Workday has named Sarah Kennedy Ellis Chief Marketing Officer. The enterprise software company announced the appointment on 10 September 2026, with the role taking effect on 5 October 2026.
She reports to Aneel Bhusri, Workday's co founder, Chief Executive Officer and chair, and takes responsibility for global marketing and communications.
A career built across the enterprise software marketing cycle
Kennedy Ellis joins from Google, where she led global marketing for Google Cloud and Google Workspace. Before that she was Chief Marketing Officer of Adobe Experience Cloud, a role she reached after Adobe acquired Marketo in 2018, where she had been Chief Marketing Officer. Earlier in her career she spent close to a decade at Sabre Corporation, the travel technology group. She has served on the board of the marketing services firm Ansira since 2021 and holds an MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas.
The through line is a career spent marketing complex software to businesses rather than products to consumers, and specifically software bought by a committee over a long cycle. That is the discipline Workday needs, and it is a narrower talent pool than the size of the marketing profession suggests.
The problem the role has to solve
Workday sells human capital and financial management software to large enterprises, in a category where the incumbents are entrenched and the buying decision is a multi year commitment made by a chief human resources officer and a chief financial officer together. Marketing in that setting is not primarily a demand generation function. It is the work of establishing that a platform is a safe long horizon bet, which is closer to reputation management than to campaign management.
The competitive backdrop has also shifted. Artificial intelligence has given every enterprise software vendor a new claim to make and made it harder for buyers to distinguish between them, because the claims are largely identical in the abstract. A marketing leader arriving from Google Cloud, which spent several years making exactly that argument against larger rivals, brings direct experience of the problem.
What to watch
Whether Workday's positioning moves from a functional description of what the platform does toward a clearer argument about why an enterprise should consolidate on it. Whether the communications function, which sits within her remit, becomes more visible as the company navigates the workforce questions its own product category raises. And whether a reporting line straight to a founder Chief Executive gives the function the authority it needs or ties it too closely to one voice.
Kennedy Ellis takes up the role on 5 October 2026.
