Workday (WDAY) has launched the next generation of Workday AI as companies across all sectors begin to adopt the technology. Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach joins Asking for a Trend to discuss the latest tool and the overall outlook for AI.

"We're in the biggest tectonic shift we've ever seen in AI. We've had many different tectonic shifts over the years — cloud, mobile, social — but never something as potentially powerful as this. And we do believe absolutely it is a big trend and it will become a huge lift to employee productivity in the future," Eschenbach tells Yahoo Finance.

He believes that the technology will "impact everyone." However, this isn't bad news for employees. He argues, "We will peacefully coexist with this technology just like we always have in the past with other big technology trends. And we think what will happen is by leveraging things like AI agents and AI bots, we will accelerate how people work. We'll assist them, and then we'll ultimately be transforming business."

Eschenbach does not expect employment to decrease. Rather, AI will allow employees to become more productive and instead allow them to focus on other tasks. "We think it will drive growth for our companies because we'll have productivity gains through the use of this. And our motto is we want to augment human productivity, we don't want to replace it. And we fundamentally think with a platform like Workday supporting your people and your money, that's exactly what we're doing," he adds.

Workday has recently made investments into AI companies, and Eschenbach stresses the importance of staying "as close to the startup community in AI as possible." In addition, he believes that some of these names could even be acquired by the company down the line.

He elaborates, "We fundamentally also want to stay close to that community because we want them to build and run on top of the Workday platform. We're not just an application anymore. We're both a best-of-class application and a best-of-class platform. And all the companies we now invest in as part of our corporate ventures arm, we're bringing them onto the Workday platform and seamlessly integrating them into the Workday platform so you can get access to our data and drive deeper insights for our customers."

Watch the video above to hear what Eschenbach says about the valuations of AI-focused companies.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.

This post was written by Melanie Riehl