New Workday Agents Turn IT Tickets and Travel Chaos Into One Conversation

In this article we discuss:

• Exposing Hidden Friction
• Where Identity and Context Intersect
• How Sana for ITSM Eliminates the Queue
• Collapsing Travel Into a Single Flow

• Scaling Intelligence Across Workflows

The most persistent time drains in the modern enterprise often hide in plain sight. These include the minutes lost to filing repetitive IT tickets and the hours spent chasing down travel approvals across systems. Technology has advanced, but the daily reality for many employees still involves juggling multiple tools to perform basic administrative tasks.  

Today, we introduced Sana for IT Service Management (ITSM) and the Travel Agent, both designed to go beyond recommendations to directly complete the work itself. These agents reside inside Workday, operating on real-time HR and finance data to quietly absorb the operational drag that everyone feels but we’ve accepted as the cost of doing business.   

“Today, employees spend so much of their time navigating a maze of tools, switching context constantly, and re-entering data across multiple systems just to resolve an IT ticket or manage travel and expenses,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, president, product and technology, Workday. “AI lets us break free from the limitations of enterprise applications, removing that complexity and turning fragmented workflows into real outcomes and more productive work days for our customers.”

This foundation allows for a direct solution to the specific friction points in IT and travel management that have long hindered productivity. 

Exposing Hidden Friction

Mapping where employees spend time on low-leverage tasks reveals two specific patterns. First, a significant share of IT work is triggered by HR events that Workday already tracks. Second, a large portion of expense work is actually travel work spread across disconnected systems.

The IT lifecycle is predictable. A new hire joining the company needs equipment and systems access. A manager changing roles needs new permissions. An employee leaving the company triggers device returns and account deactivation. All of these events originate in Workday. However, the actual fulfillment often happens elsewhere in ticketing queues, manual spreadsheets, or ad-hoc approvals.

This fragmentation fuels what Workday research identifies as a systemic drain on productivity. Our survey of 6,100 professionals found that 82% of employees spend significant time coordinating across teams and moving data between tools. One in five loses more than seven hours a week to this "Copy/Paste Economy." For IT professionals, the burden is even higher, with one in four losing a full day every week to manual data reconciliation.

Workday agents solve this problem by integrating directly where the source of truth already exists. Instead of requiring a human to bridge the gap between HR events and IT actions, the agents automate the downstream work. This eliminates the need for an additional AI layer on top of the sprawl and stops employees from doing the job that software is supposed to do. 

Where Identity and Context Intersect

Both the Sana for ITSM and the Travel Agent are built directly into the Workday core. While that sounds like a product statement, the architectural implications are significant. Because these agents sit next to the systems managing people and capital, they inherit three critical capabilities by default.

1. They understand identity and roles. The agent does not need to guess who a user is or what they are permitted to do. It operates using the same identity, organizational structure, and security model that HR and IT already trust.
2. They respect existing policy and approvals. Whether it is a specific travel policy or a complex access control rule, the agent does not maintain a separate copy or a parallel approval universe. It calls into the existing configuration running HR and finance workflows and uses those rules to decide what to do and when to pause for human input.
3. They provide end-to-end traceability. Actions taken by an agent flow through the same approvals and audit trails as actions taken by a human. When an agent adjusts access or books travel, those steps appear in the same logs and workflows customers already rely on to understand who did what, and why.

This creates a technical bridge between a chat interface that merely suggests steps and an agent that safely executes them as part of the existing governance model, rather than outside it. 

How Sana for ITSM Eliminates the Queue

Sana for ITSM operates on a simple principle: Most IT tickets shouldn’t exist in the first place. For employees, it presents a conversational interface where they request help in natural language to reset passwords, request system access, or resolve sign-in issues. Under the hood, the agent maps that intent to workflows that already exist across HR, identity, and IT systems and routes requests through the same approval paths an IT team would use today.

But the most efficient IT workflow is the one an employee never has to ask for. Instead of waiting for a prompt, Sana for ITSM monitors underlying events to automatically trigger downstream IT actions. A new hire automatically initiates provisioning for accounts and hardware, a role change adjusts data access, and an employee departure instantly revokes credentials. When a workflow calls for it, the agent pauses for existing approvals and logs its actions alongside human operators, ensuring nothing happens outside established processes.

“IT teams don't wake up wanting to close more tickets, they want fewer tickets and cleaner operations,” said Joel Hellermark, chief AI officer, Workday. "Because Sana for ITSM is built directly into Workday, every hire, role change, and offboarding event becomes a live trigger for the right IT actions to happen automatically across identity, security, and collaboration tools."

For cases that require human intervention or judgment, the agent handles the initial triage. It collects context, applies relevant policies, and routes the request to the correct team with fewer back-and-forth questions. Over time, this makes a measurable dent in repetitive work, allowing IT professionals to focus on high-value projects rather than queue management, while still keeping people in the loop where it matters most. 

Collapsing Travel Into a Single Flow

Business travel is an area where current friction is only tolerated because it has become normalized. Users go to a travel tool to book, reference a policy in a static PDF or wiki, and keep track of physical receipts. Later, they log into an expense system to manually recreate the data.

The Travel Agent collapses this into a single flow. An employee plans a trip through a conversation regarding the destination and the purpose. The agent checks availability, budgets, and policy constraints in the background using the same rules finance and HR already maintain in Workday, rather than a separate policy engine.

It then proposes flight and hotel options that stay within those specific bounds. Once a trip is booked, all policy-approved expenses—from the upfront bookings to business-related incidentals—are automatically created and coded. Those actions are captured in the same approvals, logs, and expense workflows that finance teams already review today.

This is not a chatbot sitting on top of a travel site. It is the treatment of planning, booking, and expense as one connected system that honors the organization’s existing controls. For finance teams, the impact is immediate. Instead of waiting for reports weeks after a trip, they receive a real-time view of travel commitments as they occur, with clear visibility into the steps an agent took and where humans were asked to review or approve. 

Scaling Intelligence Across Workflows

IT support and travel are two areas where everyday friction is clearest. The data lives in systems customers already trust, the workflows are repetitive enough to benefit from automation, and the failure modes are well understood.

Over time, we expect this to become the standard way we approach critical workflows in Workday. If a process already runs here, organizations should not need to bolt on a separate AI stack to make that process more intelligent. Agents should inherit the context, policies, and guardrails that are already in place, and focus on the last mile—understanding natural language, orchestrating complex steps, and knowing when to ask for confirmation or hand off to a human.

The real test is not in the launch, but in the details of how these agents behave in live environments with real-world constraints. As we roll out these capabilities, we will continue to share how we connect models to business logic, where fully autonomous workflows provide the most value, and where keeping a human firmly in the loop is the right choice. Our goal is to reduce the operational drag of everyday work while respecting the complexity and governance of the systems organizations already run.

Discover the full scope of how these new agents seamlessly integrate into your existing workflows to eliminate daily operational drag. Read the complete press release to learn more.