PeopleSoft Didn't Die. It Was Demoted. Workday is Next.
The system of record isn't dying. It's being demoted. Here's who's building the next layer, why Workday is eighteen months behind, and the quote from inside Pleasanton that should have been a warning.
tl;dr
Workday won the last war (UX, cloud, APIs) the same way PeopleSoft won the one before it. Twenty years later, the pattern is repeating, with Workday in the PeopleSoft seat.
The SOR isn’t dying. It’s being demoted to substrate. Value is moving up the stack to the system of insight / system of reasoning. Leadership has stopped asking “what’s our headcount” and started asking “what should we do about attrition in engineering.” Substrate is not useless. It’s deterministic. It’s foundation.
Visier shipped an Analytic AI Agent Platform in December 2024. UKG calls Bryte “a system of action.” Eightfold just published “The End of the ATS Era.” These aren’t theories. They are shipping products.
Workday is spending $1 billion-plus trying to catch up via acquisition — HiredScore, Evisort, Paradox, Flowise, Pipedream, Sana. Six deals in eighteen months. In 2023, their own VP of People Analytics publicly named the exact gap they are now trying to close.
If you work inside a Workday tenant all day, you need to know what layer of the stack you are working on. It is not the one with the gravity.
The Founding Mirror
January 2005. Pleasanton, California. Dave Duffield is standing in a conference room inside the company he spent eighteen years building. It hasn’t, technically, been his for several days. The Oracle deal closed on January 7th. But there are still employees in that room who built their careers around the idea that PeopleSoft was different. They trusted him. He has to tell them it’s over.
“There were people crying,” he would later recall. “Men crying, in that room.”
He calls it the worst moment of his life.
Within weeks, Duffield and Aneel Bhusri walk out of Pleasanton and start over. Cloud-native this time. Same founding premise Duffield had in 1987: enterprise software shouldn’t be miserable to use. The competition back then was IBM dinosaurs; mainframe relics designed for administrators, not humans. PeopleSoft beat them because Duffield thought software should look like it was made for the people who had to use it.
They called the new company Workday.
Twenty years later, Workday is Pleasanton. It is the incumbent. It’s the system everybody else is building around. The UI that was revolutionary in 2006 is the UI that makes a retail manager want to throw a laptop out the window in 2026. The APIs that were once “open” are now table stakes, and in some cases a liability (more on that in a minute). The automatic updates are a regression, not a feature.
And somebody inside the building has been telling them what’s coming for at least two years. The call is coming from inside the house.
This is a piece about that.
The Demotion
Here’s the framing:
HR tech has had four eras. Each one has been disrupted by the next. We are inside the third disruption.
Era 1: the Mainframe. IBM. Unisys. The dinosaurs. Character-based green screens, transaction codes you had to memorize, batch payroll running at 2 AM. One HRIS admin for every 5,000 employees, a three-ring procedure manual on the desk, and a weekly phone call to the data processing department because nobody else in HR could talk to the system. Won on: centralization. The first time employee data existed in digital form at all. Died when client-server computing made distributed compute possible (and a former IBM engineer named Dave Duffield decided enterprise HR software shouldn’t be miserable to use).
Era 2: the On-Prem System of Record. PeopleSoft. SAP R/3. Oracle HCM before the cloud. Client-server architecture. SQL databases. Graphical interfaces. Real-time reporting. Help documentation that actually worked. Won on: dragging HR software out of the mainframe and into something that looked like the rest of the enterprise application stack. Died when the cloud rewrote the economics, SaaS rewrote the purchasing model, and mobile made every on-prem interaction feel like a time warp.
Era 3: the Cloud System of Record. Workday. SuccessFactors. Oracle HCM Cloud. UKG Pro. Dayforce. Same file cabinet, better UX, open APIs, SaaS economics, predictable releases. Won on: UI revolution plus integration openness. This was the game for a decade-plus. Workday won it, hard.
Era 4: the System of Insight. The System of Reasoning, depending on who you ask. Visier. UKG Bryte. Eightfold. Gloat. Phenom. Fuel50. Beamery. Every insight-first vendor is adding the ability to act. Every SOR vendor is bolting on insight. They are converging on the same position from opposite directions. Only one side has the history of disrupting the other.
The shift is subtle, but it is the whole ballgame. Leadership’s question has changed.
They do not ask “what’s our headcount.” Workday can answer that. They do not even ask “why is headcount growing.” Workday can help with that, if you spend a year cleaning your data model.
They ask: “What should we do about attrition in engineering?”
That is a fundamentally different product category. The SOR can’t answer it. The SOR can support an answer. It cannot produce one. And leadership has lost interest in systems that merely store what you already know. They want systems that tell them what to do.
The System of Record is not dying. Nobody is turning off payroll. Workday still handles the deterministic plumbing: I-9s, tax withholding, comp cycles, the stuff that keeps the lawyers off your neck. That work continues. That work is important.
It just isn’t where the value is anymore.
The System of Record is being demoted to substrate.
Who’s Actually Building It
If you want to know where the compass is pointing, watch what’s shipping.
Visier launched their Analytic AI Agent Platform in December 2024. Claimed to be the first of its kind in the category. They built agents that analyze people data and make recommendations, across whatever data sources you point them at, with full security and governance. Their CEO, Ryan Wong, said the quiet part out loud at the time: “Unlike other agentic platforms that focus on automation of workflows, we’re fixated on unleashing AI agents to analyze people and work data to quickly deliver the answers and recommendations that drive workforce impact.”
Then in November 2025, they shipped an MCP server. A universal connector letting any AI agent (Claude, Copilot, whatever) pull governed people insights with a single secure protocol. Ike Bennion, their VP of Product, said this on the launch call:
“The market is quickly realizing that building DIY agents on top of context-poor APIs is a recipe for chaos.”
Read that again with your Workday hat on. Whose APIs do you think he’s describing?
UKG Bryte, their agentic AI platform, is sold in UKG’s own press releases as “a system of action.” They are not hiding the framing. Jason Averbook (former HR digital transformation lead at Leapgen, now at Mercer) called the Workforce Intelligence Hub (Bryte’s operational command center) “a monumental leap forward... elevating workforce data to the same strategic importance as CRM and ERP.” An HCM vendor is publicly positioning its insight layer at the same altitude as Salesforce and Oracle ERP. Five years ago that would have been a pitch deck dream. Now it is a launch tagline.
Eightfold just published a blog post titled “The End of the ATS Era.” It opens with the sentence: “The ATS was built for record-keeping. The Intelligence Revolution demands action.” That is a vendor making the full-frontal attack on an entire category. You can call it marketing. You can also notice that they are saying it loudly and that nobody at Workday is disagreeing in public.
Around those three, the supporting cast tells you this is a pattern, not an outlier. Gloat on internal talent marketplaces (production-grade integrations with Workday and SAP). Phenom on the experience layer, which regular readers know I have been writing about for six months. Beamery on workforce planning fused with external labor market data. Fuel50 on career pathing, recently a Visier MCP partner. Galileo, Josh Bersin’s own AI tool, with 400-plus sub-agents integrated into ServiceNow Now Assist and HiBob.
Insight-first vendors adding agency. SOR-first vendors bolting on insight. They are meeting in the middle.
Only one side has the history of being the disruptor.
What Workday Is Doing About It (And Why It Rhymes With 2023)
Workday is not sitting still. Give them that.
They have:
Acquired HiredScore (AI talent orchestration)
Acquired Evisort (contract intelligence)
Laid off 1,750 employees — 8.5% of the workforce — in February 2025 to “invest in AI”
Acquired Flowise (low-code agent builder)
Acquired Paradox (conversational AI for high-volume hiring)
Acquired Sana for $1.1 billion (AI knowledge, learning, and agent platform)
Acquired Pipedream (iPaaS with 3,000+ connectors)
Replaced the CEO. Eschenbach out. Founder Aneel Bhusri back in, February 2026
Lost their CTO, Peter Bailis (the face of Workday Illuminate, the AI strategy’s public front) to Anthropic. As a Member of Technical Staff. After eleven months in the job.
Six major acquisitions in eighteen months is not a strategy. It is a shopping spree with a corporate card and a deadline.
The Pipedream acquisition is worth flagging separately. Most coverage lumped it in with the rest of the AI buys, but for architects it’s the quietest and most significant signal in the sprint. Workday’s integration stack (EIB, Core Connectors, Studio) was built for a specific world: deterministic, enterprise-to-enterprise data flow on scheduled runs. That stack is good at what it was designed for. It is not the stack the agent era needs. Agents touch three thousand SaaS tools in real time, not ten ERP systems on a nightly batch. Buying Pipedream is a quiet acknowledgment that the integration model Workday built the company on isn’t the one they need to win the next war. That’s an architectural concession, and it’s the right one. It is also not something you say out loud at Rising.
The theory of what they are building is coherent enough. Sana as the new “front door for work,” replacing Illuminate as the AI brand. Flowise as the agent builder. Pipedream as the orchestration layer. An Agent System of Record on top to govern the whole fleet. Altogether: Workday becomes the insight layer and stays the system of record. One vendor, whole stack, all the budget.
I want that bet to pay off. I work in this ecosystem every day. A successful Workday pivot is good for me, good for my org, and good for anyone reading this who’s chosen to specialize in the platform. I am not rooting for Pleasanton to fail.
I am, however, noticing what the script looks like.
Because in 2015, Josh Bersin (the most widely-read HR tech analyst in the world) wrote, explicitly, that “Workday understands this from their PeopleSoft playbook.” The founding DNA of the company was “don’t let happen to us what happened to PeopleSoft.” That awareness is now the company’s tell.
And in 2023, Phil Willburn (Workday’s own VP of People Analytics, founding member of the function since 2017, former US Intelligence Community analyst, a practitioner running people analytics for Workday’s own 18,000 employees with Workday’s own tools) told David Green on the Digital HR Leaders podcast, on the record:
“We’ve unintentionally broken the link between insights and action.”
That sentence went out to podcast subscribers in 2023.
That was before Visier built the Analytic AI Agent Platform. Before UKG shipped the Workforce Intelligence Hub. Before Eightfold declared the end of the ATS era. Before Workday itself started writing checks to close the gap Phil had already named in plain English on somebody else’s podcast feed.
A senior Workday insider diagnosed the exact problem the insight-layer vendors are now eating Workday’s lunch on. He did it publicly. He did it two-plus years before the acquisition sprint started. Product didn’t pick up. Or picked up too slowly.
This is what the innovator’s dilemma looks like rendered on a specific timeline with a specific quotable source. Workday knew. The internal analysis was there. The diagnosis was published. And the organization (twenty thousand people, $9 billion in revenue, a Gartner leader every year) couldn’t move fast enough to act on it until the threat was already shipping.
PeopleSoft had the same problem in 2003. Too many fronts. Too many acquisitions to integrate. An existing revenue stream they couldn’t cannibalize. Duffield saw it. Couldn’t stop it.
Oracle paid $10.3 billion.
I am not predicting that outcome for Workday. I am noting that the script they are running off is one we’ve seen before, that the previous run ended in a Pleasanton conference room with grown men crying, and that the guy whose name was on the building saw it coming and couldn’t stop it either.
But What About Extend?
I can hear the seasoned architects already. “You can’t argue Workday is losing the action layer without addressing Extend.”
Fair. Let me address it.
Extend is Workday’s billion-dollar bet that you’ll build your custom apps inside the walled garden. Inherit the data model. Inherit the security. Stay in the family. It’s pitched as the moat that keeps the action and reasoning layers tethered to the platform.
It’s also Workday’s PeopleTools moment.
PeopleSoft had PeopleTools. Same pitch, same architectural promise, same lock-in story. Customers built on it. They built deeply. And those PeopleTools investments became the technical debt that made the cloud migration brutal. The customization platform didn’t save PeopleSoft. It accelerated the dependency and made the inevitable platform shift hurt more on the way out.
Extend is running the same playbook. Adoption is concentrated in a thin slice of enterprise customers with real engineering teams (the rest of the install base has no Extend footprint and isn’t going to develop one). The credit economics make build-vs-buy math favor buy in almost every scenario. External vendors ship in weeks; Extend builds take months. And if Extend was actually keeping the experience layer inside the garden, Workday wouldn’t have spent a billion dollars on Sana to bolt one on top.
Extend doesn’t keep the value layer inside the walled garden. It builds a porch outside the back door. And the customers most invested in Extend become the most locked into a substrate they can’t easily leave.
That’s not the escape from PeopleSoft. That’s the same script.
What This Means for You
If you spend your days inside a Workday tenant (building business processes, maintaining integrations, writing calc fields, fighting with security groups, shipping BIRT reports nobody will read) you are working on the substrate.
That is stable work. That is real work. That is work that will continue to exist for as long as payroll has to be deterministic, which, legally, is forever. I am not telling you to quit. I am telling you to know what layer you are on.
Because the value layer - the part that gets budget, the part that gets keynotes, the part that turns into career-defining projects - is moving up.
If you want to work there, build the skills that live there. Data modeling is still table stakes (your SOR skills translate cleanly; you will be shocked how much of a Workday Prism build maps directly to an insight-layer product). But the new skill is reasoning about what the data means and who is allowed to act on it. Insight delivery as a product discipline. Agent governance frameworks. Knowing the difference between an agent that recommends and an agent that acts, and designing the guardrails between them.
And here’s the part regular readers have heard from me before: the insight layer is only as smart as the substrate beneath it. A reasoning agent fed garbage data produces garbage recommendations, just with more confidence and a prettier dashboard. Which means the Workday admin who keeps the plumbing clean and thinks about what the reasoning layer needs from it becomes more valuable in Era 4, not less. The career risk isn’t being on the substrate. The career risk is being on the substrate and only thinking about the substrate.
Watch Visier. Watch UKG Bryte. Watch Gloat. Watch Phenom. Not because you have to leave Workday. Because in five to ten years these vendors will either be the next incumbents or the acquisition targets of the current ones, and in either case the people who know how to architect on top of them will be in the rooms where the decisions get made. The Workday-only specialist in 2026 is in a similar spot to the PeopleSoft-only specialist in 2008. Not unemployed. Not underwater. Just working on a layer that fewer and fewer people are talking about.
Most practitioners don’t see this shift yet. Some do and aren’t talking about it. A few are quietly updating their résumés.
The ones who will come out of the next five years with the best careers are the ones who understand, right now, which layer they are building on, and are honest with themselves about whether they want to stay.
Close
PeopleSoft is still around.
Oracle still bills for it. The product still works. Public sector uses it. Universities run it. It does the things it has always done. You just don’t hear about it anymore. That is not death. That is the demotion. That is what being the substrate looks like after somebody else moves up the stack. It is also not where HR tech careers go to grow. Substrate pays salaries. It does not attract new ones.
Workday might not go there. I am not writing PeopleSoft’s obituary a second time. Sana is a real product. Flowise is a substantive acquisition. Pipedream gives them something Workday has genuinely never had; a living integration ecosystem with a developer community attached. Bhusri coming back to run the company is founder-mode energy and that is not nothing. There is a version of the next five years where Workday successfully buys its way from Era 2 to Era 3 and keeps the whole enterprise locked in through the transition.
There is also the other version.
The last time a company with twenty thousand employees tried to defend its substrate by acquiring everything around it, the guy in the Hawaiian shirt had to tell crying employees in a Pleasanton conference room that it was over.
And before he had to do that, somebody inside the building had probably been telling him for years.
P.S.
Justin asked if he could have my old MacBookPro that sits in the basement, still plugged in, taped power cord and all. I told him no, that one runs the media server. He asked what that meant. I explained that the 2008 MacBook Pro downstairs has been quietly serving movies and music to every device in the house for years, and will keep doing it until it stops, at which point I’ll probably finally go fully cloud (we’re like 90% of the way there anyway). He thought about it for a second and said:
“So it still does a job. It just doesn’t get to come upstairs anymore.”
Yeah, bud. That is what a System of Record looks like after it gets demoted. Still on. Still running. Still doing real work. Just doesn’t get to come upstairs anymore.
— Mike
Director HR Tech | Hawaiian Shirt Adjacent
The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.
Now... here's the counter-argument:
Workday is literally built around this not happening. The founders own 51%. They are protected against hostile takeover this time. But what if they don't get bought? What if they are just the stuff under the road?