Chennai: Workday, the US-based HR and financial software company, is expanding its Chennai centre into a key engineering hub as it develops agentic AI systems. The company has also ramped up its India presence in recent months and now has around 1,600 employees in the country.Its Chennai capability centre has around 600 employees, who work with global teams on critical product development.Max Wessel, SVP, Product at Workday, said the company’s development teams have “clear and complete missions” and are responsible for core products rather than outsourced work.“Our engineering teams in Chennai have taken the reins on all of our agentic development, model context protocol (MCP) surfaces and agent skills. We also have a team owning the core of our financial system, global spend and tax capabilities,” he said.Workday has also expanded its local commercial operations to serve around 1,800 customers in India. A key focus is supporting global capability centres (GCCs) of US-headquartered multinationals, along with non-US MNCs and Indian enterprises in professional services, technology and telecom, and financial services.Wessel described India as one of Workday’s most strategic bets and said revenue growth in the country is expected to outpace the company’s overall global growth for years, without giving specific projections.To support regulated sectors such as financial services and meet growing demand from customers, Workday is focusing on data sovereignty and local infrastructure hosting.The company is also using its unified application architecture to enable AI-driven autonomous workflows, while adopting new pricing models, including flex credits. Its commercial model combines seat-based platform subscriptions with consumption-based pricing for agentic usage.
