• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 7, 2025

Paul Stanley of KISS and Billy Idol appeared in a set of “rock star” commercials for software company Workday, and the latest ads -- Carmen The Rock Star and Goodnight Rock Stars, released today -- also feature Gwen Stefani.

The latest advertisements, created by the creative agency Ogilvy, promote Workday’s AI agents and will run during Live from the Masters on NBC's The Golf Channel between April 7 and April 13. Jim Jenkins directed the ads.

“So you corporate types think you’re rock stars?” Idol asks in "Carmen The Rock Star."

Stanley, in business attire and KISS makeup, replies: “That’s as ridiculous as us being corporate types.” He is asked by a corporate employee what he did during the weekend, and the video shows him breaking a guitar onstage. He replies, “The you-ssh [usual].”

Stefani, Stanley, and Idol are dressed in business attire, trying to navigate the corporate world -- and refusing to believe that Workday’s AI agents are making people that they call rock stars.

They are not actors -- they are performers. And that's the point around performance, to get the job done.

This is not the first time Idol and Stanley have appeared in Workday ads. Both were featured in Workday’s Super Bowl ads, which also starred Ozzy Osbourne and Gary Clark Jr.

Workday believes the Masters Tournament is the new Super Bowl for B2B advertising and want consumers to see these ads as the third act in its Rock Star campaign. The first time they ran this type of ad was for Super Bowl 2023.

The company provides an AI platform for managing people, money, and agents. It has gained acceptance to support advertising.  

Ads will run on broadcast TV in the U.S. across Golf Channel, CNBC and Bloomberg starting today, and continue throughout the year. On April 10, the spots will also run in digital video across these outlets and others programmatically. In addition to the U.S., the ads will run in Canada, the UK, and Australia.

Workday in September announced role-based agents including Recruiting, Talent Mobility, Succession, and Optimize Agents.

The company recently announced its new Agent System of Record, which provides a centralized system for managing an organization's entire fleet of AI agents, from Workday and third parties alike.

David Duffield co-founded Workday after Oracle gobbled up his software company, PeopleSoft, in a hostile takeover in 2004 for about 10.3 billion.