Workday has announced a series of AI updates at its Rising 2026 event. The enterprise software company has signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, an agentic identity management platform, and introduced new AI agents designed to handle tasks across human resources (HR), finance, and IT. The updates reflect the company’s push to move AI beyond answering questions towards completing business tasks. Workday has signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, a platform focused on identity management for people and AI agents.
The announcements also include a redesigned Workday Home powered by Sana, a platform that lets customers build and manage their own AI agents, along with new tools for workforce planning and financial decisions. Workday is also expanding its partnerships with Anthropic and other technology companies to bring its AI capabilities into the tools employees already use. The acquisition is intended to help Workday manage access to applications, data and systems for employees and AI agents throughout their lifecycle.
The company aims to reduce friction in the application process and address an estimated application-abandonment rate of around 60%. Workday Decision Intelligence is now available across the company’s portfolio. Using Workday Skills Cloud’s database of more than 75,000 skills, the tool helps leaders determine which tasks AI can automate, which it can support, and which should remain with people. Workday and Anthropic have announced a partnership connecting Claude’s reasoning capabilities with Sana AI agents and Workday’s business data and context. The system is designed to ensure employees and AI agents receive the right access permissions when they join an organisation, change roles, or leave. The move comes as businesses increasingly deploy AI agents to perform tasks across enterprise systems, creating a need to manage their access and permissions alongside those of human employees. Workday has introduced Sana as the new Workday Home, describing it as an agentic experience designed to complete tasks rather than simply answer questions. Employees can make requests in natural language, and Sana coordinates the relevant Workday AI agents to carry out the requested actions. The company said Sana Concierge can handle HR and IT requests, including employee onboarding and password resets, before they become support tickets. Workday is positioning Sana as an interface that lets employees access business services and get work done without navigating multiple systems or manually completing every step. Workday has also launched Autopilot Agents that operate in the background across HR, finance and IT. The approach is intended to give organisations flexibility in developing AI agents while retaining governance over how they access and use business data. Workday has announced additional features for recruitment, workforce planning and financial analysis. Businesses can compare hiring strategies, identify skills gaps and analyse financial variances before routing recommendations through existing approval processes. Workday has also introduced Work Intelligence, which helps organisations break jobs into individual tasks and map them to the skills required to perform them.
The agents are designed to handle tasks involving hiring, payroll, accounting and compliance. Workday, customer-built and partner-developed agents operate under the same permissions, approval processes and audit trails, according to the company. With the acquisition, Workday aims to establish an identity governance layer covering people, money and agents. The new Candidate Profile feature allows job seekers to save their information once and reuse it when applying to companies that use Workday for recruitment. The AI-powered HR and finance analyst helps teams model scenarios using live, governed Workday data. Depending on the task, users can access the experience through Sana or Claude. Workday is also expanding Sana’s availability beyond its own platform. The agentic experience and orchestration engine will work within tools employees already use, including Claude, Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Teams and Slack. The integrations let employees access Workday capabilities through existing workplace tools rather than switching between applications. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
The agents can identify work that needs attention and recommend actions or take them within customer-defined policies and approval limits, according to the company. Sana coordinates their activities, while existing business rules determine what they can do independently. The objective is to reduce the time employees spend on routine operational tasks, allowing teams to focus on decisions that require human judgement. Workday’s Trusted Agent Platform now supports headless access to HR and finance capabilities, allowing customers to build, run and govern their own AI agents. The company said Agent-Ready Tools, Agent Harness, Developer Agent, Custom Agents and Data Cloud are generally available. These capabilities support different AI models and development frameworks.