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. Watch a demo.
In this article we discuss:
Today at Workday Rising, we're announcing Sana Coach, a new AI agent that expands the scope of Workday's talent management offering.
When I talk with other leaders, I hear the same frustration again and again: talent development is a nice idea, but the reality hasn't kept pace with how people actually work. I feel it myself. The signals that tell us how our people are doing (their skills, performance, and engagement) all live in separate systems, so none of us ever sees the full picture. Development conversations still happen in bursts—an annual review here, a quarterly check-in there—shaped more by process than business strategy or growth. All of the leaders I know genuinely want to coach their teams, but admin work crowds out the conversations that matter most, and help rarely shows up in the moment they need it. Employees tell us they struggle to see where their careers could go next or what it would take to get there. And while AI promises to help, advice that doesn't understand the business and the opportunities given someone's real role, goals, and experiences is too generic to make a difference.
When I talk with other leaders, I hear the same frustration: talent development is a nice idea, but the reality hasn't kept pace with how people actually work. That's exactly why I'm so excited about Sana Coach.
That's exactly why I'm so excited about Sana Coach. It marks a transformative shift in how organizations grow their talent readiness, turning admin-driven, episodic processes into always-on, personalized coaching for every employee and manager. Rather than treating performance, feedback, learning, and sentiment as separate workflows, Sana Coach brings them into one guided, conversational, voice-enabled experience, built in partnership with ElevenLabs for AI avatar and voice-led coaching.
Sana Coach is built to handle a broad range of tasks across roles, sectors, and domains. It enters early access at Rising with capabilities in three critical areas of talent management, helping employees and managers turn talent signals into action:
Feedback: It also makes feedback easier to request, synthesize, and act on. The agent gathers input from multiple reviewers, identifies themes, and translates feedback into coaching prompts and development actions.
Talent Sentiment: Connected to Workday Peakon Employee Voice, Sana Coach turns sentiment signals into leadership insight rather than a static survey dashboard, helping organizations move from listening to action while there's still time to intervene.
Together, these capabilities are already reducing administrative burden and improving the quality and speed of everyday talent decisions.
The most useful feedback is often the kind given in the moment: right after a strong presentation, a tough client call, or a project that finally shipped. Too often, though, that feedback never gets shared. Opening a form and typing out thoughtful comments feels like one more task, so it gets pushed to later, or never happens at all.
Sana Coach changes that by giving employees and managers the choice of spoken or written feedback. It can turn a quick, stream-of-consciousness commentary into ready-to-share feedback. Rather than simple talk-to-type dictation, Sana Coach offers a true, turn-by-turn conversation, so employees and managers can think out loud, get prompted with a follow-up question, and refine their thinking in dialogue—while Sana Coach captures and structures it into feedback that's ready to share. It's a small change in how people interact with the system, and it makes a big difference in the outcome:
Greater speed and efficiency: Speaking is much faster than typing, so people can capture their thoughts in seconds, wherever they are, instead of saving them for a dedicated sit-down later.
Higher participation: When giving feedback takes less effort, people do it more often and more spontaneously, turning "anytime feedback" from an aspiration into a habit.
Richer, more natural detail: Spoken feedback tends to be more conversational and specific, giving the recipient better context for their development.
The most useful feedback is often the kind given in the moment. Too often, though, that feedback never gets shared. Sana Coach changes that by giving employees and managers the choice of spoken or written feedback.
I believe few things shape a person's experience at work more than their manager. We all know the adage that people leave managers, not jobs. Yet so many managers who aspire to be great leaders are left to grow their people without the support they need. That's what Sana Coach can change.
It gives every manager timely insight and advice so their teams can perform, grow, and feel like they belong. It continuously gathers signals, surfaces themes, and recommends next steps, helping managers and HR step in earlier instead of after the fact. Our vision isn't to automate management away. It's to make great management, the kind I've been lucky to experience, consistent and scalable for every team.
So many managers who aspire to be great leaders are left to grow their people without the support they need. That's what Sana Coach can change.
Sana Coach's early access launch is the first step toward a much bigger goal: a connected talent operating system. Next, we're bringing leadership coaching into Sana Coach, a brand-new capability that helps every manager, not just executives, translate strategy into clear goals, prepare for difficult conversations, lead teams through change, and support employees with personalized next steps. Because it's grounded in Workday's governed people and work data—goals, org structure, feedback, performance history, skills, and sentiment—its guidance reflects a leader's actual team, not generic advice.
Looking further ahead, Career Coaching is planned for a future release, building on the same data foundation to bring automated career paths and skill-gap analysis to every worker.
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