How Workday’s L&D Team Built Courses 50% Faster With Sana Learn

In this article we discuss:

• Building On a Trusted Foundation

• Making The Learning Experience More Engaging

• Cutting Course Creation Time In Half

• Scaling Global While Cutting Costs & Improving Quality

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Workday Learning, powered by Sana. The new solution combines Workday's trusted people and skills data with Sana's AI-native learning experience. Now, organizations can deliver personalized training grounded in the workforce data they already rely on.

Workday Learning, powered by Sana, builds on Sana Learn, a solution our own L&D team knows well. Three years ago, the team began reimagining how they design and deliver learning to Workday’s 20,000 employees across 35 countries with Sana Learn. Our partnership with Sana deepened over time, so much so that Workday acquired the company. As early believers in AI’s potential, our L&D team has learned a lot about where AI drives real value for instructional designers and the employees they support. And we're just getting started.

Building On a Trusted Foundation

According to Workday research, 87% of employees agree that AI increases their confidence in decisions when they trust the underlying system. For our L&D team, that trusted system has been Workday Learning since 2016.

Workday Learning is the governance and reporting backbone our learning strategy depends on. It’s where employees discover and enroll in courses, managers track progress, and leaders monitor completion of critical programs like Code of Conduct training.

Sana Learn didn't replace that foundation—it built on it. With trust and infrastructure already in place, we could focus AI where it creates the most value: how learning gets experienced, how it gets created, and how it scales across languages and regions.

Making The Learning Experience More Engaging

We started where AI-powered learning would make the biggest impact: high-visibility enterprise programs. The results came fast. Completion rates rose 25% across required and elective courses, with some programs hitting all-time highs. As part of Workday’s Everyday AI program, our companywide course on responsible AI reached 86% completion—well above what comparable enterprise programs had previously achieved. The experience also drove meaningfully higher engagement in user feedback.

Behind those numbers is a bit of a paradox: AI is what makes the training feel more personal and engaging, not less. 

With Sana Learn, every learner gets a personal AI tutor that coaches them through complex material, breaks difficult concepts into practical guidance, and recommends what to learn next. Employees can ask questions in real-time and get explanations tied to the material in front of them. A narrator guides people through commonly used eLearnings, making the AI-powered experience even more engaging—and, dare I say, human. 

Learning has become more collaborative, too. Interactive polls let Workmates see how their peers respond to questions and scenarios—a welcome dose of connection in a hybrid world.

"Learners love to see each other's feedback," said one of our instructional designers. "We encouraged them to respond to other comments, and people really leaned in."

AI scenario simulations take collaboration a step further. In Workday’s goal-setting program, AI plays the role of a learner's people leader, offering the kind of feedback a manager might. This allows Workmates to pressure-test their goals in a safe space.

"It is great to give learners an opportunity to practice right in the eLearning, without requiring them to go elsewhere to get feedback and refine their goals,” said another instructional designer.

Cutting Course Creation Time in Half 

Course creation is now 50% faster than with our previous tools, and 60% faster when migrating existing courses. Course maintenance, often a hidden cost in L&D, improved just as dramatically. The team can update policies or phrasing across multiple courses at once, cutting annual content update time by 70%. 

Driving these numbers is a fundamental shift in how courses get built and updated. Sana Learn removed production bottlenecks that had long slowed creation and maintenance. What used to be a blank-slide, start-from-scratch process now begins with a running head start. Designers simply provide source materials (outlines, PDFs, presentations, or existing course files), and AI-powered authoring tools turn them into structured, interactive learning experiences in minutes. 

The AI editor proposes learning objectives, knowledge checks, and practice scenarios that designers can review and refine within branded templates. Meanwhile, an integrated writing assistant accelerates every day tasks such as automatically drafting lesson text, simplifying lengthy policies, and generating quiz questions.

"We can drop a course outline into the template and let the AI make that outline a reality within minutes," said one of our instructional designers. "No more blank-page friction."

And because interactivity is built directly into the authoring environment, designers can weave polls, quizzes, reflections, and scenarios into a course without ever leaving the workspace.

"You can intersperse content with interactivity really easily," said an instructional designer. "No extra add-ons, no juggling multiple tools for engagement. As a designer, it's a one-stop shop."

The results speak for themselves. With all the time savings, Workday's L&D teams now focus on what matters most: shaping learning strategy and driving business impact.

Scaling While Cutting Costs & Improving Quality

We saw another early example of AI's value in Workday’s sales enablement team, which manages a large volume of L&D content across regions and languages.

Before Sana Learn, localization was slow and complex. Moving a single piece of content through the process required an internal localization team, external vendors, and a 13-page manual.

With Sana Learn, the team automated the entire translation process end-to-end. Video transcripts are even generated and translated automatically, eliminating manual subtitling. What used to take weeks and multiple handoffs now happens in a few clicks—no external vendors, no internal handoffs, and no 13-page manual.

Speed meant nothing, though, without quality. The team put the translations to the test. Team members in Japan reviewed the AI-generated output, and confirmed it could be used as-is. That gave them the confidence to retire mandatory local reviews, shortening time-to-market and cutting resource costs.

Now, the team designs a course once and localizes it in parallel, so Workmates employees in different parts of the world learn from the same content. That's critical for product launches, new ways of working, and regulatory changes.

Introducing Workday Learning, Powered by Sana

Using Sana Learn alongside Workday Learning has changed how we create, maintain, and deliver learning. Employees engage more deeply, content gets built at the speed of the business, and learners around the world get a higher-quality experience—all backed by the governance and trusted foundation of Workday Learning.

As the next step in our journey to bring AI into every part of the learning experience, our L&D team is planning to implement Workday Learning, powered by Sana in the coming months. For Workday, it's all about making learning more responsive to the business, more useful to employees, and easier for learning teams to scale. 

That's the future of L&D we believe in.

Join Workday’s webinar to learn more about redesigning global learning programs with Workday Learning, powered by Sana. Register now.