ...
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