At first, we wondered why Zane Rowe was once again leading us back to Continental Airlines. With notable CFO tenures at VMware and EMC—chapters rich with transformation—surely there were fresh stories to surface.
But as Rowe began tracing the logic behind flight profitability, route modeling, and data-rich decision making, the relevance snapped into focus. His Continental experience isn’t just a recurring anecdote; it’s the lens through which he still interprets complex systems today. That early foundation made this discussion every bit as insightful as our last—especially as he connected those lessons to Workday’s AI trajectory and the accelerating pace of strategic decision making.
Read More“I spent a lot of time in the airlines in what we called flight profitability,” Rowe tells us. At Continental, he helped build systems to understand which routes truly created value when full planes were still losing money, he tells us. That work, grounded in heavy telemetry and EMC technology, showed him how finance could move from reporting results to reshaping the route portfolio, he tells us.
In his first conversation with CFO Thought Leader, Rowe walked through those early chapters—from revenue management at a post-bankruptcy airline to a bold sales pivot at Apple and multiple CFO roles in technology, he tells us. In this second interview, he returns to the same storyline but takes it one step further, drawing a direct line from that profitability model to today’s AI-driven world, he tells us.
Now, as Workday’s CFO, he describes AI as an equalizer that lets small teams run multiple forecasting models and ingest far more variables in cash projections than before, he tells us. He points to “Everyday AI,” a company-wide initiative, and a cross-functional AI leadership group that pushes common tools, responsible use, and regular check-ins on what is changing in the work itself, he tells us.
Rowe’s finance strategic moment this year is “recognizing the importance of investing more into AI”—organically and inorganically—because peers are not standing still and customers want those capabilities, he tells us. With a total addressable market “in the hundreds of billions of dollars” and revenue “much less than that,” he frames leadership now as deciding where to lean in hardest, he tells us.
Made Possible By
CFOTL: You mentioned acquisitions. As far as M&A is concerned, what are your priorities now? It’s always been an acquisitive company, I think that’s a fair characterization—but correct me. What M&A priorities are you putting forth today?
Rowe: Broadly, I’d say they center around AI technology and really thinking about how we continue to accelerate. We’ve got a great roadmap and really talented people, but how do we augment that and move even faster? Customers are asking for more and more, so we want to do this in a smart way. We’ve always had a very high bar—as you alluded to, Jack. We’re inquisitive. We ask: Is it the right technology? Is it the right cultural fit? Do we have the right team, and can we really drive change with it and have it become part of the portfolio? With the platform we have and the recent acquisitions we’ve made, we’re very confident that what we’re doing is helping our teams internally and helping customers recognize more value from the platform. It’s exciting work. It’s not “acquire a company and give us a year or two.” In many cases, we’re counting in months and quarters the change our customers can see and benefit from, thanks to the technologies and incredible teams we’ve brought in. We’re thrilled to keep growing the family.
CFOTL: From your vantage point, what’s the most meaningful way AI has begun to change how you think about Workday’s long-term strategy?
Rowe: I don’t know that it’s been a significant change in strategy. One of the great things about Workday—and one of the reasons I joined about two and a half years ago—is that we’d already been working on AI for many years. So it’s not a strategic pivot; it’s an acceleration. Ideas we had a few years ago can now be executed much faster with the tools we have and the pace of AI. That applies to the UI/UX side of the business and the agent side. We’ve expanded our portfolio to include not just HCM and financials but also who is managing your agents and how you think about those resources, which we’ve now included as part of our portfolio—an agent system of record—so you’re managing your people, your money, and your agents together. That agent tech layer has put everything into “fast speed mode.” The strategy is similar, but it’s more comprehensive because of agents and the change we can drive with customers. When you go to Rising, our big customer event, and see how customers are using the technology to make things better and faster and truly change people’s lives, it’s an exciting time to be in this business.
CFOTL: You mentioned that there are new tools being adopted and used, and there’s some excitement around them. What have you learned about driving adoption of new tools internally—especially AI-related tools?
Rowe: We have an initiative called Everyday AI, which is really about enabling all our workmates to embrace AI. Our IT group, which we call Business Technology, helps proliferate these tools so people can adopt them. Alongside that, as with any learning and development opportunity, we encourage and actually measure usage. Whether you’re in finance or elsewhere, we want you to have strong familiarity with the AI tools that can benefit you. We offer all kinds of classes and we’re very focused on the skills the workforce has today—myself included. I have a team constantly asking, “Have you used AI here? Have you used Gemini this way? How are you thinking about Notebook LM?”—in addition to our own tools. The goal is to embrace AI and then change where and how we spend our time. I challenge all my teams—all my direct reports—to sit down with me and talk about what they’re doing with AI today and what they expect that to look like a year from now. Then we check in: Are we making progress? Are forecasts better? On the accounting side, do we have anomaly detection? Are we more accurate than ever? Are we moving faster where it makes sense, with better granularity in the data? We think about every finance process and ask how it is changing and what “good” and “great” look like. Then we socialize that with peers—finance leaders across the Bay Area and beyond—to see what others are doing and how finance more broadly is changing. It’s exciting, because with good data, a great data set, and strong tools, you can do analysis with fewer people and go deeper into the organization, and that can truly change how you think about the business.
CFOTL: Can you give us some perspective on AI and forecasting compared to two years ago? How is your team leveraging AI in forecasting tasks today?
Rowe: If you look at our cash forecast, and go into more detail on when we expect to be paid by customers and all the elements of that forecast, there are many more variables we can pull in now than ever before. That’s one example of getting more precise in certain parts of the business. We can factor in seasonality in different ways and run multiple models. Where it might have taken a group of people a couple of months to test everything, we can now compress that timeline. We can say, “This model has a much better correlation, and here’s why,” and then keep testing and adopting it, and keep improving the forecast by including more variables. On the go-to-market side, when we look at pipeline, we can examine propensity to sell to different types of customers, where we’ve had success, and how we think about renewal opportunities. Every part of the business can benefit from having more data and better insight into that data in ways that previously weren’t possible—simply because people didn’t have the time or the capacity to dig in as deeply as AI now allows.
Workday | www.workday.com | Pleasanton, CA