With the acquisition of integration platform Pipedream, Workday is throwing open its doors to external applications. Thanks to 3,000 connectors, AI agents will have access to all kinds of prominent business applications.
Earlier this year, Workday acquired Flowise and shortly thereafter Sana. With these steps, the company has already demonstrated its commitment to promoting the development and rollout of AI agents as much as possible. As the intended “Agent System of Record,” Workday should already serve as the focal point for making agents available to every employee in a secure and compliant manner. With Pipedream, the transition to applications such as Asana, HubSpot, Jira, Recurly, and Slack should be straightforward.
Workday cites as an example that agents can contribute to employee performance reviews. Projects in Jira or Asana and feedback from Slack can be linked without a manager having to dive into these applications for this information. Given Pipedream’s functionality, there are many more integrations to be devised, as the integrations run with more than 2,700 apps and there are over 10,000 pre-built workflows ready to be used.
Pipedream gives AI agents in a broader sense the ability to start workflows, retrieve data, and perform tasks. This happens both within Workday and in third-party systems. Within Workday itself, the possibilities for building agents are also broad, which can be a good addition to Pipedream’s offering.
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Connectivity for AI agents
The acquisition was announced today at Workday Rising EMEA in Barcelona. The company expects to complete the transaction in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026, which ends January 31, 2026.
Pipedream currently has over 5,000 customers and tens of thousands of users. CEO Tod Sacerdoti sees the deal as an opportunity to bring the simplicity of his platform to more than 11,000 organizations worldwide. “We founded Pipedream to help people work faster and with less complexity with AI,” said Sacerdoti.
Broader strategy
Pipedream’s community should increase the speed at which new connectors become available. Together with Flowise’s open-source community, Workday says it is committed to open development. As we noted earlier this year, this is a significant change of course from previous years. It was once known as a “walled garden” with few integrations. We spoke with Workday’s CEO Carl Eschenbach and CTO Peter Bailis during Workday Rising in September about the company’s new strategy. We also spoke with the CEO about the mistakes his company made in the past in another article.
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The focus is on agents that understand a company, can make decisions, and can connect systems where work actually happens. Within Workday’s trusted environment, customers are given the tools to build custom agents, provide them with the right context, and link them to relevant systems. Importantly, they are out-of-the-box compliant. Thanks to integrations with Okta and later Microsoft Entra ID, agents can be provided with the right permissions and rights alongside employees.