The present disclosure involves systems, software, and computer implemented methods for providing adaptive demand-driven load balancing for processing jobs in business applications. One process includes operations for identifying a workload for distribution among a plurality of work processes. A subset of the workload is assigned to a plurality of work processes for processing of the subset of the workload based on an application-dependent algorithm. An indication of availability is received from one of the plurality of work processes, and a new subset of the workload is assigned to the work process.