Workday Delivers Next Wave of Agentic AI to Power the New Work Day

At Workday, we believe the enterprise of the future won’t be limited by what people alone can do. Instead, it’ll be powered by people and AI agents working together—combining human judgment and creativity with the always-on reasoning, speed, and scale of AI. Routine tasks will fade into the background. And the experience will be so intuitive, it’ll simplify work for everyone in the enterprise.

As Workday makes that vision a reality, we’re introducing hundreds of new AI capabilities and agents built directly into the platform that not only change how work gets done, but also how work feels.

Workday AI agents combine powerful AI reasoning with Workday’s deterministic systems and controls, acting as agentic teammates that leverage trusted HR, finance, and business data, along with operational context and enterprise guardrails, to get work done right. Together, these capabilities move customers from AI‑assisted tasks to truly agentic work—so there are fewer clicks, fewer handoffs, and more time for the work that really matters.

Sana from Workday, Sana Enterprise, a new suite of Workday AI agents, Workday Data Cloud, and new developer tools are now available to customers worldwide, putting agentic AI to work across HR, finance, IT, and legal.

In this article, we discuss the latest innovations in Workday’s Spring release, including:

• Sana from Workday, which is now generally available to customers worldwide, including Sana for Workday, Sana Self‑Service Agent, and Sana Enterprise.

• A new wave of Workday AI Agents for HR and Finance that are now available.

• An expansion of Workday Data Cloud and Workday Data Connect including new Live Data Query capabilities and Early Access for an open, lake‑style architecture.

• New AI capabilities for HR, finance, IT, and legal that let leaders move from reactive operations to agentic, always‑on functions.

Introducing Sana from Workday: Superintelligence for Work

Sana from Workday is now available to customers worldwide. This includes Sana for Workday, the new AI interface for Workday; Sana Self-Service Agent, which automates a broad range of HR and finance tasks, questions, and workflows; and Sana Enterprise, which unlocks Sana’s AI capabilities beyond Workday alone — orchestrating agents across hundreds of enterprise systems and business applications that employees use every day.

Sana from Workday is superintelligence for work, connecting Workday with hundreds of enterprise applications so employees can use a single conversational interface to reach across HR, finance, and the tools they use every day. Instead of hunting through tabs, knowledge articles, and tickets, they just ask in natural language and get cited, action‑ready answers that span systems.

New Workday Agents for HR Help Transform Routine People Operations Across the Employee Lifecycle

CHROs are under pressure to hire the right talent, maintain pay equity, and build trust—all while staying compliant. Our latest AI agents and capabilities are designed to make those jobs easier and more effective by turning routine HR work into agent‑driven workflows that run in the background, from recruiting and onboarding to performance and payroll. 

New agentic teammates now available for HR include: 

• Payroll Agent: Reduces manual work and improves accuracy by orchestrating workflows across the payroll process—identifying missing data and configurations, managing minimum wage updates, and delivering conversational insights.

• Total Rewards Agent (Early Access): Benchmarks job profiles against market data so HR leaders can better align roles, skills, and structures. 

• Talent Management Agent (Early Access): Drafts evidence-based reviews for managers using real-time contribution signals, improving consistency and quality of feedback. 

• Sana Self-Service Agent: Finds and summarizes information from Workday and other knowledge sources, giving employees clear, personalized answers to their questions right away.

New AI capabilities for HR leaders support better hiring, compensation, and employee listening:

• Fraudulent Application Detection: Surfaces signals like IP geolocation and automation likelihood scores so recruiters can more easily spot and filter out suspected bot or fraudulent applications.

• Organizational Design & Scenario Modeling: Makes it easier to test “what‑if” scenarios so leaders can move beyond spreadsheets and silos and design more resilient workforce structures.

• Demand Forecasting: Uses external data to forecast business demand and optimize schedules and workers.

• Workday Peakon AI Topics: Applies generative AI to large volumes of employee feedback, grouping comments by topic and sentiment so every leader gets a clear, summarized view of what matters most to their teams. 

Pictured: Organizational Design & Scenario Modeling

Pictured: Workday Peakon AI Topics

New Capabilities Empower CFOs to Move Toward Agentic Finance

Modern finance teams need to move from operational maintenance to proactive strategy. New innovations build on Workday’s long-standing strengths in continuous close, agile planning, and real-time governance, with agents that automate routine work. The result is a path to agentic finance, where agentic teammates keep the books running so finance leaders can stay focused on the business. Think fewer late‑night reconciliations and more time modeling new growth scenarios.

New agentic teammates now available for Finance include:

• Financial Audit Agent: Uses natural language to request sample data from across Workday, automating audit evidence collation and reducing manual work.

• Planning Agent: Automates analysis, delivers actionable variance insights, and lets users explore data through conversational prompts in a single workflow.

• Revenue Contract Agent (Early Access): Identifies risks and opportunities in revenue contracts and automates downstream accounting activities so finance teams can move faster and with greater confidence. Visit Workday Community to request a free trial.

New AI capabilities further simplify everyday tasks and strengthen controls:

• Reimagined Expense Management: Creates expenses at the point of sale, reducing manual entry and improving the employee experience. 

• AI-Powered Reconciliation: Provides end‑to‑end transaction lineage and automates preparation and reconciliation by up to 70%.

Pictured: Reimagined Expense Management

Bringing Agentic AI to Every Corner of the Tech Stack

We’re expanding how IT and data teams use Workday data and AI across their technology stack, while delivering a new wave of AI agents that turn system configuration and deployment into continuous, intelligent operations.

New agentic teammates now available for IT include:

• Adoption Agent (Early Access): Automates routine release management so admins can stay current with less manual effort.

• BP Optimize Agent: Spots bottlenecks in business processes and recommends clear configuration changes so teams can fix issues in seconds instead of weeks.

• Deployment Agent: Guides and executes changes based on your specific configuration so IT teams can deploy with more confidence and less risk.

Pictured: BP Optimize Agent

To empower developers to build custom apps even faster with Workday Extend Professional, we’re introducing advanced AI-powered tools:

• Expanded Workday Developer Copilot: Generates business objects and assists with API discovery and querying through natural language, reducing manual work and speeding up the path from ideation to production.

• AI Widgets: Brings AI prompts directly into Extend apps, enabling actions like instant summarization or content generation based on fields on the page – without separate tools.

Workday Data Cloud, announced at Workday Rising, connects trusted Workday data with leading platforms including Databricks, Google BigQuery, Salesforce, and Snowflake. It provides simple, secure, and governed access to trusted HR and finance data, while preserving the integrity of Workday as the system of record. Built on a zero-copy approach, it lets organizations drive advanced analytics, AI agents, and reporting without duplicating data. Early adopters are already using Live Data Query to get governed, real‑time SQL access to live Workday transactional data over a standard JDBC connection, so analytics and data teams can connect platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, Tableau, or Power BI directly to Workday data using the tools they already have, without building complex, custom extraction pipelines.

We’re also expanding what’s possible with Workday Data Connect (using Apache Iceberg open standards) and Workday Data Lake, soon available in Early Access. This will support an open, lake-style architecture and bi-directional data access between Workday and partner platforms including Databricks, Google Cloud, Salesforce, and Snowflake.

Workday AI Helps Legal Teams Review and Negotiate Contracts Faster

Legal teams must support functions like Procurement, Sales, and Finance with faster contracting and better access to contract data. The Workday Contract Intelligence Agent provides total visibility into large volumes of executed contracts, while the Contract Negotiation Agent streamlines pre‑signature workflows. Now, the Contract Negotiation Agent adds a new full‑document review and redlining capability that analyzes entire inbound contracts against corporate playbooks, flags areas of risk, and suggests precise redlines. This new end‑to‑end support helps reduce contract turnaround time, lower risk, and secure more favorable terms while significantly cutting hours of manual review.

Together, business partners get clearer guidance, legal gets more control, and everyone gets contracts over the finish line faster.

Pictured: Full Document Review and Redlining

Building the New Work Day With Agentic AI

Every wave of Workday innovation builds on the last, adding new AI agents, data tools, and financial capabilities to a platform that’s continuously updated throughout the year, not every few years.

As humans and agentic teammates start working side by side, organizations need context, control, and trustworthy insight. These 2026 innovations are a major step toward that future, bringing agentic work to life with AI that understands your people, policies, and processes well enough to take action – while keeping humans firmly in charge.

This is the new work day: humans and AI agents working together on a single, trusted platform to make work more intelligent, more connected, and a lot more fun.