What happens when AI moves from experimentation to infrastructure? Workday President of Product and Technology Gerrit Kazmaier joins CMO Emma Chalwin to explore the new work day where leadership, connection, and purpose become the true measure of progress.
Emily Faracca
Multimedia Content Writer
Workday
Audio also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
There is a certain kind of tension just before a breakthrough. It’s that moment just before a rubber band snaps, stretched to its limit and unable to hold its original shape any longer.
This is exactly where the enterprise finds itself right now: stretched by speed, pressure, and expectation, in the early hours of a new work day. AI is no longer a pilot tucked into the corner of the organization; it’s drafting, summarizing, forecasting, and reconciling. Yet, for all its activity, productivity is up while pressure is rising. Employees feel busier than ever, and leaders are realizing that the old metrics of ROI no longer satisfy the moment.
In a recent conversation, Workday CMO Emma Chalwin and President of Product and Technology Gerrit Kazmaier moved past the hype to explore a more consequential reality: not just what AI can do, but how the work experience itself must be redesigned to realize true value.
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For some, the "light bulb moment" for AI was the ability to generate syntactically correct sentences. But for Kazmaier, the true shift occurred when AI models evolved from language processing to runtime reasoning.
“I don't think anyone has yet seen what [AI] truly represents,” Kazmaier explained. “That really came in once those models started to be gaining reasoning capabilities and the architecture evolved...suddenly it became clear that it's not just [taking on] creative tasks, but actually cognitively challenging work.”
This shift allows AI to take a high-level objective, break it down into a plan, and execute steps sequentially. It transforms AI from a tool that helps you write to a system that helps you solve.
“I don't think anyone has yet seen what [AI] truly represents…suddenly it became clear that it's not just [taking on] creative tasks, but actually cognitively challenging work.”- Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday President of Product and Technology
With the introduction of AI to the enterprise came the promise of "found time." The narrative was simple: deploy AI, automate the mundane, and harvest the productivity gains. However, Workday’s research suggests we have reached a "productivity bubble."
The data reveals a startling trend: While 90% of employees are now using AI weekly, organizations are experiencing a massive, silent operational drag. For every 10 hours of productivity gained through AI adoption, organizations are currently "paying back" nearly four hours in the form of correcting, clarifying, and rewriting low-quality or misaligned output.
Kazmaier noted that the most frequent users of AI are often the ones struggling most with this verification cycle.
"Of the people who are using AI the most…those most frequent users are also the ones who are investing most of their time back into verifying and checking the AI work results themselves," he noted.
This efficiency loss isn't a failure of technology, but a failure of context.
Enterprise workflows, Kazmaier notes, were built for a different kind of technology, one that behaved the same way every time. As he puts it, “the reality is that AI, they are probabilistic systems…They’re not deterministic.”
This duality is the central challenge of the new work day: we have a hyper-proficient technology that can take over human cognition, but we are using it within systems designed for absolute certainty.
To "pop" the productivity bubble, leaders must move beyond the misconception of AI as a simple technology innovation and view it as a fundamental work change. It requires an entirely new kind of intelligent work experience—one that serves as a modern "front door" to the enterprise.
This experience layer must be designed to manage the duality of automation and judgment. It involves creating hyper-accurate AI agents that automate the “drudgery,” while simultaneously guiding the human user on where their specific intervention is required.
"It’s not only about changing the process, it’s changing the work experience at the same time," said Kazmaier.
The goal is a system that can proactively communicate its actions: telling a user what has been automated and identifying where human judgment, critical thinking, and goal setting are essential. By grounding AI in the systems that hold an organization’s deepest context, speed stops creating friction and starts creating leverage.
If the first era of software was about digitizing "salary work"—the transactional, administrative tasks required to keep a business running—the AI era is about reclaiming "soul work."
Chalwin describes this as the ultimate goal for any leader: “If I could leverage AI to do some of my ‘salary work’ so I can focus on my ‘soul work,’ I'm going to be more productive as a leader and a happier human as well.”
Kazmaier agrees, reframing AI not as a tech innovation, but as a fundamental work change. He views AI as a powerful amplifier that scales the quality and the intent of the person using it.
However, he warns that amplification is a double-edged sword. "Amplification can go both ways," he noted. "It can make you better and more productive, but amplification can also be negative and make you much worse because you have this big leverage function now called AI to generate output.
The successful leaders in this new era will be those who reinvest AI gains not just into more technology, but into the upskilling of their people. The reclaimed time must be filled with higher-order functions: setting the right goals, exercising business judgment, and applying critical thinking.
“If I could leverage AI to do some of my ‘salary work’ so I can focus on my ‘soul work,’ I'm going to be more productive as a leader and a happier human as well.”- Emma Chalwin, Workday CMO
Five years from now, one of the most measurable outcomes of the new work day won’t be found on a balance sheet alone. It will be found in the well-being and engagement of the workforce.
When technology handles the "work for the sake of work," employees are freed to do what humans do best: create, connect, and solve. Kazmaier’s vision for the future is rooted in this human outcome—a world where the intelligent work experience helps people achieve their career goals and genuinely adds value to their lives.
They will come home happier because they “feel like their day is productive and adding value versus doing work for the sake of work,” Kazmaier noted. “It will genuinely make people go home happy."
In the end, the transition to the new work day is about more than efficiency. It is about using the most sophisticated technology we have ever built to make the experience of being a human at work more meaningful, more productive, and ultimately, more joyful. Because, as Kazmaier put it, "It's fun to have fun."
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