HR giant Workday is launching a new way for enterprises to keep track of all of their AI agents in one place. It’s also launching a few more AI agents of its own, for good measure. Silicon Valley-based Workday announced on Tuesday the release of Workday Agent System of Record, which is meant to help […]
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Unimaginable disasters like the fires in Los Angeles cause hundreds of billions of dollars in destruction, and put a huge focus on the role the insurance industry plays in the process of rebuilding. Those events also lead to major financial losses at the insurance companies themselves, and longer term, all of this will put a […]
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Enterprise HR platform Workday is the latest tech company to announce layoffs in recent weeks. The Silicon Valley-based company laid off 1,750 employees on Wednesday, as originally reported by Bloomberg and confirmed independently by TechCrunch. That total represents approximately 8.5% of head count. Unlike many other tech companies, including Meta and Microsoft, Workday has not […]
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Amazon
Big Amazon cloud customers have been pressing the tech giant to give them access to DeepSeek's AI models, the latest sign of the Chinese startup taking the tech world by storm.
More than 20 key clients of Amazon Web Services asked the company to make DeepSeek models available through Amazon's Bedrock AI development tool this weekend, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider.
Toyota, Stripe, Cisco, Yelp, and Workday were among AWS customers asking for this access, with many wanting to test and evaluate DeepSeek's AI capabilities internally. Other companies that made similar requests include Mercado Libre and Kellogg, the document showed.
An Amazon spokesperson told BI that Bedrock customers use multiple models to meet their unique needs and the company remains focused on "providing our customers with choice."
"We are always listening to customers to bring the latest emerging and popular models to AWS," the spokesperson said.
Spokespeople for Stripe, Cisco, Yelp, Workday, Toyota, Mercado Libre, and Kellogg didn't respond to requests for comment.
DeepSeek recently rolled out AI models that are on par with, or better than, some of Silicon Valley's top offerings — at a fraction of the cost. Its cheap pricing, strong performance, and compute-efficiency have raised questions about US tech companies' massive spending on competing products.
Tech stocks, including Nvidia, Broadcom, and TSMC, plunged on Monday as investors tried to assess the long-term implications of DeepSeek's initial success.
Amazon shares dropped early on Monday trading, but rallied during the day to end up 0.2%.
The moves highlight Amazon's strategic advantage in the generative AI race. From early on, AWS focused on providing customers with as many AI models as possible through Bedrock, believing that no one model would dominate the market.
That's a contrast to other tech companies, such as OpenAI and Google, which have spent heavily on building their own frontier AI models.
AWS still has an internal AGI team developing its own AI models, and the company unveiled the latest version, Nova, in December. However, Amazon has mostly prioritized offering a range of other AI models through the cloud.
Amazon often makes decisions based on customer feedback, and the company is likely considering making DeepSeek's models available through Bedrock after such a flood of client requests, according to a person familiar with the matter.
One AWS employee told BI that the company is not in "panic" mode over DeepSeek like some other tech companies. If DeepSeek's models are good, "we'll just host it on Bedrock," this person said. They asked not to be identified discussing private matters.
"We expect to see many more models like this — both large and small, proprietary and open-source — excel at different tasks," the Amazon spokesperson told BI, while noting that customers can access some DeepSeek-related products on AWS through tools such as Bedrock.
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As Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy gear up to try to reshape large swaths of the federal government, one big software player sees an opportunity.
Workday, the human-resources-software company that workers love to hate, is embedded in more than half of Fortune 500 companies. The $72 billion company has been building up its government customer base, from Oklahoma's Tulsa County to the US Department of Energy. In 2022, Workday was approved to work with the federal government.
Now that Musk and Ramaswamy's Department of Government Efficiency is set to advise President-elect Donald Trump on rescinding regulations and cutting administrative costs, Workday and other government vendors could stand to benefit.
On Workday's Tuesday earnings call, CEO Carl Eschenbach addressed an analyst's question about how DOGE could impact Workday's business.
Eschenbach said more than 80% of the federal government's HR systems were physically housed on local servers, what's called "on-premises." Companies and organizations have been steadily migrating from on-premises servers to the cloud for cost savings, better security, and efficiency, among other benefits.
"Postelection and with DOGE coming out, people are absolutely looking to drive more economies of scale and more efficiency. And I can tell you supporting these on-premises, antiquated systems is not a way to do that," Eschenbach said.
Eschenbach added that federal agencies were at an "inflection point" and ready to move to the cloud — and Workday has a government-focused product to sell them.
"We think this will only be a tailwind for us as we think about the federal government business going forward," he said.
Workday said in May that it would work with the Department of Energy and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
"These are critical wins for us and it's actually driving demand for us in the federal government as people recognize Workday is really pushing hard into that market," Eschenbach said on Tuesday's call.
In the last quarter, Workday brought in $2.2 billion in revenue — a 16% increase from last year. The company doesn't break out revenue by customer type. Workday's stock is up 14% in the past year.
The company didn't respond to a request for comment sent outside business hours.
Last week, Musk and Ramaswamy named several of DOGE's targets in a Wall Street Journal opinion column: work-from-home arrangements, Planned Parenthood, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and general head count, among others.
"DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions," the pair wrote.
The federal government is the largest employer in the US, with a workforce of more than 2 million Americans, so the group's suggestions could have wide-ranging implications.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that notable Silicon Valley figures — including the Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, the investor Marc Andreessen, the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, and the former Uber CEO turned food-tech entrepreneur Travis Kalanick — had been involved in DOGE's early planning.
