Plenty of tech billionaires have promised that AI will hand people more free time. The executive whose software runs HR and payroll at some of the world’s biggest companies is offering a less comfortable forecast.
Workday Inc. (NASDAQ:WDAY) co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri says AI is coming for a lot of jobs, and he’s put a clock on it.
“Timeline? I think it’s within the next five years,” Bhusri said on “Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry” podcast last month.
The Jobs He Named Out Loud
Bhusri didn’t speak in generalities. He pointed to the AI agents his own company builds.
“If I look at what we’re doing with some of our agentic technology — say, like a financial audit agent — it’s going to replace the work of junior auditors,” he said. “I look at what we’re doing with our contract intelligence agent, it does replace the work of lawyers, or at least a subset of lawyers.”
He said the first wave will hit routine back-office work, and he used payroll as his example.
“Can an agent do that and replace a human at a lower cost? Yes. Will companies want to do that? Yes,” Bhusri said. “Am I worried about the job displacement? Absolutely.”
The Company Building The Agents Is Sounding The Alarm
That warning carries extra weight coming from Workday. The company makes the software many large employers use to hire, pay and manage their people, and it’s now selling AI agents built to do some of that work.
Bhusri returned as CEO in February to steer the company’s AI push. He said Workday’s answer is retraining. That’s why it joined RAISE US, a bipartisan nonprofit launched in June by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb. The group has raised more than $500 million toward a $1 billion goal for worker retraining programs.
“We have to figure out what we’re going to retrain these folks who get displaced into, or we’re going to have a set of social issues,” Bhusri said.
He also pointed to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who he said “has been pretty open about these issues coming.”
Silicon Valley’s Crystal Balls Don’t Match
Other tech leaders have painted a sunnier picture. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos has said AI could boost productivity enough to make three-day workweeks and single-income households more common.
Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has gone further, predicting that working will become optional within 20 years and that AI will support a “universal high income.”
Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder, lands somewhere in between. He has proposed that governments set aside some jobs as “Human Reserved,” keeping them in people’s hands even when AI could do the work.
Bhusri doesn’t rule out a good ending. He said individual contributors should come through it.
“If you’re a doer, an individual contributor, you’re going to be fine,” he said.
His advice to everyone else was to learn the tools rather than fight them, because “the genie’s out of the bottle.”
Five years is about the length of a car loan. That’s the window Bhusri is giving workers to find out whether AI brings the free time his peers are promising or the displacement he says worries him.
Photo via Shutterstock
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