Barbara Larson didn’t arrive at Workiva as an outsider. Before joining the company as EVP and CFO in January, she had used its financial reporting platform at two previous employers — Workday and VMware — and had been an advocate for it internally. When the opportunity to join the company itself came up, she says the decision was straightforward.
The timing is significant. Workiva is in the middle of its most ambitious growth phase yet, with the company guiding for $1 billion in revenue in 2026. It reported $885 million in total revenue for fiscal 2025, up 20% year over year, with subscription and support revenue growing 22%. Full-year guidance for 2026 puts total revenue in the range of $1.036 billion to $1.040 billion. The company counts more than 6,600 customers, including names like Hershey, Slack and KeyBank.
Workiva offers an AI-powered platform covering governance, risk, compliance and sustainability reporting — tools that sit squarely in the path of some of the most pressing challenges finance teams face today. In fiscal 2025, the company delivered more than 600 basis points of non-GAAP operating leverage alongside that 20% revenue growth, a combination Larson is focused on sustaining.
Larson brings more than two decades of finance leadership to the role. She most recently served as CFO at SentinelOne and spent nearly a decade at Workday, ultimately becoming its CFO. She has also held senior finance positions at VMware, TIBCO Software and Symantec.
Her view of the current landscape is direct: most companies are still dealing with data fragmented across multiple systems, and that fragmentation is the root cause of a lot of bad decisions. Running AI across that kind of environment doesn’t produce better insight — it just produces wrong answers faster. Workiva’s approach is to anchor AI within each customer’s own data, standards and regulatory context, so that what the platform produces is not just plausible but defensible.
That matters particularly for the use cases Workiva is built around: SEC reporting, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, enterprise risk management, sustainability disclosures. These aren’t areas where organisations can afford to be approximate. The same platform is used by both internal finance teams and external auditors, which is part of what makes it sticky.
The CFO role itself has changed significantly, Larson notes. Today it carries a dual mandate on AI: driving adoption and transformation across the broader enterprise while simultaneously rethinking how the finance function itself operates. At Workiva, she is working with the CIO and executive team to identify where AI can create speed and leverage for shareholders — not just automate existing processes, but change what’s possible.
Her advice to finance leaders coming up through the ranks is grounded in her own career: get close to the business, not just the numbers. Strong finance leaders understand the broader operation, and that understanding is what makes financial judgement genuinely useful rather than just technically correct.