Workday, having bought Swedish AI startup Sana for 1.1 billion dollars, is making swift work of integrating it. It took just two months to integrate the ‘superintelligence’ internally, the company says, and four months after the acquisition, it has now rolled Sana out for customers as well. What does this ‘superintelligence’ deliver?
The new addition uses a conversational interface for both self-service work and connection both within and outside of Workday. Available now, Sana runs inside Workday’s existing security and compliance framework. This helps ground its AI actions into the same data and policies companies have set up already.
Self-service and enterprise-wide abilities
The launch covers three distinct components. Sana for Workday replaces the traditional menu-driven interface with a conversational AI experience for employees, managers, CFOs, and CHROs. The Sana Self-Service Agent brings 300+ skills covering pay, time, and absence, and is already processing everyday HR and finance tasks for customers globally. Sana Enterprise, meanwhile, extends those capabilities beyond Workday into the broader enterprise technology stack.
In other words: Sana is the kind of AI assistance SaaS systems are increasingly shooting for. Despite fears among investors about the viability of this setup, particularly earlier in the year, Workday and others aim to set up AI tooling in such a way that their platform becomes the system of record for AI agents. The other route, one rather opportunistically dreamed up at times whenever Claude or other AI model makers improve autonomous tools, would instead seek to make enterprise apps composable for each organization. For the moment, we’re seeing no reason mature organizations would rip and replace these central systems. As a result, AI assistants like Sana seem to offer an answer to those seeking automation within existing platforms.
Grounded in Workday’s core systems
Specifically, what sets Sana apart from standalone AI assistants, according to Workday, is that it runs inside Workday’s existing security, permissions, and audit framework. Agents inherit the same access controls companies already trust for sensitive HR and finance data. This means answers and actions are grounded in the same security model, configuration, and policies already in use.
The Self-Service Agent supports four core modes. The first of these consists of finding instant answers from company knowledge and Workday data. Secondly, it helps in executing tasks across connected systems. Thirdly, it can build dashboards, summaries, and documents from existing data. Finally, Sana makes it possible to set up no-code, multi-step automated workflows. “Most AI projects today live in pilots and browser tabs — they look impressive in demos, but they don’t change how work actually gets done,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product and technology at Workday. “With Sana from Workday, we’re delivering a new way to get work done – where AI agents take action using trusted context, not just provide suggestions.”
Both Sana for Workday and the Self-Service Agent are available immediately to all Workday customers through Workday Flex Credits, at no extra licence fee. Early adoption figures from customers are striking: one organization reached 90 percent adoption within 40 days and retired 400 ChatGPT licences. In that same vein, IT managers can harbor some hope of eliminating shadow AI, where regular users jump to chatbots to get work done faster. Now, the tools should be more refined, in plain view of IT, and adhering to existing rules.
Sana Enterprise reaches beyond Workday
Sana Enterprise connects Workday to more than 18 third-party applications, including Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, SharePoint, Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, and Zoom. That connectivity push has been building since Workday’s acquisition of integration platform Pipedream in November, which added over 3,000 connectors to the platform. Through Sana Enterprise, employees can complete work across multiple systems in a single conversation. For example, the tool can find documents in SharePoint, schedule meetings in Outlook, or review Jira tickets. Naturally, this means users can get much more work done without switching between applications.
Sana Enterprise is available with Workday Human Capital Management or Workday Financial Management and through Flex Credits. The company’s platform strategy combining Sana, Pipedream, and the also recently acquired low-code agent builder Flowise now comes together in a single user-facing product.