Workday, Inc.

iTutor Group paid $365,000 after it was shown that its software automatically rejected women over 55 and men over 60.

More recently, in Mobley v. Workday, filed in 2023, still ongoing in 2026, a federal court in California certified in May 2025 a class action for age discrimination against Workday, one of the leading global ATS providers.

What is truly unsettling about this precedent is not only that the potential class could reach hundreds of millions of applicants, but that the court held that the algorithm's provider, not just the employer, may be considered an agent of the employer, and therefore directly liable for the biases of its tool.

None of these cases occurred in GXP environments, but the leap is trivial.

This is Dan Turchin from AI and the Future of Work.

Welcome to a special edition of the podcast featuring conversations recorded live at Workday Rising 2026 in Las Vegas.

As always, we're using Eleven Labs to digitize my voice for this compilation.

The real me reviewed and approved the content and of course approved the digital twin.

I joined the Workday executive team and customer community at Rising to discuss Workday's vision for AI and the future of work.

We went beyond the headlines to understand how one of the world's leading HR tech companies is going through a refounding moment as co-founder Anil Bhusri returns as CEO for a second stint at the helm.

I sat down with three leaders who see that moment from different perspectives, a customer putting agents to work, the product leader deciding what gets built, and the executive shaping the vision behind it.

And... really excited to see how that all shakes out.

But this is the first time in my life I didn't exactly know what I needed or wanted to do, right? I just knew HR was, that's my heart.

But man, Workday came along, and I'm like, I love Workday.

Third, I love local government generally.

And so I know when Cheryl was talking to me, my boss, she's our deputy city manager personally, she said, what is it you want? And I said, there's these three things, if you can see my three things.

I just want to help them see what's possible and be able to communicate with the cities to understand if you can shore up this one piece, you've got the whole package at that point.

Because nobody's been able to do it before.

Can Workday do it? I believe they can.

I really do believe they can.

He spent years in recruiting.

He's led teams, evaluated candidates, and implemented systems like Workday and iSIMS, the same kinds of systems he's now trying to get through himself.

So I asked him to come on the podcast.

Javier and I knew each other in high school.

So I fell back on that one skill set that I learned after basic training, right? And I worked for ITT Technical Institute for about 10 years and Universal Technical Institute.

Then I transitioned from educational type of recruiting to technical recruiting for Service King Coalition Repair and Caliber Coalition.

For the last 10 years or so, I've been in recruiting leadership, getting into things like implementing Workday.

implementing ISIMs and leading large recruiting functions and setting up the systems and processes that we will call recruiting in today's day and era.

something.

What we did find when we were doing some testing, when we went direct into Salesforce, went direct into NetSuite or direct into Workday with a querying response,

I

mean, that's querying the whole system.

You're there to be the risk person.

So when HR comes to you and says, Hey, is our, Our workday, sorry to call it workday, they're great, but you know, it's the one that came to mind.

Workday, is it secure? Are we okay to put our employee data in there? Well, you've got to work with IT people to validate some of that stuff.

Well, HR and IT don't usually talk to each other about these things, and they speak completely different languages.

But you in the middle as a security person, as the CISO, you've got to translate.

I mean, I can put, you know, I can say that about myself.

I mean, I worked in some of these organizations and we were using Workday and Oracle, Teleo and so on.

Did I care too much about what's happening behind the scenes as far as tech is concerned? I didn't.

I had no interest in it till a very long time.

I think there are two big things.

The first is, you know Workday, right? Workday was started by a guy from Oracle who just saw that the fundamental data structure of Oracle for HR systems was wrong.

The fundamental thing at a system level is that the data structure of SAP, even the latest one, SAP S4ANA and other comparable systems have been made to record transactions and not to improve KPIs.

And so without getting too technical, One is based on relational databases and logs.