Workday wants employees to stop logging into Workday. Not because it’s going anywhere, but because it would rather meet them inside the AI tools they already use.
On October 13, 2026, at its Workday Rising event in Las Vegas, the HR and finance software giant announced a partnership with Anthropic. The deal introduces a beta service called the Sana from Workday connector, which plugs Workday’s agentic AI directly into Anthropic’s Claude model.
The pitch is simple. Employees can handle routine HR and finance chores, like checking their pay or requesting time off, by asking Claude. Workday’s existing security setup, including roles, permissions, and audit controls, stays in place the whole time.
How the Claude connector works
Sana, which Workday recently rebranded as its agentic AI layer, acts as the central hub linking Workday’s functionality to outside AI tools such as Claude. Every request still runs through Workday’s permission structure. A manager sees what a manager is allowed to see. An individual employee sees their own payslip, not the CFO’s.
External AI agents that connect to business systems on their own terms could potentially bypass a platform’s built-in infrastructure, and with it, the safeguards companies rely on. Routing Claude through Sana is Workday’s way of keeping that from happening.
The connector is a beta service and requires an active Workday subscription. At launch, the connector focuses on self-service HR and finance functions. Workday says it plans to expand the tool into complex, multi-step agent workflows over time.
The numbers behind Workday’s AI push
In November 2025, the company acquired Sana, originally known as Sana Labs, for $1.1 billion. Sana from Workday became available in March 2026. Seven months later, that same technology is now being extended outward into a third-party model.
As of Q2 2026, more than 5,500 Workday customers were using AI agents, a 35% increase from the previous quarter. Workday’s AI-driven SKUs accounted for nearly $600 million in annual recurring revenue, up more than 200% year over year.
Alongside the Claude connector, Workday is also launching Agent Harness, a tool designed to let companies customize AI agents using their own HR and finance data.
Why Workday is opening the door to Claude
Rather than directly compete with general-purpose AI models, Workday seeks to embed its functionalities into these environments — including Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot — ensuring that it remains the secure execution layer for enterprise applications, managing the complexities of security and compliance while maximizing usability for users.
By keeping roles, permissions, and audit controls intact, Workday is betting that IT and compliance teams will be more comfortable letting employees use Claude for HR and finance tasks. Positioning Sana as the hub between Workday and third-party AI tools turns Workday into the gatekeeper for its own data, even when the conversation is happening somewhere else.
For Anthropic, the partnership extends Claude’s reach into a large base of enterprise workflows. Every connector that lets Claude complete real business tasks makes the model more useful inside companies, not just as a writing or coding assistant.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.