That technological sophistication starts at the top. A few months ago, in an exclusive interview, Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri described himself as the companys Pied Piper of ML for his passionate advocacy about a technology that he believes will be even more disruptive than the cloud.

In his own understated but high-impact way, Workday cofounder and CEO Aneel Bhusri has become one of the worlds most-bullish evangelists for the extraordinary power and potential of machine learning.

Weve always talked about predictive analytics but theyre now a realityand its really a reality, Bhusri said in a recent exclusive interview.

Its what weve dreamed about for a long time. But we never actually got there because the technologies werent therebut now theyre here.

And Bhusri is making sure that Workdaywhich is on the verge of posting its first billion-dollar quarteris at the forefront in giving corporate customers the full benefits of MLs transformative capabilities.

Machine learning is just so profound, right? Its impacting all of our lives in so many ways, Bhusri said when I brought up his comment that ML will be even more disruptive than the cloud.

Internally I described my role to the company as the pied piper of machine learning, he said with a chuckle.And I asked every employee in the company to buy the bookPrediction Machinesand charge it back to Workday because we all have to get comfortable with this new world and be able to succeed in it and be able to talk to our customers about it.

It looks like one of the ways Bhusri is helping Workdays entire workforce to get comfortable with this new world is by letting them know that hes driving the conversation for that conversion.

For me theres actually something very gratifying when I can say, okay, not going to try to get the engineers to work on five different things, says Bhusri, who refers to himself self-effacingly as a products guy.

So every time I see one of our engineers or developers, I ask, what are you doing on machine learning? Or what do you think about machine learning? And what should we be doing with machine learning?

Pretty soon theyre all saying, Okay, before I meet with Aneel, I know hes going to ask about machine learning so I should have my act together, Bhusri said.It gets everybody on the same pagepeople are excited.

At least so far, Workdays customers have been eager to share that excitement and allow Workday to help them build their digital futures.

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Workday, Machine Learning, and the Future of Enterprise Applications - Cloud Wars