2026 Ex Awards Silver Finalist
Workday Rising 2025 has been named a silver finalist for Event Marketer’s 2026 EX Awards, the industry’s most respected recognition of brand experience and event marketing excellence. The EX Awards honor the year’s most strategically sound, creatively distinctive, and operationally outstanding live and virtual brand experiences.
The Opportunity
Rising 2025 had to do something unusually hard: differentiate Workday’s AI strategy in a saturated enterprise market without repeating the patterns driving customer fatigue.
Across the industry, AI dominated the discourse — but customers were feeling a growing disconnect between high‑level tech hype and practical, human‑centric application. Workday and Sparks named that disconnect the “AI Fatigue Gap.” Rising 2025 was designed to help close it.
That meant evolving Rising from a traditional corporate conference into a tangible roadmap for the future of work — one that proved AI is a co-pilot, not a replacement, and gave attendees something they could put to work on Day 1.
The brief surfaced a three-fold marketing hurdle:
Scaling intimacy.
Maintain a high-touch, community feel despite a record-breaking 32,000+ hybrid attendees and a campus stretched across multiple buildings.
Humanizing AI innovation.
Move the “AI-powered” narrative away from technical jargon and toward a “human-centric” experience that empowered the individual user.
Actionable authority.
Transition from visionary “future-thinking” to immediate, “future-ready” tools attendees could implement on Day 1.
Three measures of success anchored the program: market position (solidifying Workday’s status as the leader in human-AI collaboration), operational scale (seamlessly integrating the Moscone footprint with digital platforms), and community growth (deepening peer-to-peer connections beyond 2024’s benchmarks).
The Solution
Sparks designed Workday Rising 2025 as one continuous attendee journey across multiple environments, ensuring strategy, story, and operations were aligned from the first sketch to the last load‑out.
A premium, persona-led journey across a two-million-square-foot campus
To accommodate the program’s massive scope, the event encompassed roughly two million square feet across disparate physical spaces — Moscone South, Moscone West, and multiple outlying hotels. The design imperative was a seamless, globally consistent, premium user journey across a fragmented campus, where every touchpoint, from registration to the closing party, felt unified.
The experience was intentionally designed around distinct audience segments, with curated environments and content paths tailored to executives, HR leaders, finance teams, developers, and IT professionals — ensuring relevance and clarity at scale. For senior leadership, the Executive Symposium offered a curated forum for C-suite executives to connect with peers and engage directly with Workday leadership.
Translating AI into something attendees could touch
The hardest design problem at any enterprise software event is making software visible. For 2025, the experience was anchored by expansive Expo floors that doubled as learning hubs and innovation showcases.
Through keynote presentations, interactive demos, hands-on labs, “sandbox” testing sessions, and digital storytelling zones including The Core and Express Labs, attendees explored how to move their businesses forward with AI in concrete, immediate terms. Complementing these immersive experiences were 180+ partner sponsors, curated lounges, solution theaters, ask-an-expert moments, Braindates, and networking receptions — designed to enable both peer-to-peer and customer-to-expert engagement at the scale Rising demands.
Human-centricity as a design principle, not a slogan
Rising 2025 balanced technical innovation with genuine care for attendee wellbeing. Wellness programming ran throughout the event — Sunrise 5K runs, daily yoga sessions, and quiet zones for mental breaks — alongside comprehensive accessibility services and sustainable practices baked into the operational backbone. The point was simple: Workday’s “human-centric” positioning extended beyond product messaging to how the event itself was designed, built, and delivered.
The Impact
Workday Rising 2025 delivered record-breaking performance, scaling the physical and digital footprint while deepening brand authority in AI. The program exceeded its primary KPIs across attendance, business pipeline, and brand perception.
Attendance and scale:
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32K+ Attendees in-person and digital (6% YoY increase) |
18K+ In-person attendees activated across the Moscone Center campus |
4.2 / 5.0 Overall satisfaction score (up 0.1 YoY) |
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50% YoY increase in executive meetings held in the Rising Customer Experience Center (CXC) |
60% increase in Expo floor interactions over 2024, generating quality marketing leads |
9% increase in partner-led engagement across 180+ sponsoring partners |
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220+ original media placements and analyst mentions |
93% of articles included AI message pull-through |
99% positive brand sentiment |
Beyond the Metrics
The program landed on three outcomes that matter to brand and revenue leaders:
Closing the AI Fatigue Gap.
Rising 2025 met enterprise audiences where their skepticism was — and answered it with hands-on labs, sandbox sessions, and customer-led storytelling that made AI feel useful, not theoretical.
A premium experience at unprecedented scale.
A two-million-square-foot, multi-building campus was delivered as a single, coherent attendee journey — and the satisfaction score moved up, not down.
A potent accelerator for brand leadership.
Workday’s perception as a trusted, human-centric AI partner advanced measurably, supported by the strategic alignment of expo programming, partner engagement, and content delivery.
A Note on Partners
Workday Rising is the product of many hands. Workday led the vision and overall creative direction, in close partnership with their experience marketing organization.
Sparks served as the lead experiential agency partner, delivering creative direction and program execution alongside Freeman and a roster of specialized supporting partners across production, fabrication, and event services.
FAQs
What did Sparks design and produce at Workday Rising 2025?
Sparks served as the experiential agency partner behind the live event in San Francisco. The work spans strategy and creative, program and event management, custom fabrication, AV and event production, interactive demo and lab design, content production, and post-event measurement — across the Moscone Center campus that ran throughout the four-day event.
Where and when did Workday Rising 2025 take place?
At the Moscone Center (South and West) in San Francisco, with programming extending into multiple outlying hotels and to Howard Street outside Moscone, from September 15 to 18, 2025.
How big was the program?
The event encompassed roughly two million square feet across Moscone South, Moscone West, and multiple outlying hotels, and welcomed more than 32,000 attendees in person and online — including more than 18,000 in-person attendees.
What was the “AI Fatigue Gap,” and how did the experience address it?
The AI Fatigue Gap is the disconnect between high-level AI hype and practical, human-centric application — a tension enterprise buyers were increasingly feeling in 2025. Rising 2025 closed that gap by replacing abstract messaging with hands-on encounters: interactive demos, hands-on labs, sandbox testing sessions, and digital storytelling zones including The Core and Express Labs, all designed to give attendees something they could implement on Day 1.
How did the experience serve such a wide audience?
The program was intentionally designed around distinct audience segments — executives, HR leaders, finance teams, developers, IT professionals, and partners — with curated environments and content paths for each. The Executive Symposium provided a dedicated forum for C-suite engagement with Workday leadership, while the Expo floors, labs, and theaters served the broader functional audience.
What were the headline results?
- – 6% year-over-year increase in total attendees (32,000+).
- – 0.1-point lift in overall satisfaction to 4.2 / 5.0.
- – 50% year-over-year increase in executive meetings at the Rising Customer Experience Center.
- – 60% increase in Expo floor interactions over 2024.
- – 9% increase in partner-led engagement across 180+ sponsoring partners.
- – Advanced from 4.3 to 4.4 / 5.0 in attendee perception of Workday as a “Trusted AI Leader.”
- – 220+ original media placements with 93% AI message pull-through and 99% positive brand sentiment.
How did Workday Rising 2025 reflect human-centric design beyond messaging?
The program embedded human-centricity into operations: Sunrise 5K runs, daily yoga sessions, quiet zones for mental breaks, comprehensive accessibility services, and sustainable practices were built into the event backbone. The point was that Workday’s “human-centric” positioning extended beyond product messaging to how the event itself was designed and delivered.
What makes Sparks’s approach to enterprise events different?
Three things. First, Sparks designs around personas and outcomes, not floor plans — the journey is the brief, the build is the answer to it. Second, Sparks treats abstract product stories (especially AI) as physical design problems: every concept gets a way to be touched. Third, Sparks designs to operational reality — registration flow, dwell time, peak load, accessibility, and sustainability targets — so the program performs on the day, not just in renderings.
Is Sparks the right partner for a brand running a flagship customer conference?
Sparks specializes in experiential design for brands whose live events have to perform on multiple axes at once — pipeline, brand authority, customer love, partner enablement, analyst and press, and sustainability — at venue scale, year after year. If a brand is running a flagship conference that needs to grow without losing coherence, Sparks’s work on Workday Rising is a direct precedent.
