Fresh off its $1.1 billion acquisition of AI startup Sana, Workday is making another bet on enterprise AI, this time targeting the governance challenge. The company said it will acquire agentic identity platform C1.ai to help customers manage and secure AI agents operating across enterprise applications.

The acquisition will build on Workday’s Agent System of Record, which gives enterprises a centralized view of their AI agents, by adding controls over what those agents can access across Workday and other enterprise systems, the company said.

That would allow enterprises to grant agents the permissions they need to perform specific tasks and revoke them when those tasks are completed, rather than risk agents retaining access to data and applications they no longer need, it added.

The combined capabilities could also help streamline access management for employees as they join an organization, change roles, or leave, reducing the manual work involved in managing permissions while limiting potential security gaps, it further said.

These governance and identity management capabilities become increasingly important as Workday, alongside the acquisition, also continues to expand the role of AI agents across its suite.

During the week, the company announced several updates to Sana, including making it the new home interface for its applications.

The interface brings tasks, decisions, meetings, and agent activity into one place, allowing employees to use natural-language prompts to get Workday agents to complete tasks rather than simply retrieve information, the company said.

The company also extended Sana into third-party tools, including Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Microsoft Copilot, allowing employees to invoke Workday capabilities from the applications they already use.

That expanded ability to invoke Workday agents across applications underscores the need for enterprises to govern what these agents can access and do across systems. C1.ai’s acquisition is expected to close by the end of January.

When Workday acquired Sana just about a year ago, it said that the combination of Sana’s AI with Workday’s platform would create a new “front door” to work. Today at its Workday Rising conference, it unveiled that front door, turning Sana into Workday’s default home screen that, it said, “brings tasks, decisions, meetings, and agent activity into one place, helping employees move directly from what needs attention to getting it done.”

The new interface goes beyond merely answering questions to orchestrating Workday’s agents to execute tasks. Each employee’s experience is tailored to their role; when they open the application, they see the tasks and decisions that need their attention and can take action directly from the UI. And, using TypeSafe’s Jev AI model, Sana adapts its UI to each task, the company said, generating forms, calendars, approval cards, visualizations, and other interactive experiences in real time and completing tasks once the employee approves the action. It also supports work that spans multiple days, displaying relevant information at every stage of functions such as financial closing or preparation of workforce plans by HR.

Sana also works within other AI tools and platforms including Anthropic Claude, Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise, and Microsoft Copilot, as well as within Microsoft Teams and Slack. But, Workday said in its announcement, “third-party AI tools and platforms never get raw access to Workday data — they can now access this data through Sana, and Sana does the reasoning, applies each company’s own permissions, approvals, and policies, and carries out the work so actions are lawful by design and recorded, regardless of the tool it started in.”

Along with the Sana home page, known as Workday Home, the company introduced Sana Concierge, which brings together the self-service capabilities and Sana for IT Service Management released earlier this year with Workday Help and Case Agent to create AI-native employee services spanning HR and IT. Workday said it can resolve requests such as password resets, access requests, and questions about time off and payroll, as well as performing onboarding and offboarding. The employee just submits a natural language request, and Concierge looks up relevant policies and, based on the employee’s Workday information, guides them through the steps to complete their request.

If a human decision is needed, Concierge routes the request to the right person in the background, but remains the employee’s point of contact.

The Sana Workday Home experience is available today, with more capabilities and support “coming soon,” the company said. Sana Concierge is available now to early adopter customers, with general availability expected in the first quarter of 2027.

From copilots to autopilots

The company also introduced four new autonomous AI agents that act as autopilots across hiring, payroll, accounting, and compliance.

“From co-pilots to autopilots, that’s a big transition that you will see across our agents today,” said Joel Hellermark, former CEO of Sana, who is now Workday’s chief AI officer. “These are now agents that anticipate what needs attention, they apply the company’s policies, they advise on the next step, and then act once the appropriate person approves that. And these autopilots run completely on Workday’s rails, so they’re self-governed and compliant.”

And, he said, while a typical copilot-driven system “sits there” until the user logs in, autopilot agents run on a heartbeat, operating whether or not the user is online.

The Talent Acquisition Agent, for example, monitors the open job queue from the time a position is posted, finding qualified candidates and giving the recruiter information about them. It can generate outreach to potential hires and present it to the recruiter for approval, explain why candidates on a short list are a good fit, and schedule interviews with those the recruiter flags. It then automatically joins the interview and takes notes. Based on recruiter feedback, the agent learns how to improve its recommendations.

The agent works across multiple recruiting tools, including Workday Recruiting, HiredScore, Paradox, native Workday skills, and connected sourcing providers. The autopilot capabilities are available to early adopter customers today, with general availability planned for early 2027.

Three more autopilots will arrive for early adopters in early 2027, for Payroll Agent, Accounting Agent, and Deployment Agent.

This could be the start of a change in the coordination of work, said Melody Brue, analyst in residence at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Workday is trying to connect more of the work around a decision, from weighing options to carrying out the approved plan,” she said. “Sana could become the starting point for that process, giving Workday a larger role in coordinating work beyond its own applications. For current customers, the meaningful change would be less manual coordination between a request, an approval, and a completed transaction. The value depends on whether that reduces the work employees have to manage or shifts it into resolving exceptions when a workflow crosses systems.”

Extending Decision Intelligence

Workday Decision Intelligence, first seen in Adaptive from Workday, is spreading into more areas of the business, said Yasmeen Ahmad, SVP and GM, Workday Data Cloud.

Decision Intelligence is not an agent performing a task, she said. “It’s a planning and reasoning experience built for decisions that are too complex, too high stakes, or too cross-functional for any single task to capture.”

Ahmad described a scenario in which HR revised a hiring plan using Decision Intelligence, passing it to Finance to use as an input for reviewing its quarterly projections with the same tool.

“Normally this would have taken six weeks, five spreadsheets, and analysts trying to stitch it together. Today, it was all just a prompt,” she said.

Brue said that what she finds interesting is whether Workday can take more of the manual modeling out of a staffing discussion. “Workday already supports connected workforce and financial planning,” she said. “If teams can work through several options with fewer model adjustments and less reliance on specialists for routine ones, planning could be more responsive when business needs change.”

Work Intelligence

Work Intelligence, available to early access Workday Human Capital Management customers, breaks jobs into their component tasks, describing the skills employees need to perform them. It draws on Workday Skills Cloud, giving leaders a look at how jobs are changing, and then, using Decision Intelligence, companies can get a picture of their internal readiness for evolving work.

“The task-level analysis is worth watching,” Brue said. “A role is rarely entirely automatable or entirely human-led. Looking inside the role could give customers a more useful basis for redesigning work. But saving time across a dozen tasks doesn’t automatically free someone up for a different assignment. Companies may need to regroup the work, letting agents handle routine steps together and giving employees clear responsibility for what comes next.”

Off with its head

Workday also announced that its Trusted Agent Platform, on which organizations build and run AI agents governed by their business rules, is now headless, allowing customers to use the development tools and models of their choice. It brings together the existing Workday Data Cloud, Agent-Ready Tools, Developer Agent, custom agents, and Agent Harness.

However, Workday CTO Gabe Monroy emphasized that, at the same time, “headless can’t mean lawless. The rules for HR and finance already live in Workday, so customers don’t have to rebuild them for every agent they create. This is what lets companies move fast with agents without losing control.”

And, to enhance the controls, in early 2027 the company will add Agent Context Service and Grounded Reasoning to Agent Harness to provide Workday context that agents need and check requests against company policies, business processes, and tenant data before the agent is allowed to act.

“Governance gets more consequential as agents move from recommendations to actions,” Brue pointed out. “An agent can be authorized and still make the wrong call. Customers need to distinguish permission to recommend from permission to execute. And know which actions require human approval, especially in hiring and finance. The governance question extends to any workflow that crosses platforms. Customers need clear ownership of approvals, exceptions, and the audit trail when a request starts in one system, and an agent acts in another.”

For companies already using Workday and ServiceNow together, she said, there’s an additional consideration: Workday’s expansion into employee-facing AI and agent governance could create more overlap between platforms that have traditionally played complementary roles.

“Joint customers don’t suddenly need to choose one, but they may need to clarify which platform coordinates the work and how controls operate across both,” she said. “A unified experience won’t necessarily mean unified control.”