1148: How Early Data Lessons Shaped Workday’s CFO AI Playbook | Zane Rowe, CFO, Workday

Dec 8, 2025

Zane Rowe, CFO of Workday and former executive at Continental Airlines, VMware, and EMC, shares insights on AI's transformative impact on finance. He connects his experience in flight profitability to today's AI-driven decision-making, emphasizing the importance of collaboration across departments. Rowe discusses evolving ROI strategies for AI investments and highlights the significance of customer feedback. He also reflects on the need for CFOs to engage deeply with teams and customers, helping to shape a future where data-driven approaches drive growth.

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ADVICE

Spend Time With Product To Prioritize

Spend time with product teams to jointly evaluate trade-offs and investment returns.
Use zero-based budgeting positively to redefine where and how work gets done.

ADVICE

Test Then Scale AI Initiatives

Evaluate AI pilots by testing thesis, scalability, and tool choice before scaling.
Build reviews into processes to sustain initiatives and measure long-term ROI.

ADVICE

Balance Investment With Efficiency

Balance continued investment with efficiency to expand operating margin while growing revenue.
Use AI to drive internal efficiencies and be thoughtful about where to invest versus save.

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At first, we wondered why Zane Rowe was once again leading us back to Continental Airlines. With notable CFO tenures at VMware and EMC—chapters rich with transformation—surely there were fresh stories to surface.

But as Rowe began tracing the logic behind flight profitability, route modeling, and data-rich decision making, the relevance snapped into focus. His Continental experience isn’t just a recurring anecdote; it’s the lens through which he still interprets complex systems today. That early foundation made this discussion every bit as insightful as our last—especially as he connected those lessons to Workday’s AI trajectory and the accelerating pace of strategic decision making.

“I spent a lot of time in the airlines in what we called flight profitability,” Rowe tells us. At Continental, he helped build systems to understand which routes truly created value when full planes were still losing money, he tells us. That work, grounded in heavy telemetry and EMC technology, showed him how finance could move from reporting results to reshaping the route portfolio, he tells us.

In his first conversation with CFO Thought Leader, Rowe walked through those early chapters—from revenue management at a post-bankruptcy airline to a bold sales pivot at Apple and multiple CFO roles in technology, he tells us. In this second interview, he returns to the same storyline but takes it one step further, drawing a direct line from that profitability model to today’s AI-driven world, he tells us.

Now, as Workday’s CFO, he describes AI as an equalizer that lets small teams run multiple forecasting models and ingest far more variables in cash projections than before, he tells us. He points to “Everyday AI,” a company-wide initiative, and a cross-functional AI leadership group that pushes common tools, responsible use, and regular check-ins on what is changing in the work itself, he tells us.

Rowe’s finance strategic moment this year is “recognizing the importance of investing more into AI”—organically and inorganically—because peers are not standing still and customers want those capabilities, he tells us. With a total addressable market “in the hundreds of billions of dollars” and revenue “much less than that,” he frames leadership now as deciding where to lean in hardest, he tells us.