Workday makes Sana its new home for AI-driven HR and finance

Workday makes Sana its new home for AI-driven HR and finance

Enterprise management software company Workday Inc. today announced that it wants to turn its existing knowledge of people, money and business rules into an operational foundation for agentic artificial intelligence tools.

At Workday Rising, the company’s annual global conference, the company said Sana, an agentic experience that brings together tasks, experiences, decisions, meetings and agent activity in one place, is becoming the new Workday Home. Employees will now work directly with Sana to get everything done.

The company also introduced Sana Concierge, a new service agent for human resources and information technology teams, which can resolve employee requests. It can handle onboarding, leave and password requests without passing these tedious twenty-minute tasks that can be automated to people, so they can focus on issues that require actual intuition.

The company also said Sana now adapts to each employee with a “Home” experience that can tailor itself to each employee role. This includes a user interface that can generate interactive applications using Jev, a cutting-edge model from TypeSafe AI that can create forms, calendars, approval cards, visualizations and interactive experiences in real time.

“AI is the new UI,” said Chief AI Officer Joel Hellermark. “Users shouldn’t have to decide which agent to use, just as they shouldn’t have to click between dozens of different systems. We’re giving our customers an agentic experience that opens up a whole new way to work.”

Included in this new experience, Workday’s executives demonstrated a shift from “copilot to autopilot” during a press briefing. This follows an industry trend alongside agentic automation, where many enterprises are giving employees access to AI agents that can act behind the scenes without needing to be touched and can be triggered when data changes or comes their way, instead of needing a chat interface.

For example, a recruiter autopilot agent prepares for a user’s day by checking open requisitions without waiting for the recruiter to log in, prepares outreach and surfaces candidates. Then the employee reviews outreach and chooses whether to advance candidates from the Sana interface; interview scheduling then runs autonomously. When the interview happens, the agent joins to listen in, prepare notes and uses recruiter feedback to influence future recommendations.

Work Intelligence and Decision Intelligence

As more teams begin to incorporate AI agents, models and tools, Workday announced two new platforms that help teams interact with AI experiences: Work Intelligence and Decision Intelligence.

Work Intelligence helps businesses build for AI by showing enterprise teams how AI tools and agents change work. Workday said AI rarely changes a whole job at once; it can change tasks, and as those tasks change, the underlying skills that matter also change. Every worker that interacts with AI is a data point for how the company can grow.

“Work Intelligence gives leaders the data to thoughtfully redesign roles, build careers and help people grow into what’s next,” said Vice President of Talent Management and Insights Nikki Helmer.

Workday said it can use its deep understanding of skills, delivered through its Skills Cloud, which is now used by more than 3,450 customers and built on an ontology of more than 75,000 canonical skills, to help leadership plan how to grow people as work changes. AI won’t just change existing roles; it will create new ones too.

Decision Intelligence lets HR and finance teams operate in the same space without curating and trading information across clunky communication channels, which often rely on dry reports pulled on a periodic basis. Too often, hiring decisions and procurement are based on analyst-produced reports that slowly go out of date; with an AI analyst on hand, those decisions are based on real-time business data. When the HR or finance team needs to look over a hiring plan, explain shifts in margins or respond to changes in business, they need trustworthy workforce and financial data but this data is often siloed.

As a result, Decision Intelligence performs analysis for both HR and Finance, allowing them to make “decisions,” thus the name, and compare using actionable, real-time data based on business needs.

For example, if HR wants to hire 50 people, it can ask whether the business still needs 50 based on the current workforce makeup. Decision Intelligence can look at the composition, skills that exist, roles that can be filled and how the hiring plan affects costs. Hiring managers and leadership can look at current workforce data instead of staring at a static report.

C1.ai joins Workday

In addition to the Sana updates, Workday announced that it agreed to acquire ConductorOne Inc., also known as C1.ai, an agentic identity platform for people and agents.

C1.ai provides a platform that governs people and agents so that they have the right access at the right time. This means that when a new agent or person is onboarded, they receive the roles they need, and only the roles they need, to get the job done, and then when they no longer need those permissions, they are turned off. This removes the stress of constantly monitoring every part of the system for potential rogue activity.

Without these kinds of controls, AI agents can become lawless, creating security and compliance risks across the entire enterprise.

“Today’s companies run on a combined workforce of people and AI agents,” said Workday President of Product and Technology Gerrit Kazmaier. “With C1.ai, we’ll help secure that workforce by managing and enforcing exactly who – and what – has access to connected apps and systems…”

C1.ai will combine with the Workday Agent System of Record, which already provides a place to see and manage agents. It will go beyond registering agents to also govern what they can access across Workday and other enterprise systems.

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