Every Enterprise Software Firm is Selling the Same AI Products

Workday has spent most of its 20-year existence selling applications that businesses use to manage their employees and financial operations. Now, the company is joining the growing list of software incumbents that are competing head-on in ways they didn’t use to, by selling the same artificial intelligence-powered applications.

Last week, Workday announced a $1.1 billion acquisition of an artificial intelligence startup that competes with companies like Glean and Atlassian in software that helps employees quickly find information scattered across different applications, such as Salesforce customer management and Microsoft SharePoint. The startup Workday bought, Sana, also develops so-called agents that automate tasks such as updating customer records and reviewing legal contracts.

As a result, Workday will now sell these types of applications alongside everyone from Salesforce and ServiceNow to SAP and Google, as the chart below shows. At least seven of these companies are selling five similar products.

If you’re confused about this competitive mess, you’re not alone.

In some ways, this is the natural response by long-established software firms to new technology that appeared to threaten them or at least offered customers AI-powered alternatives they could build themselves or get from young “AI-native” startups.