Aneel Bhusri came back as CEO of Workday (@Workday) in February and found 50 AI agents under development. Now there are 20. He told Fortune's Alyson Shontell (@ajs) where that call came from: "I'm a huge Steve Jobs disciple as it relates to his products and market thinking." He watched Jobs interview after interview and kept sending his management team Instagram clips of him. The one that stuck was an All Things D interview where Jobs talked about making Apple the biggest startup in the world, back to ownership and speed, with fewer products that really mattered. So Bhusri ended the projects outside the core. Some agents had little impact. Others became features inside the agents that stayed. "The best lens on that is what matters for the customer," he said. Workday itself started as a comeback. Bhusri joined PeopleSoft in 1993 as director of planning, working for founder Dave Duffield, and became vice chairman in 1999. That same year he also became a partner at Greylock (@GreylockVC). In December 2004 PeopleSoft agreed to a $10.3B hostile takeover. By March 2005, Duffield and Bhusri had started Workday, funded by Duffield himself and Greylock. The product launched in November 2006. By spring 2012 it had 310 customers. That October it priced its IPO at $28, closed day one at $48.69 and raised $637M, the most cash for a US tech IPO since Facebook's that May. Then he handed the company over in steps. Co-CEO with Chano Fernandez in 2020, co-CEO with Carl Eschenbach from December 2022, then executive chair in 2024 while Eschenbach ran it alone. In February 2026 Eschenbach stepped down and Bhusri took the CEO seat again, the same week Workday announced layoffs of about 2% of staff. A year earlier it had cut 8.5% to invest in AI. He came back to a company doing about $9.5B in fiscal 2026 revenue, with 75% of new sales including AI. His advice to workers in the same episode was blunt: "The genie's out of the bottle, AI's here." Asked whether he wishes it would slow down so people could catch up, he said "I do," then told them to get expert at the tools anyway. Two decades after a takeover sent him back to square one, the biggest move of his second run was deleting 30 agents. xitter.cf/FortuneMagazine/status…