Ep 50: Workday’s Partner Playbook | Marketplace Maturity | Own the Number | AI With Humans

In Episode 50, we celebrate a major Unlearn milestone: 50 conversations about what business leaders need to rethink.

Saqib Sheikh joins the show to break down how Workday is building its partner ecosystem across strategic partnerships, ISVs, benefits, payroll, and Workday Marketplace. This is a practical conversation about what happens when partnerships move from “nice to have” to a real growth motion with revenue, operations, product, and customer experience behind it.

We cover:
• Why Workday works with more than 1,500 partners, but focuses deeply on a smaller set of strategic relationships
• How benefits and payroll partners extend Workday’s platform for employees
• Why marketplaces cannot stop at search and listings
• How Workday Marketplace moved from discovery to transactions
• Why customer context matters: industry, geography, company size, and maturity stage
• What it takes to run a marketplace across product, partner ops, finance, sales ops, and marketing
• Why partner teams should own real metrics like sourced revenue, co-sell, and revenue share
• How Workday thinks about co-sell attribution and partner revenue
• Why AI can help customers browse and decide, but payroll, benefits, and finance still need deterministic systems
• Why the best AI strategy is not replacing people, but helping them work differently

50 episodes in, one lesson keeps showing up:
partnerships matter most when they are tied to customer outcomes and business outcomes.

If you want to understand how a company like Workday thinks about marketplace strategy, partner revenue, and AI, this episode is worth listening to all the way through.