Workday majors on Sana acquisition to forward agentic AI programme

Workday’s competitive position 

It was clear at the event that the rapid pace of AI-powered change enabled by Workday and other technology companies is very much the initial shift in a grander transformation.

While employees at most firms have started dabbling in generative AI (GenAI) services, Kathy Pham, vice-president for AI at Workday, says the large language models (LLMs) powering these technologies are limited in their influence. These probabilistic LLMs are usually trained on information across the internet, not within the enterprise firewall, and don’t have access to contextual financial records, customer details and HR information within businesses.

“They’re disconnected,” says Pham, referring to these LLMs, adding that successful providers will help their customers achieve better outputs via a deterministic approach to AI. That’s where Workday comes in, with the company aiming to create agents, including through its next-generation service Sana, that are powered by concrete enterprise data points.

“We believe agents need a deep understanding of how work happens,” says Pham. “And most importantly for me, this is where the right engineering comes into play, paired with a good, responsible AI team that provides the context across security, AI, systems, data and unified processes. We bring all that together when we build systems for our customers.”

“We believe agents need a deep understanding of how work happens. This is where the right engineering comes into play, paired with a good, responsible AI team that provides the context across security, AI, systems, data and unified processes. We bring all that together when we build systems for our customers”

Kathy Pham, Workday

Work on this shift is already underway. During the Rising conference in Barcelona in November 2025, senior Workday executives described the company’s desire to provide an agentic AI platform that disrupts traditional ERP services. Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product and technology at Workday, positioned the platform in his keynote as a “front door to work”.

In Dublin, Pham says Workday will use a deterministic approach to become this front door to work. She says employees should be able to log in to Workday and use built-in agentic services to ask natural-language questions about key issues, such as payroll variations across regions, and receive personalised answers from enterprise data sources.

At the heart of Workday’s deterministic approach to AI sits Sana. Pierre Gousset, vice-president of solutions at Workday, describes Sana as the intelligent entry point for accessing data and taking AI-enabled actions. “It’s where organisations build, orchestrate and manage agents that can deliver work across HR, finance, IT and beyond,” he says.

“With Sana, you get access to an AI that is not only powerful, but that also lives inside Workday’s deepest understanding of your data, people, job architectures, organisational structures, approval chains and compensation bounding. That gives us an unfair advantage that we think no other AI can replicate.”

While Workday is eager to position Sana as a step change in business-focused AI, the platform shouldn’t be seen in isolation from other enterprise applications. To that end, Gousset says integrating Sana with other providers’ services gives Workday’s agents the best possible access to data that will drive end-to-end process automation.

“Sana is designed to work with the broader enterprise ecosystem, and we deliver this through secure integrations with platforms like Salesforce, Databricks, Snowflake, Google and Microsoft 365, and we want to make this possible because we want Sana to be used not only to answer questions in Workday, but to trigger actions across all enterprise systems.”

Gousset detailed four key capabilities of Sana’s agents: asking questions of data across enterprise systems; helping professionals take actions based on this insight; building outputs via dashboards, reports and documents; and automating processes to create multi-step workflows. He says the final capability – automating workflows – is where Sana moves from being an assistant to a system that executes work with professionals.

While this agentic transformation sounds powerful in practice, it’s important to remember that other providers are making similar shifts. And though embracing emerging technology allows specialists like Workday to create new data-led services, the rise of AI also creates risks for software firms, not least the potential for disintermediation.

“Our success will be built on the foundations established by the deterministic guardrails we’ve put in place. These foundations will help organisations evolve successfully into the world of AI”

Clare Hickie, Workday

Some industry experts have suggested that as many as 35% of software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools could be replaced by AI agents by 2030. In a one-to-one interview in Dublin, Computer Weekly asked Workday’s chief technology officer, Clare Hickie, whether disintermediation is on her executive team’s radar.

“I can see why you asked the question, because I can see what’s being said in the media right now, and I can see some of the curiosity that may be applied based on where we are in the world in this transitional period from an AI perspective,” she says. “However, what I will say, and it’s no more than what we’ve said at this event, is that AI is often probabilistic, which means it can be wrong, whereas we operate via a deterministic application stack.”

In an uncertain world, Hickie says CIOs will look for the degree of certainty that trusted software providers can supply. She says it’s here that Workday excels, with a strong history of building services for major enterprises in risk-averse sectors that will require deterministic AI solutions for intractable challenges.

“We can never be wrong when it comes to payments,” she says. “We can’t be wrong when it comes to financial close, audits and compliance. And so our success will be built on the foundations established by the deterministic guardrails we’ve put in place. These foundations will help organisations evolve successfully into the world of AI.”

New technologies, new skills 

The key to Workday becoming the “front door to work” will be the extent to which CIOs and other buyers use the firm’s technologies to support an AI-enabled workplace transformation.

Gousset demonstrated at the event how Sana’s agents can automate processes across enterprise ecosystems to help line-of-business employees manage tasks, such as onboarding new employees and producing reports, and add repeatable workflows, such as getting executive-level sign-offs.

“Think about how much time you save by not having to work across multiple systems. This is a new type of experience, where AI is the UI, and you replace dozens of enterprise systems with a conversational experience, which is more intuitive but also more intelligent”

Pierre Gousset, Workday

“Think about how much time you save by not having to work across multiple systems,” he says. “This is a new type of experience, where AI is the UI [user interface], and you replace dozens of enterprise systems with a conversational experience, which is more intuitive but also more intelligent. This capability is how businesses will transform work.”

Hickie says the underlying aim of these and other services is to ensure agents do more than answer questions and summarise information. By combining data with enterprise context, Workday wants to develop agents that create a step change in workplace productivity.

“By context, we mean that agents understand skills, decision lines, approvals, security and where friction points actually are,” she says. “And it’s that context that allows us to deliver 100% positive outcomes, but equally, more importantly, that layer of productivity that is really required when it comes to AI and agents in particular.”

Examples discussed at the event included a Recruiting Agent that helps recruiters break their reliance on manual processes, allowing them to spend less time filling roles and more time discovering talent. Another example was Workday’s Payroll Agent, which unifies data and context to create a service that helps staff spend less time on compliance-focused tasks.

“This capability is just a starting point for Workday,” says Hickie. “How we see these agents being delivered is through a level of depth and breadth. It’s not always about the singular role that an agent will explicitly perform. Many of these agents will be able to complete end-to-end workflows.”

This higher level of automation raises important questions about the future of work, not just for the professionals who fulfil these tasks, but also for companies like Workday that are enabling this workplace transformation. Workday CEO Bhusri acknowledged the scale of change in a press conference in March.

“What sometimes keeps me awake at night is that low-level HR work is going to be replaced by agents; there is no getting around that. And what the industry needs to own, including Workday, is that we have to find a way to take care of the employees who are dislocated.”

“Our team has been working both in the US, at the federal and state and local level, and with the European Commission, so a policy response to issues [around AI-enabled disruption] is top of mind for us”

Chandler Morse, Workday

In Dublin, Chandler Morse, chief corporate affairs officer at Workday, acknowledged the concerns about AI-enabled disruption. He says Workday is urging lawmakers to consider employer incentives for reskilling.

“Our team has been working both in the US, at the federal and state and local level, and with the European Commission, so a policy response to those issues is top of mind for us,” he says.

Beyond policy, Bhusri suggested in the March press conference that Sana itself could provide a potential solution to the intractable challenge of worker dislocation, automating low-level manual tasks while helping to retrain employees in the new skills required. In Dulin, Gousset says Workday views agents as extensions of a company’s workforce.

“Agents are not going to replace humans,” he says. “Most agents will work hand in hand with humans to accomplish certain tasks. Therefore, you need, organisationally, not only technically, to be able to define which part of your processes are going to be managed jointly by humans and agents.”

Here, he pointed to Workday’s Agent System of Record. This tooling helps organisations to consider the permissions and skills required for agents and humans in an AI-powered workplace transformation: “It’s really about building that framework to help enterprises rethink their process gradually, together with AI.”

What’s clear, says Hickie, is that the pace of change is only going to quicken. Yes, Workday technology is helping power a workplace transformation, but the company also wants to help employees and their bosses embrace new roles and skills required in an age of AI.

“Our technology is helping others manage that change from a development perspective,” she says. “We’re working out where the skills gaps are in the roles that are starting to be defined, and we also want to help individuals train, learn and develop within their current roles. We’re just moving into this moment of change.”