At its Workday Rising annual event in Las Vegas this week, the cloud application giant unleashed a wave of new AI agent capabilities that automate routine tasks and provide a new front-end user experience for Workday HR, payroll and finance applications.
Workday has struck a deal to acquire C1.ai, a leading developer of agentic identity technology for people and agents, in a move to boost the identity and access management capabilities of the company’s cloud applications.
Workday announced the acquisition deal at its Workday Rising annual conference, taking place this week in Las Vegas, where the company also unveiled a wave of new AI agentic technologies—including autopilot agents—that perform a range of functions across the company’s HR, payroll and financial management applications.
“With C1, Workday becomes the identity governance and security enforcement layer for people and agents,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday president, product and technology, during a Workday keynote speech Tuesday.
[Related: Workday Co-Founder Returns As CEO Ahead Of Q4 Earnings]
“And it answers one of the most pressing questions in all of AI: How can you secure agents at scale? This is the piece that completes the picture we showed you this morning,” Kazmaier said of the C1.ai acquisition, referring to the product announcements and demonstrations made during the 90-minute keynote.
The Workday Agent System of Record already provides companies with a single place to see and manage their agents. Workday, in the acquisition announcement, said the C1.ai technology will build on that, going beyond registering agents to also governing what they can access across Workday and other enterprise systems. Once registered, an agent can receive the access it needs, when it needs it, and lose that access immediately when its work or role ends.
“Now, with C1, we can govern each of these agents in real time, and you know it can reach to Workday and any other system it touches, from the day an agent starts to the day an agent gets retired,” Kazmaier said. “And for your people, this means that they get access to all of the right apps.”
Financial terms of the C1.ai acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close during Workday’s fiscal 2027 fourth quarter, which ends Jan. 31, 2027.
The C1.ai acquisition was just one of many announcements Workday made Tuesday at Workday Rising. Promising a new way to work with AI, the cloud software giant debuted a wave of new AI agentic technology including autopilot agents that automate a range of functions across the company’s HR, payroll and financial management cloud applications.
Workday also announced that it is leveraging the Sana enterprise knowledge, learning and AI agent technology it acquired last year as the new agentic home screen and front-end user experience software for the company’s cloud applications.
“AI is one of the biggest opportunities in Workday’s history,” said Aneel Bhusri, Workday co-founder and CEO, during a pre-Workday Rising press conference. “We’re moving faster than we have, really since the founding of Workday, and we really need to be there for our customers and help them take advantage of [AI] in a way that is trusted and built for the enterprise. What we are delivering to our customers is truly groundbreaking.”
Workday’s agentic AI push meshes with what the company’s partners say their customers are asking for. “Leaning into Workday around human capital and performance—and now even beyond humans—everyone is thinking about their workforce as a totality,” said Chris Long, U.S. head of consulting and a principal at KPMG, a long-time strategic alliance partner with Workday.
Whether it’s human workers, agents or both, “People are looking for that ability to be able to create insights and improve decision making,” Long said in a pre-Rising interview with CRN. The AI agentic wave has “probably accelerated the pace and the interaction that we have with Workday as we lean into what’s important for our clients.”
A New Day For Workday
The news out of the Workday Rising conference comes at a pivotal time for the company. In February, Bhusri returned as the company’s top executive following the departure of Carl Eschenbach as CEO. Eschenbach, named co-CEO alongside Bhusri in 2022 and the sole CEO in 2024, stepped down on Feb. 9 following layoffs at the company and a steep decline in the company’s stock price.
Like other software-as-a-service application companies, Workday’s shares have been under price pressure for the last year amid fears that AI agentic technology could reduce demand for SaaS seats. Workday’s stock price lost nearly 15 percent of its value in 2025 and another 24 percent in 2026 in the five weeks before Eschenbach resigned.
During his Workday Rising keynote Tuesday Bhusri described the event as a “re-founding moment” for the company given its widespread adoption of AI agentic technology and the incorporation of agent capabilities across the company’s portfolio.
The CEO noted that Workday has spent 20 years building trust with customers and developing its platform, which now supports more than 80 million users and last year processed more than 1.4 trillion transactions.
“So our approach is straightforward,” the CEO said on stage. “We’re open. We’re flexible. We’re grounded in trust. The right model for the right job. And we keep it grounded in the workday context. So that gets us to the future of work…We want you to spend less time on mundane activities and more time on making decisions, moving the business forward.”
“And as you do that, we want to be your partner in helping you get to that next version of your company, a better version of your company, where people are truly empowered by automating a lot of the tasks that, frankly, no one likes to do. I believe the best chapters of Workday are still ahead and we’re writing them together with you.”
Agentic AI Announcements At Rising
At Rising Workday announced that it is leveraging the Sana enterprise knowledge, learning and AI agent technology it acquired in November 2025 as the new agentic home screen and front-end user experience software for the company’s cloud applications, replacing the current Workday Home interface.
Sana is now the central landing page and dashboard that users see when logging into Workday’s HR, payroll and finance applications. Workday said Sana provides an agentic experience that brings tasks, decisions, meetings and agent activity into a single place.
Workday also said that Sana now works inside AI tools and platforms employees already use including Anthropic Claude, Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Also new is Sana Concierge, an HR and IT service agent that resolves employee requests before they become tickets. Sana Concierge brings together the capabilities of Sana Self-Service Agent, for automating HR and finance workflows, and Sana for IT Service Management, both of which Workday launched earlier this year.
Workday also introduced new AI agent capabilities that the company said work as autopilots across hiring, payroll, accounting and compliance tasks. The agents continuously handle routine HR, finance and IT processes in the background, following company policies, permissions and approvals as they do so.
The new Talent Acquisition Agent monitors the queue of candidates for posted jobs, providing recruiters with information about applicants and their qualifications. The new agent is available now for early adopters.
Workday is adding similar autopilot capabilities to its current lineup of payroll, accounting and deployment agents. The Payroll Agent, for example, can now spot missing pay data before payroll runs while the Accounting Agent continuously tests financial information. And the deployment Agent identifies new capabilities that can improve business outcomes based on how a customer has Workday set up.
The company’s new Work Intelligence product, which also debuted at Workday Rising, is a tool that shows how AI is changing the work inside each job and which skills employees will need next. Work Intelligence, according to the company, breaks each job into the tasks employees do and connects those tasks to the skills they require. The tool uses information from the Workday Skills Cloud, currently in use by nearly 3,500 customers, which has an ontology of more than 75,000 canonical skills.
And the new Workday Decision Intelligence product collects live data from Workday applications to help finance and HR managers make real-time strategic decisions using natural language queries. The new product, with its enterprise AI capabilities, works the way an in-house analyst would and offers a unified, governed experience for modeling future scenarios and evaluating tradeoffs, according to the company.
