A Better Way to Work: A Day in the Life With Sana

In this article we discuss:

• Clarity Over Chaos

• Building and Acting

• Concentrating on Clear Communication

• A Clean Slate

As AI becomes embedded across the enterprise, complexity is rising fast. More agents, more tools—and more places where work gets done. With Sana from Workday, now available to customers worldwide, employees can find answers and automate tasks in one AI-powered experience. 

And Workday employees didn’t have to wait for our public launch today to discover a more streamlined workday. Following the acquisition four months ago, Workday set a new record by rolling out Sana internally in just 60 days. Today, Sana has achieved a reach of 80% of Workday’s 21,000 employees, with more than 12,200 active users engaging with the platform each week.  

The impact is clear. Workday teams are already using Sana to turn grueling manual workflows into sprints. A custom legal agent has transformed a massive 1,500-contract review project from a 9,000-hour mountain into a streamlined success. By slashing review times from six hours to just 15 minutes per contract, this agent returned a staggering 8,625 hours to our global legal services team.

Our product managers have traded manual data drudgery for an automated analyzer that serves up deep usage trends and user segments in seconds—saving up to 10 hours of spreadsheet grinding per analysis. 

Meanwhile, a new strategy agent has turned competitive research into a self-service win, allowing sales executives to instantly pull pricing comparisons and market patterns that used to require a middleman. From AI literacy agents democratizing technical knowledge across the org to smart assistants triaging the daily email chaos, Sana is more than a tool—it’s Workday’s new competitive edge.

Morning: Clarity Over Chaos

For George Margrove, senior principal researcher at Workday, the work week used to begin on Sunday night with the Sunday Scaries. He felt that familiar Monday morning weight—a defensive crouch spent mentally triaging his inbox just to figure out what should happen next.

But now Sana prepares him with WeekIQ, an agent that acts as a digital chief of staff. It integrates with Outlook and other email providers to sift through tons of messages. So instead of wasting time digging through folders and inboxes, his Sana agent greets him with a prioritized list of project updates and his most important tasks. 

"It’s a total lifesaver,” Margrove says. “The integration between Sana and my email was easy to set up, and it has completely changed my Monday routine. On more than one occasion, it reminded me of a critical task I’d forgotten, giving me the nudge I needed to get it done. It's a low-impact, high-utility time saver that organizes my thoughts and ensures I actually do what I'm supposed to do.”

On another occasion, Margrove needed to quickly synthesize dozens of papers and internal documents on skills and talent development ahead of an urgent meeting. Sana saved the day.

“Sana was great for helping me organize my analyses into different folders and themes with sub-analyses, and then combine them into one synthesis. It allowed me to distill a massive amount of information into key insights in time for the meeting without having to manually cross-reference every single document. Normally you would need to use a tool like Gemini for one part of it, and NotebookLM for the other part, but Sana was effective for both,” he explains.

Margrove’s experience reflects a broader trend across Workday: Employees who connect five or more integrations to the platform see a 5x higher adoption rate, as the agentic power of the system grows with every connected data source.

With less pressure spent worrying about the next task, Margrove has more room to innovate. He’s currently using Sana as a development partner to build a new product—which is actually an agent within Sana itself. This custom agent acts as a career coach that can carry out soft skills assessments to improve coaching priorities for individuals.

“I actually use the coach as its own sounding board,” he adds. “I have the agent analyze its instructions and deconstruct its errors, essentially letting the AI brainstorm its own improvements to ensure the coaching is as sharp as possible.”

Afternoon: Building and Acting

As the day progresses, the focus shifts from preparation to taking action. This is where Sana’s ability to deploy specialized agents becomes a force multiplier.

Kyle Troyer, an integrations consultant at Workday, manages complex deployments involving technical and functional teams across multiple workstreams. By early afternoon, when Troyer’s focus shifts from catching up to making things happen, Sana steps in as a silent partner, handling the manual legwork of documentation and data so teams can focus on the big picture. Sana isn’t like traditional software—it's a digital teammate. 

For Troyer, this is where Sana Notetaker becomes essential. In addition to recording meetings, it acts as a digital consultant that sits in on every call. It’s a huge help in the high-stakes world of customer experience and consulting. 

“I’m impressed by how the notetaker identifies key takeaways compared to standard tools—it eliminates the variable quality of notes you get from different consultants or projects,” he says. “I can see a future where Sana acts as an extra consultant on every project, capturing information with a level of consistency that's impossible for a human to maintain alone. It becomes a living knowledge base where I can instantly ask about specific decisions or staffing models instead of hunting for answers in Slack.”

With that level of detail and consistency, users can turn notes into immediate action. Nirupama Balu, a product manager at Workday, has turned meeting management into a science thanks to Sana. 

“During meetings, I proactively articulate my understanding of others’ input or summarize key takeaways. These explicit cues have demonstrably enhanced Sana’s accuracy in summarizing the meeting and identifying action items.”

Subsequently, she leverages the meeting recording and instructs the chat functionality within Sana to generate a one-page "now-next-later" summary, complete with the objective and expected outcome.

"I perform minimal edits. Then I incorporate the one-pager into a Google Slide, where I create the roadmap. This efficient process allows me to circulate a well-formed roadmap to my team within an hour of the meeting’s conclusion," Balu explains. 

Late Afternoon: Concentrating on Clear Communication 

When the focus turns to communication, Isabell Moreno, a technical consultant who specializes in finance integrations, uses the Email Ghostwriter agent to bridge gaps across the German-, French-, and English-speaking markets. "It adapts well to the nuances of each language and helps me quickly craft professional emails and concise meeting summaries in the right tone, without having to mentally translate everything first," Moreno says. By reclaiming that time, she can focus more on the substance of her work and building customer relationships.

Elle Waters, a senior product accessibility customer manager, uses Sana to bridge the gap between technical requirements and business strategy. By plugging into our company’s knowledge base—including Google Drive, Jira, and Confluence—Sana helps Waters synthesize accessibility data across specific projects and translate it into a format everyone can understand.

"I use Sana to simplify industry jargon and build customer confidence in our work," Waters explains. “It has been invaluable in articulating complex concepts in a customer-friendly way.”

She often collaborates with the agent on the initial goals and tone before fine-tuning the messaging for specific audiences. This allows her to quickly turn raw discussion points into actionable plans that resonate with customers and colleagues alike.

Evening: A Clean Slate

As the afternoon winds down, the focus shifts from the heat of collaboration to the quiet reflection of the evening. Sana prevents any worries that employees left something unfinished, so they don’t have to carry home a heavy mental checklist.

Competitive and market intelligence leader August Jackson knows that the value of AI lies in its ability to bring information together so humans don't have to. His team uses Sana to stay ahead of a rapidly changing market where information can become outdated in the blink of an eye. 

"It has the ability to synthesize multiple vetted sources of information and data and query them faster and more efficiently than we would have been able to in the past," Jackson says. By the time the laptop closes, Sana has already organized the data, ensuring the team starts the next morning with the most current and validated insights.

This sense of being ahead of the curve changes the way the workday ends. The frantic, last-minute scramble is gone. In its place is a quiet readiness—the right knowledge, organized and waiting at the digital front doo

The transition away from work starts with a final check-in with Sana. Instead of scrolling through files and folders to remember what they promised to whom, employees use Sana to summarize their own day. It identifies the action items buried in afternoon chats and ensures nothing falls through the cracks. 

The real peace of mind comes from how Sana prepares the ground for tomorrow. It’s already looking at the Tuesday morning calendar, quietly gathering the documents needed for an early-morning presentation and drafting a summary of the latest project developments.

When employees finally log off, they end their workday not with a list of worries, but with the quiet confidence that, come the next morning, they are already exactly where they need to be.
 

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