Workday’s strategic expansion in India: Why the time is right for India

Workday, the AI-powered platform that helps enterprises manage people, money, and digital agents, is doubling down on India. In a major announcement, the company revealed plans to open its first India-based data centre by mid-2026, complementing its new Global Capability Centre (GCC) in Chennai. The new facilities will together serve as a core hub for innovation, technology development, and customer support.

Why is India becoming so central to Workday’s global roadmap? To understand more about this ambitious expansion, People Matters CEO, Pushkar Bidwai, recently had an exclusive conversation with Simon Tate, President, Asia Pacific at Workday. Simon took the time to share more details about the factors behind Workday’s strategic decision, from the deep advantages of an embedded partner network to the rising momentum of AI adoption across India. As Asia's largest community and media platform for HR and Talent leaders, People Matters is delighted to bring the key takeaways from this discussion.

“When we looked at India’s market readiness, we saw an ecosystem that’s not only mature but already deeply engaged with us,” said Simon. For comparison, he pointed out that Workday has about twice as many users in India as in Australia, which is one of Workday’s Tier 1 APAC markets. And what’s more, India is also far ahead of other APAC markets in AI adoption.

Hence the expansion, Simon stressed, is a matter of market readiness. The timing, he said, is right; the macroeconomic environment is right; the geopolitical situation is right; and on top of this, Workday’s customers in India are asking for infrastructure, hence the hefty new investments.

But what about the highly specific needs of the India market? As Pushkar rightly pointed out: “India has often been labelled as a unique market that has many demands, maybe too customised for a SaaS platform. How do you map that onto scalable solutions and anticipate customer asks?”

Reflecting on his nearly 25 years of doing business in India, Simon believes a profound shift in mindset has happened: “As far back as 10 years ago, India was very much a build-before-buy market. Indian companies would hire their own IT expertise, and if there was some unique nuance to their business, they would buy platforms and build on top of those. That's changed a little, because I now think that Indian companies, certainly the big companies, have realised they don't want to be software companies.”

In other words, his observation is that Indian companies now want to focus on their own areas of expertise and outsource tangential areas to other experts - such as Workday. But they do still want the ability to build and customise their tools.

“They want extensible platforms with API connectors and the ability to create and build on top of their platforms,” said Simon. “That is very unique to the Indian market. And I love the opportunity that presents, because it means that Indian companies can buy the best HR, finance, planning and AI agent platform in the world, but they can also extend that platform and build their own apps, their own connectors. It's the best of both worlds...I'm really looking forward to seeing how the Indian market adopts and creates new IP on top of Workday.”

As the fastest-growing economy in the world, India is currently keeping pace with its global peers in terms of productivity. But the country cannot be complacent, Simon believes. Productivity needs to be on the very top of the agenda for business leaders.

During the conversation, he singled out two specific drivers of productivity that Indian companies can double down on. One is the mass adoption of agentic AI in order to make enterprise workflows much more productive.

He sees this as a natural evolution: “Historically, companies scaled productivity by adding people. But with Baby Boomers exiting the workforce and talent pools tightening, that’s no longer sustainable…The only viable path forward is mass adoption of technologies like agentic AI.”

Workday currently has several AI agents on the platform and is scaling rapidly, he added. There is an inherent competitive advantage for companies that have clean and trustworthy data, which is where he believes Workday’s AI efforts will excel.

The other, more complex driver is the shift to a skills-based economy.

“I can guarantee that most companies in India have the skills in their organisation, they just don't know it,” said Simon. “And so they lose a lot of great talent to the competition for a 5% pay rise or a 10% pay rise.”

Instead of hiring and firing based on CVs alone, then trying to compete on pay alone, companies ought to be tapping their innate skill base, he pointed out. This isn’t normally scalable due to the sheer volume of work involved in assessing skills needed versus skills present - but AI can pave the way. Using the example of how Workday Skills Cloud works, Simon described a scenario where companies can view their entire employee population by any demographic or part of the business that they work in, map their individual skills independently of the remit or the job that they currently occupy, and create a talent marketplace where the skills needed for any given project can be easily surfaced.

“That's great for retention. It's great for learning and development. It means that people’s primary motivator is no longer money, and that kind of thing has a direct attribution to productivity,” said Simon.

Change readiness for AI adoption is one of the biggest areas that organisations are working on and is in fact a massive investment area for the entire country, as Pushkar rightfully pointed out. In this context, what could the emergence and integration of agentic AI mean for Indian organisations?

“In short, it means productivity uplift: maintaining global competitive differentiation as it relates to productivity,” said Simon. “Most companies that I talk to already have quite efficient businesses. There's not much fat in the system. Anything that can be automated has already been automated, or there is a plan to automate it. So what is the new baseline?”

The answer, simply, is that AI will be a “massive accelerator for human productivity” as Simon put it. His vision for the technology and the Indian economy is intense.

“Think of a future where anything that was labour intensive and took hours is now literally taking minutes, where 13-step workflows can now be reduced to one or two without any additional compliance or regulatory orientated risk. And think of the businesses of some of the largest Indian companies: imagine what a 1-3% increase in productivity would mean to revenue and or profit.”