Workday Product Announcements at Rising 2026
The opportunity for agentic HR, Finance and IT is so much more than efficiency—it’s about unlocking business growth and reinvention.
Work has been reinvented before. Every time it felt impossible right up until it felt obvious.
At Workday Rising 2026, the real question isn’t whether we should embrace AI or fear it. The question is how to harness its power and make it safe, reliable, and trusted. The innovations we announced today are about how to thrive on the explosion of intelligence around us, without losing our strong guardrails.
Many people think of AI as an efficiency gain, but if you stop there, you miss the opportunity.
“Real AI transformation is about driving growth faster, better. That’s where you’re really winning,” said Workday President of Product and Technology Gerrit Kazmaier during today’s Innovation Keynote. “Faster decisions, better customer service, more agility, unlocking new market opportunities. This is the Workday way.”
In other words, the opportunity for agentic HR, Finance and IT is about unlocking business growth and reinvention, not efficiency. Today’s announcements help employees focus on higher-value work while trusting agent autopilots to run on Workday’s trusted guardrails.
“Real AI transformation is about driving growth faster, better. That’s where you’re really winning.”
Gerrit Kazmaier
President of Product and Technology
Workday
Sana: The New Workday Home
Sana is the new front door to Workday. A simple, conversational UI, Sana is designed to help people find information and get real work done across HR, finance and IT. Sana brings tasks, decisions, meetings, and agent activity into one place to help employees finish the work, not just answer questions. Employees simply ask for what they need in natural language, and Sana orchestrates Workday agents to complete the work.
Sana Concierge
Sana Concierge is a new, AI-native HR and IT service delivery experience within Workday Home 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. Sana Concierge is in early access now.
Sana Inside the AI Tools You Use
Sana now also works inside the AI tools employees already use, including Claude, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams, Slack, and Google Gemini Enterprise. Employees can ask questions in plain language and have Workday agents finish the work, all while staying inside their company's permissions and approvals.
Sana Coach
Now in early access, the new Sana Coach brings performance, feedback, sentiment, and leadership coaching into one connected, conversational experience. Talent development evolves from episodic HR tasks to always-on guidance.
Work Intelligence
Work Intelligence shows companies how AI is changing the work inside each job and which skills their people will need next. It breaks each job into the tasks people do, connects those tasks to the skills they require, and helps leaders plan how to grow their people as work changes.
Autopilot Agents for HR, Finance & IT
The era of genuinely autonomous work is here. Workday has unveiled new AI agents that work as autopilots across hiring, payroll, accounting, and compliance. For HR, finance, and IT teams, this means less time chasing work and more time on the decisions only people can make.
Talent Acquisition Agent
Workday’s first agentic autopilot, Talent Acquisition Agent, is now in early access. It helps recruiting teams focus on what matters by handing routine hiring tasks automatically and keeping hiring moving around the clock. Recruiters spend less time on admin, and more time engaging top talent and making faster hiring decisions.
Workday Candidate Profile
Workday Candidate Profile is a reusable, candidate-controlled profile experience designed to help job seekers apply faster across Workday-hosted career sites. Candidates spend less time repeating themselves, and employers receive more complete applications while keeping existing recruiting workflows intact. Candidate Profile is expected to be available in early 2027.
Expanded Decision Intelligence
Decision Intelligence now spans the full Workday portfolio, giving HR and finance teams a single, governed AI experience that works the way an in-house analyst would: with seamless, secure access to the people, financial, and planning data already governed in Workday. Teams can ask a question in plain language, get an answer grounded in live data instead of a static export, compare options, and take action based on existing Workday permissions.
Trusted Agent Platform
Workday’s Trusted Agent Platform gives teams lawful, headless access to HR and finance data—using whatever tools, models, and frameworks they choose. No matter who builds an agent, every action running through our platform stays bound to Workday’s permissions, approvals, and audit trails. No agent gets a side door.
Workday Data Cloud
The new Workday Data Cloud opens the System of Record directly to AI agents. Its unified, open architecture gives agents direct, secure access to live Workday data and business logic. Teams no longer have to extract data, duplicate it, or rebuild security.
Workday Extend AI
Workday Extend AI is a comprehensive, enterprise-grade developer toolkit, giving developers the freedom to innovate while ensuring agents run lawfully inside Workday’s guardrails. Developer Agent, Custom Agents, and Agent-Ready Tools are generally available as part of Workday Extend AI.
Workday + C1.ai
Workday has signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, a leading agentic identity platform for people and agents. C1.ai connects to the systems a business runs on—from email and CRM to code repositories, finance systems, and cloud infrastructure—giving each person and agent the right access at the right time and removing it the moment it's no longer needed.
Workday + Anthropic
This new partnership brings Claude’s frontier reasoning together with Sana AI agents and Workday’s trusted data and business context in HR and finance. The experience will come to life in either Sana, Workday’s agentic experience and orchestration layer, or in Claude, depending on the work being done. With the new partnership, people can start work in Claude or in Sana, with their context and controls intact in each. Claude and Sana exchange information and tasks through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard, so work carries forward rather than starting over.
Note: Some of the capabilities mentioned in this blog will be generally available at a later date.
Stream the Workday Rising 2026 Innovation Keynote on-demand.
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