NEW YORK, May 22, 2026, 06:03 EDT
Workday shares jumped in pre-market trade Friday after the cloud software company topped Wall Street’s profit and revenue forecasts, with the beat pulling in buyers looking past recent AI-driven weakness in the stock.
Shares traded at $134.01 at 6:00 a.m. ET, gaining $12.16, or 9.98%, over Thursday’s $121.85 close, according to Public.com. Prices in pre-market can swing more than during the regular session because of lower volume.
Workday shares had dropped more than 43% this year, while the S&P 500 software and services index slipped about 14%. Investors worried that AI products from firms like Anthropic might hit demand for older business software. The stock jumped almost 12% in premarket trade, after Workday beat first-quarter profit and revenue forecasts, Reuters reported.
U.S. stock markets were still in pre-market hours at the time of the dateline. The Nasdaq’s main trading runs 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET, while pre-market trading goes from 4:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Nasdaq lists Memorial Day, May 25, as a day when markets are closed.
Workday’s fiscal Q1 revenue hit $2.542 billion, gaining 13.5% year over year. Subscription revenue came in at $2.354 billion, up 14.3%. Non-GAAP diluted EPS rose to $2.66 from $2.23. CEO Aneel Bhusri said Workday is “ready for this AI moment.” CFO Zane Rowe said the company will keep “executing on our agentic AI roadmap” and boosted the full-year adjusted operating-margin forecast to 30.5%. Workday Investor Relations
Workday said its 12-month subscription revenue backlog grew 15.5% to $8.806 billion. Investors had been watching for signs that the company’s core HR and finance software could still hold pricing power and keep customers locked in.
Bhusri returned as CEO and drove home the message on the earnings call. In his prepared remarks, he called this Workday’s “best first quarter of new ACV growth in five years.” ACV stands for annual contract value, a metric for expected yearly deal revenue in software. Bhusri also said Workday needs a more startup-like mindset as it rolls out AI agents in its products. Q4 Communications
Workday is tightening its AI-agent focus, with The Wall Street Journal saying the company will launch about 15 agents this year. The agents are expected to target HR, finance, corporate travel and IT service management, areas that put Workday closer to ServiceNow. Salesforce is still another big software name investors watch as they try to gauge the price impact of AI across the sector.
But the rebound isn’t settled yet. Workday held its full-year subscription revenue guidance at $9.925 billion to $9.950 billion, and Barron’s said the subscription revenue backlog came to $27.29 billion, which fell short of the $28.38 billion analysts wanted. There’s risk the pre-market move loses steam if clients use AI to reduce software seats or slow down fresh spending, turning the bounce into just another relief trade.
Workday gets a cleaner quarter with the returning founder-CEO, better margins, and more AI buzz this time. That takes some pressure off for now. The next sign comes after the open, when deeper trading shows if investors will stick with the move ahead of the long U.S. holiday weekend.
