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Posted by gaws 11/20/2025

Workday to acquire Pipedream(newsroom.workday.com)
55 points | 53 comments
afavour 11/20/2025|
> Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY), the enterprise AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Pipedream, a leading integration platform for AI agents

Pipedream indeed!

It blows my mind that every company has decided to call itself an “AI platform” but it blows my mind even more that the stock market apparently believes them when they say it. Workday was an HR platform five years ago. It still an HR platform today.

gomoboo 11/20/2025||
That Workday description reads like the resumes one writes when desperate and the job search has expanded into totally unrelated professions.
johnfn 11/20/2025|||
"managing people, money and agents" yes, that makes total sense, agents are managed exactly the same ways that you manage people or money, I don't see anyth- WHAT AM I READING?!??
Gormo 11/22/2025||
"Agents" is a term that usually refers to people working in a customer support role at a company. Anyone using "agent" without qualification to describe autonomous AI is engaging in a perversion of the English language and should be ashamed of themselves.
johnfn 11/23/2025||
You don’t think that words can shift meaning over time?
Gormo 12/4/2025||
They can, but whether they have is something to be determined by observation, not simply assertion.

It's unfortunately commonplace for people using words inconsistently with established usage, or coming up with novel usages that create ambiguity with respect to existing terms, to use "language evolves" as a blanket excuse.

But saying "language evolves" merely describes the process by which the current state of the language emerged, and doesn't actually substantiate any specific claim about what that current state actually is.

The point here is that this novel usage of the term "agent" is in conflict with what actually is the current standard meaning of the term, and actually does inhibit communication with people who aren't immersed in tech jargon.

I've encountered this myself when discussing AI tooling with the team managing a customer service call center, where "agent" is a pervasive term that already refers to human staff.

darth_avocado 11/20/2025|||
Ironically Workday is the worst product to use as a job seeker to upload your resume.
SideburnsOfDoom 11/20/2025|||
As an employee who has to interact with workday, I can assure you that it sucks so badly since you are not the person that Workday is sold to. It is sold to c-suite and head of HR. In that context, you as an employee using workday are the product not the user, and usability to you just does not matter.
RexM 11/20/2025|||
As an employee, too.
Esophagus4 11/20/2025|||
I was gonna try to contradict you by looking up Workday’s multiple and showing that it is valued like an HR company, but holy smokes…

Their multiple is 105 lol

airstrike 11/20/2025||
their forward multiple is the only one that matters
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11/20/2025|||
Well if we are using crystal balls then the future stock price is the only thing that matters.
airstrike 11/20/2025||
That's disingenuous and uninformed, sorry. You're trying to refute my claim but kind of just proving my point.

The current price is indeed an indication of what the market believes will happen to the company's performance. It doesn't matter if their estimates will eventually be proven right or wrong. Looking at forward P/E will serve precisely to express what the market's "crystal ball" is saying! That's what we want to know. What do people think this company is worth?

Conversely, the current price and their past earnings are not related, so dividing one by the other is mostly just noise.

Esophagus4 11/20/2025|||
Ah, well that brings the number back to reality.
fsniper 11/20/2025|||
I suppose all comes down to who runs the leading (or any) investment companies. Money people are not known to be technically literate enough for not being fooled by magic (any sufficiently advanced technology).

They are facinated by llms that they are pouring down money to AI related companies. Can you blame them? Can’t deny, I am also fascinated by llms.

afavour 11/20/2025||
> They are facinated by llms that they are pouring down money to AI related companies. Can you blame them? Can’t deny, I am also fascinated by llms.

I don’t think they’re fascinated by LLMs in the way the average Hacker News user is. They are fascinated by the pipedream (intended) of LLMs enabling them to lay off masses of workers and having AI do the work instead. It fascinates them the same way offshoring has fascinated them for years.

fsniper 11/20/2025||
> They are fascinated by the pipedream (intended) of LLMs enabling them to lay off masses of workers and having AI do the work instead

I am not fascinated by that part, I am honestly scared for my future.

flexagoon 11/20/2025|||
As someone with no experience with either of those two services, I read that description and had no idea what Workday does. So I thought, maybe their homepage will explain it better.

> Manage HR, finance, and all your AI agents. All in one place.

> Elevate the potential of your people and boost productivity across your organization with human-AI collaboration.

> Turn AI into ROI faster and deliver transformational outcomes driven by trust, agility, and data readiness you can rely on.

> 11,000+ organizations worldwide trust Workday.

Huh?

Sure, whatever, I'm not even surprised about them trying to cram AI buzzwords into every sentence, I'm used to that by now. But what's the deal with enterprise products having marketing which only makes sense to people who already use the product? Not a single sentence on their homepage explains what their product does.

Ok, let's assume I've heard about Workday and know it's a tool for HR. I want to evaluate it, so, naturally, I click the "HR solutions" link on their homepage, and get to yet another page full of buzzwords that does nothing to help me understand the service they offer.

recursivecaveat 11/21/2025||
There's some marketing advice that customers care about solving their problem and not how your solution works. I think this often gets misapplied to turn simple and comprehensible products into vague blobby messes. The customers don't care how your scooters work, but they know what scooters are. They don't know what "get your daily errands done hassle free" means.

Plus if you describe yourself in very high level terms, then your addressable market is bigger and you can get more money from investors.

chanux 11/20/2025|||
I came here to say this. I was chuckling thinking that this is how I should write my LinkedIn intro.

Also, anyone who loves coming across Workday and friends (enemies) when applying for jobs?

rustystump 11/20/2025||
If their product wasnt an absolute dumpster fire, id give em a pass.
haolez 11/20/2025||
My company uses Workday. It is integrated with our EntraID SSO. If you leave a tab open for a few minutes, it will close your session automatically, which means logging you out of Microsoft 365 altogether. Simply bizarre. Maybe more AI will help them.
bri3d 11/20/2025||
One of the hardest problems with making a configurable Enterprise Software thing with a strong brand is figuring out how not to make every misconfiguration a reflection on the brand; there’s no Workday specific reason your configuration had to federate logout in this way.

In the same vein, I always thought it was a mistake that Workday branded the recruiting portal so strongly; everyone is furious that they can’t share an account across applications but it really makes sense. They’re supplying the Workday customer with their recruiting data / PII using Workday, not furnishing that data to Workday directly, so sharing across customers would require a whole legal and data tenancy refactoring.

(disclosure: I worked at Workday for a long time ages ago and people were certainly not living with their heads in the sand. I don’t think I particularly agree with the direction the company is going but it is always interesting to reflect on some of these threads and the challenges with running that kind of business)

mk89 11/20/2025||
This is probably done to invalidate your session token, which is required in some industries (see banks, logging you out after 5 minutes of inactivity).
pbw 11/20/2025||
Workday is a disaster, at least the version we have.
hamdingers 11/20/2025||
I have to assume the backoffice is phenomenal because nobody on the employee side ever has good things to say about it.
kobelb 11/20/2025|||
You don’t wanna wait 60 seconds, 3 times to submit PTO?
chanux 11/20/2025|||
The other day my friend ranted to me how he hates their company system for applying for PTO. Since he said he only uses it to apply for PTO, I was wondering if it really deserves that much wrath.

I think I now understand.

YZF 11/20/2025|||
We use it and I never had any issues applying for PTO...
geoffbp 11/20/2025|||
It is a bit like Jira in that it’s flexible for different company use cases, but most people (especially engineers) dislike working with it
mk89 11/20/2025||
For me it's just incomplete. We used to have Successfactors and although the UI was less fancy, I have the feeling it was more complete and thorough.

After so many years with Workday I still cannot sync my calendar to outlook365, so I need to manually put the entries. A problem solved a million years ago in successfactors.

wirehack 11/20/2025||
Try https://www.klavis.ai, which is a open source MCP integration platform. (I am one of the co-founders)
skeptrune 11/20/2025||
Agents are coming. What's an agent? Who knows. But know they're coming.
ghm2199 11/20/2025||
My head explodes when I read aabout the scamsters that are equifax and their so called "strategic partnership" with workday on payroll data.

We all should be aware that equifax — via their "strategic partner" with workday — has your ENTIRE work history with *each and every* payroll check AMOUNT ever sent to you by any W2 employer, the employer info, your address etc. It sells this info to god knows who. Its a shocking amount of info. Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753

I recall a year or so ago, I had frozen this info from being dissemenated to employers or sold to companies from https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/ link but it seems to ask me to re-register again with your SSN and DOB. WTF. That registration would still not stop them from collecting this info.

There is no way I can even partially delete any part of this data, like I dunno the dates on which I recieved each of my paychecks. Why the fuck is that in the report?

jtokoph 11/20/2025|
The pay amounts also include any RSUs granted and NSOs sold.

It took many back and forths with my employer’s HR department and executives to get them to tell ADP to stop sending this info to Equifax (work number)

xgulfie 11/20/2025||
> Pipedream is a platform for building AI agents

It is? Last I used it, it was a serverless event-driven pipeline platform

neilpointer 11/20/2025||
well, see, you can send an event to an LLM and it can send an event back so it's an AI company now. I am an AI company, now, too.
mjhagen 11/20/2025|||
Last I used it, it was a plumbing game.
dangoodmanUT 11/20/2025||
I’m pretty sure that’s just the obligatory reskin to ride the ai wave
dustyharddrive 11/20/2025||
Great news for this site's most prolific spammer!
newusertoday 11/20/2025|
i don't get it can you elaborate?
jusonchan81 11/20/2025|||
Probably referring to the founder of pipedream
dustyharddrive 11/20/2025|||
The founder...

runs a crossposting bot here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

spammed package maintainers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31588316

asdfman123 11/20/2025||
> Workday to acquire Pipedream

Me when I start crushing on the lady who works on the second floor of my office

namegulf 11/20/2025||
Got confused first reading the title of this post (thought someone joking about a pipedream)

This is interesting acquisition, a integration platform to boost their AI offering.

rubenvanwyk 11/20/2025|
Was confusing Pipedrive and Pipedream for a moment. Suprised how many Zapier-alternatives apparently exist and have business.
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