{"id":2955,"date":"2025-06-12T15:08:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T15:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thefreemancompany.com\/sparks\/articles\/our-work\/workday-rising-2025\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T19:47:03","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T19:47:03","slug":"workday-rising-2025","status":"publish","type":"our-work","link":"https:\/\/www.thefreemancompany.com\/sparks\/our-work\/workday-rising-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Rising 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

2026 Ex Awards Silver Finalist<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The EX Awards<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Opportunity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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The brief surfaced a three-fold marketing hurdle:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scaling intimacy.
\nMaintain a high-touch, community feel despite a record-breaking 32,000+ hybrid attendees and a campus stretched across multiple buildings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humanizing AI innovation.
\nMove the “AI-powered” narrative away from technical jargon and toward a “human-centric” experience that empowered the individual user.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actionable authority.
\nTransition from visionary “future-thinking” to immediate, “future-ready” tools attendees could implement on Day 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Solution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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\u2011out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A premium, persona-led journey across a two-million-square-foot campus<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To accommodate the program’s massive scope, the event encompassed roughly two million square feet across disparate physical spaces \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translating AI into something attendees could touch<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 designed to enable both peer-to-peer and customer-to-expert engagement at the scale Rising demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human-centricity as a design principle, not a slogan<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rising 2025 balanced technical innovation with genuine care for attendee wellbeing. Wellness programming ran throughout the event \u2014 Sunrise 5K runs, daily yoga sessions, and quiet zones for mental breaks \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Impact<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.
\nAttendance and scale:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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32K+<\/p>\n

Attendees in-person and digital (6% YoY increase)<\/p>\n<\/td>

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18K+<\/p>\n

In-person attendees activated across the Moscone Center campus<\/p>\n<\/td>

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4.2 \/ 5.0<\/p>\n

Overall satisfaction score (up 0.1 YoY)<\/p>\n<\/td><\/tr>

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50%<\/p>\n

YoY increase in executive meetings held in the Rising Customer Experience Center (CXC)<\/p>\n<\/td>

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60%<\/p>\n

increase in Expo floor interactions over 2024, generating quality marketing leads<\/p>\n<\/td>

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9%<\/p>\n

increase in partner-led engagement across 180+ sponsoring partners<\/p>\n<\/td><\/tr>

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220+<\/p>\n

original media placements and analyst mentions<\/p>\n<\/td>

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93%<\/p>\n

of articles included AI message pull-through<\/p>\n<\/td>

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99%<\/p>\n

positive brand sentiment<\/p>\n<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Beyond the Metrics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The program landed on three outcomes that matter to brand and revenue leaders:<\/strong>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Closing the AI Fatigue Gap.
<\/strong>Rising 2025 met enterprise audiences where their skepticism was \u2014 and answered it with hands-on labs, sandbox sessions, and customer-led storytelling that made AI feel useful, not theoretical.<\/strong>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A premium experience at unprecedented scale.
<\/strong>A two-million-square-foot, multi-building campus was delivered as a single, coherent attendee journey \u2014 and the satisfaction score moved up, not down.<\/strong>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A potent accelerator for brand leadership.
<\/strong>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Note on Partners<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Workday Rising is the product of many hands. Workday led the vision and overall creative direction, in close partnership with their experience marketing organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FAQs<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nWhat did Sparks design and produce at Workday Rising 2025?<\/summary>\n

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 \u2014 across the Moscone Center campus that ran throughout the four-day event.<\/p>\n

\"Workday<\/figure><\/details>\n\n\n\n
\nWhere and when did Workday Rising 2025 take place?<\/summary>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Workday<\/figure><\/details>\n\n\n\n
\nHow big was the program?<\/summary>\n

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 \u2014 including more than 18,000 in-person attendees.<\/p>\n

\"Workday<\/figure><\/details>\n\n\n\n
\nWhat was the “AI Fatigue Gap,” and how did the experience address it?<\/summary>\n

The AI Fatigue Gap is the disconnect between high-level AI hype and practical, human-centric application \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\"Workday<\/figure><\/details>\n\n\n\n
\nHow did the experience serve such a wide audience?<\/summary>\n

The program was intentionally designed around distinct audience segments \u2014 executives, HR leaders, finance teams, developers, IT professionals, and partners \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\"Workday<\/figure><\/details>\n\n\n\n
\nWhat were the headline results?<\/summary>\n