Investors May Want To Own Workday Before August 27th

WDAY enters August 27 earnings with a 91% beat probability, four straight EPS beats, and Silver Lake buyout talks anchoring the stock.

A forward P/E of 18 and PEG of 0.75 reframe WDAY as reasonably priced, with agentic AI solutions already approaching $500 million in ARR.

WDAY's 14% subscription revenue growth outpaces CRM, while 97% gross revenue retention and a pure cloud model give it an edge over ORCL.

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Owning Workday ( NASDAQ:WDAY ) shares into the August 27, 2026 after-market earnings report is the cleanest pre-earnings setup in enterprise software today. The prediction market is pricing a 0.91 probability of a beat, the company just delivered its fourth consecutive EPS beat, and buyout chatter has put a strategic floor under the stock. The odds favor the bulls.

Trailing multiples look demanding at a P/E of 60, but the forward figure tells the real story: forward P/E of 18 against a PEG of 0.75. Free cash flow yield sits at 7.00%, and management guided fiscal 2027 free cash flow to $3.180 billion, growth of 15%. You are paying growth-at-a-reasonable-price multiples for a business converting revenue into cash at scale.

Management guided Q2 FY2027 subscription revenue to approximately $2.455 billion, growth of 13% and CRPO growth of 13.5% to 14.5%. New ACV from agentic AI products grew more than 200% year over year, with the company approaching $500 million in ARR from agentic AI solutions. On top of that, Reuters reported on August 13 that Silver Lake is in talks to buy Workday, adding a takeout premium that did not exist a month ago. Shares are up 39.77% over the past month, and history says the payoff often comes after the report settles: the average one-week post-earnings move is +7.83%.

Against Salesforce ( NYSE:CRM ), Workday is growing subscription revenue faster: 14% in Q1 versus CRM's high-single-digit subscription trajectory, and CEO Aneel Bhusri stated customers are "looking to us first for AI solutions for the HR and finance worlds". Against Oracle ( NYSE:ORCL ), Workday's non-GAAP operating margin of 31.8% and 97% gross revenue retention anchor a purer cloud HCM story than Oracle Fusion's mixed on-prem and cloud stack. Workday won the head-to-head where it matters: agentic AI adoption, with more than 4,000 customers live.