Stood up Workday's AI Centre of Excellence and a new Asia innovation centre.

Workday's Product Engineering & QA organisation, 2,500 engineers across HCM and Finance, was shipping AI-enabled product on an accelerating cadence while standing up new geographies and absorbing a step-change in expectations from customers, regulators and the board.

Give a 2,500-person engineering org a single operating rhythm, a credible AI capability layer underneath the product roadmap, and a second centre of gravity in Asia, without slowing the release train.

1. 01Ran the SVP's operating cadence, strategy reviews, staff meetings, board and exec readouts, OKR rollups, so the org made decisions on the same drumbeat instead of in side-channels.
2. 02Established Workday's AI Centre of Excellence as the shared capability layer behind HCM and Finance: shared patterns, evaluation harnesses, responsible-AI guardrails and a single intake for cross-product AI work.
3. 03Opened a new Asia innovation centre, site selection input, leadership hiring plan, charter and operating model, giving the org a second time zone for follow-the-sun engineering and a closer line to APAC customers.
4. 04Built the executive narrative connecting AI investment, engineering capacity and customer outcomes, so the same story held up in board, customer and all-hands settings.
5. 05Acted as translator between engineering leadership, product, GTM and the CEO's office, converting technical constraints into commercial language and commercial pressure into engineering priorities.

"What I'd repeat: build the AI capability layer as shared infrastructure, not as a feature team, the second and third product lines only move fast if the first one paid the governance, evaluation and guardrail tax once. What I'd change: I'd over-invest earlier in the connective tissue between the AI CoE and the release trains. The hardest part of an AI CoE isn't standing it up; it's stopping it from becoming a parallel org the product teams route around."