At Workday Rising today, we're introducing new Sana capabilities that help employees get work done across HR, finance, and IT by coordinating the right agents, tools, and people behind the scenes. Watch a quick demo.
In this article we discuss:
In my nearly five years at Workday, I've watched AI take on more of the work that matters most to our customers, from closing the books to managing their workforce. But in my conversations with other leaders, I keep hearing the same frustration: their agents don't have the context to do that work well. Cut off from the policies, permissions, and approval chains that keep a business running, they handle the surface-level tasks and leave people to coordinate the rest.
Sana from Workday was built to close that gap. As the agentic experience across Workday, it gives employees one place to start and finish work across HR, finance, and IT, bringing together Workday context, company knowledge, connected tools, people, and agents so employees can focus on outcomes instead of applications.
Today at Workday Rising, we're taking that further. With new Sana capabilities, employees start every day knowing what matters, agents kick off work the moment it's needed, HR and IT requests get resolved faster, and admins can see and manage every agent running across the business.
It's a meaningful step toward my vision for Sana: The experience of the future, where agentic teammates understand the business, notice what needs to be done, and, once approved, keep work moving within the right guardrails—so people can focus on the work that truly needs them.
Work slows down when employees have to navigate different menus, portals, systems, and agents to complete everyday tasks.
The new Sana Home gives employees a simpler place to start their day and get work done. It brings tasks, meetings, announcements, important dates, and agent activity into one personalized agentic experience.
Work slows down when employees have to navigate different menus, portals, systems, and agents to complete everyday tasks. The new Sana Home gives employees a simpler place to start their day and get work done.
Employees can see what needs their attention, ask Sana for more context, or ask Sana to take action right from the Sana Home. Behind the scenes, Sana coordinates the right agents, tools, and people to get the work done, so employees never have to figure out which system or agent to use.
Employees can also use Sana in supported surfaces like Teams, Slack, CoPilot, Claude, and Gemini. No matter where a request starts, the relevant Workday context stays with it.
Employee service remains one of the most fragmented, manually intensive operations in the enterprise. Employees have to navigate multiple tools and teams to get help, while HR and IT are overwhelmed by repetitive requests and coordinating work across disconnected tools.
That’s why we built Sana Concierge. It’s a new AI-native HR and IT service delivery experience in Sana that resolves employee requests instead of just routing them. Employees no longer have to figure out which system to file a ticket in or which team to contact. They just ask Sana, and it resolves the request end to end.
Of everything we're announcing today, this is the one I'm most excited about.
Employees no longer have to figure out which system to file a ticket in or which team to contact. They just ask Sana, and it resolves the request end to end.
Sana answers policy questions, proactively runs onboarding and offboarding processes, and automates routine access, leave, and payroll requests. When human judgment is needed, Sana brings in the right specialist with the case already prepared, including conversation history, relevant policies, similar cases, and a suggested response.
Because it draws on Workday’s trusted understanding of each employee, along with the processes, permissions, and approvals that govern their work, it can provide support that's personalized to who they are and what they need.
"With Sana, we can provide our employees with quicker access to the information they need 24/7 and can get rid of these manual, mundane, sometimes repetitive tasks,” said a global legal & business services customer.
Over time, Sana can spot recurring questions, identify knowledge gaps, and recommend new articles or automations, helping HR and IT teams reduce routine ticket volume and continuously improve service at scale.
Sana Concierge is currently available to early adopter customers and will be generally available in the first quarter of 2027.
Sana Concierge is just the start. Workday is bringing four more purpose-built experiences into Sana for specialized work across recruiting, payroll, performance, and travel, helping employees and specialists manage longer workflows with the right context and actions in one place.
The following are in early access or coming soon:
Payroll Agent: Helps payroll teams prevent issues before they affect payroll, automate payroll inputs, and turn payroll data into actionable insights
Sana Coach: Brings performance, feedback, sentiment, and leadership coaching into one connected, conversational experience, moving talent development from episodic HR tasks to always-on guidance
Travel Agent: Empowers teams to book travel in a conversation, skip the expense report scramble, and get reimbursed faster (Early Access by end of October)
Now, a recruiter can manage a hiring pipeline, a manager can prepare performance reviews, and a payroll specialist can investigate pay issues without reducing the work to a series of disconnected chat responses. These agents work in the background, surface what needs attention, and bring the right information and actions together when a person needs to step in.
The people closest to the work understand where time is wasted, which steps can be automated, and when a person needs to step in. They shouldn’t have to learn code or wait for a developer to turn that knowledge into a working agent.
Sana has always made it easy for everyday employees to build agents. They just tell Sana what they want the agent to do, and Sana builds it for them, connecting it to the tools and information needed to complete the work.
“Sana Enterprise is the kind of AI we're really excited about—it's not only transforming the way we work in HR, but also bringing a completely new experience to employees,” said Volker Schrank, VP of global employee experience & HR technology, at Mondelez.
Now it's even easier to build and scale agents securely. Agents can start automatically when a Workday event occurs, such as a hire, job change, or termination. You can also limit agents to specific company content, such as a SharePoint or Google Drive folder, so they always follow the right process and only use trusted information.
Admins can publish agents across the organization, where teams can discover and run them using their own permissions. When the agent or its underlying process changes, every subscriber receives the update automatically, so no agent runs on outdated logic or falls out of compliance.
“Sana Enterprise is the kind of AI we're really excited about—it’s not only transforming the way we work in HR, but also bringing a completely new experience to employees.”
Volker Schrank
VP of global employee experience & HR technology, Mondelez
The people closest to the work understand where time is wasted, which steps can be automated, and when a person needs to step in. They shouldn’t have to learn code or wait for a developer to turn that knowledge into a working agent.
Sana has always made it easy for everyday employees to build agents. They just tell Sana what they want the agent to do, and Sana builds it for them, connecting it to the tools and information needed to complete the work.
“Sana Enterprise is the kind of AI we're really excited about—it's not only transforming the way we work in HR, but also bringing a completely new experience to employees,” said Volker Schrank, VP of global employee experience & HR technology, at Mondelez.
Now, Sana makes those agents easier to build and scale securely. Agents can start automatically when a Workday event occurs, such as a hire, job change, or termination. They can also be limited to specific company content, such as a SharePoint or Google Drive folder, so they always follow the right process and only use trusted information.
Admins can also now publish agents across the organization, where teams can discover and run them using their own permissions. When the agent or its underlying process changes, every subscriber receives the update automatically, so no agent runs on outdated logic or falls out of compliance.
As agents take on more work, organizations need to know which agents are running, what they can do, and who has access.
Now, with the Agent System of Record (ASOR) in Sana, authorized admins can see registered agents, manage access, turn skills on or off, and activate or deactivate them. Audit and tracing provide a clear record of each agent run, including the steps taken, any errors, and who approved or rejected an action.
Admins can use Workday security groups to control who can create, share, publish, and audit agents. They can also determine which connector actions run automatically, require approval, or are blocked.
Together, these new capabilities give organizations the visibility and control to expand their use of agents with confidence.
Sana will continue to become more proactive. Instead of waiting for employees to ask, it will anticipate what needs to be done and take action on its own. Agents will be able to spot what needs attention, suggest how to handle it, and, once approved, keep routine work moving without repeated prompts.
New multiplayer experiences will coordinate people and agents across longer, end-to-end tasks, preserving the context, history, and progress as work moves between agents, people, and systems.
Sana will also deliver more purpose-built experiences for specialists, giving them the depth they need for complex work.
Over time, employees will spend less time operating software and prompting agents, and more time directing the work and stepping in when their judgment is needed.
The days of bouncing between countless apps and AI tools are over. By integrating with Workday and all your company's apps, Sana is the only AI your teams need to get work done. See why.
Note: Some of the capabilities mentioned in this blog are in early access and will be generally available at a later date.
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