Sana from Workday provides four key functions within the Workday platform: ‘find’, ‘act’, ‘build’, and ‘automate’ – but the company says human workers are still a core part of the process.

‘Find’ lets workers answer organizational-specific questions drawn from their Workday data, such as vacation policy or queries about ongoing customer campaigns, while ‘act’ leans more heavily on Sana’s AI agent functionality to update documents and populate fields on an employee’s behalf.

For example, a user could ask for Sana from Workday to update a client’s contract value, which it could then do in the relevant system without the employee needing to leave the chat window.

‘Build’ and ‘automate’ are more akin to vibe coding, in that they allow users to create dashboards and summaries from Workday data, or to construct multi-step workflows for agents. Examples include creating an agent that automatically reviews one’s email inbox for receipts and combines them into a report for manual review.

Workday also announced the Sana Self-Service Agent, which automates HR and finance tasks such as filing expenses, verifying pay cheques, or changing worker schedules based on live data.

Sana Enterprise lets businesses connect this conversational AI experience to their third-party enterprise apps. At launch, this includes connectors for Atlassian Confluence, Box, Gmail, Google Drive, Jira, Microsoft Outlook Email, Notion, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SharePoint, Slack, and Zoom.

“AI only works in the enterprise when it’s connected to trusted, deterministic systems, and that hybrid architecture is exactly what Workday is building,” said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder, CEO and chair at Workday.

“Sana is what brings it all together. It’s not just a new Workday experience – it’s a powerful way for people to search, reason, and orchestrate work across the enterprise.”

In response to an ITPro question on whether AI hallucinations are still a concern, Gerrit Kazmaier, president, Product and Technology at Workday, said that hallucinations are “a feature, not a bug” in consumer-facing LLMs but they’re something to entirely avoid in enterprise AI.

“Our value add, the value add of Workday, what we are engineering here at Workday, is actually building AI systems that put nondeterministic AI on enterprise rails,” he said.

“So running them repeatedly, safely, securely governed, and basically engineering the hallucinations away through clean data and through safeguarding.”

How Sana from Workdays automates core tasks

Workday acquired Sana Labs in November 2025 for approximately $1.1 billion (£830 million). At the time, the company highlighted how Sana’s enterprise knowledge would help to build a horizontal layer across enterprises that connects data and workflows.

Joel Hellermark, SVP and GM of AI at Workday and founder and CEO at Sana, showed in a demo how Sana from Workday and Sana Enterprise can combine to improve enterprise productivity.

Hellermark showed how he could ask the Sana Notetaker agent to update a customer’s Salesforce entry based on a call he had with them the previous day.

The agent then draws on the transcript from the call, captured by the Sana Notetaker agent, and uses the relevant information to update the Salesforce entry in a single click by the user.

In another example, Hellermark asked Sana to create an expense report based on his inbox, with the agent then able to pull details such as his flight tickets, hotel stay, and team dinner and create a single ‘submit report’ button to send the document into Workday.

On top of the pre-built agents within Sana from Workday, businesses can create their own. Hellermark showed how managers can create custom workflows for an agent to follow each time a new employee is onboarded, for example.

He demonstrated how he could give a new colleague access to a tool simply by asking the agent to do so. In the same vein, he could ask Sana to draft an email to the new employee inquiring about her laptop preferences.

“The big difference between Sana’s connectors and some of these historical connectors that were more enterprise search-like, is that we built them for agents first,” explained Hellermark.

“So this means that we can do write actions and not just read actions into all of these enterprise applications.”

Hellermark added that with Workday’s decades of experience building out strict application permissions and security, paired with Sana’s architecture, agents can accurately capture the correct governance controls to handle enterprise data and only perform authorized actions.

AI replacing human work

Responding to a press question on the organizational value of AI, especially when it comes to HR automation, Bhusri stated that it’s one that “keeps me awake at night”.

“I do think a lot of low level HR work is going to get replaced by agents – there's no way around it,” he said.

‘What the industry needs to own, including Workday and you'll see more from us on this topic, [is] we have to figure out a way to to take care of the employees that are dislocated for no better word on because of AI, we have to come up with a plan for them.”

Bhusri added that Sana is automating manual work, letting businesses do what previously took weeks in minutes, and that while this has obvious value for businesses it will have to be paired with focused support for human roles.

“A big part of what Sana and Workday does with learning is retraining, and we've got to double down on the retraining side,” he added.

“I mean, I hope there's a world where AI is complementary to humans. We have to find a path to that.”

However, Bhusri called out recent claims that AI could replace SaaS applications as “misinformation”.

“There's this idea that AI is going to replace a lot of these applications with things like vibe coding, which I'm a technologist and I've been in this space for a long time, I just don't see that happening.”

Workday’s applications, which cover HR, finance, and payroll, are deterministic – they have a clear start and end point.

“You think about a payroll process: you launch the payroll process, you end the payroll process,” said Bhusri.

“You can't get it mostly right, you have to get it right every time. AI, for all of its power, is really a probabilistic and reasoning engine, and it will help to come up with solutions and answers on what step to take next.”

Bhusri explained that Workday sees AI as an additive technology to these deterministic business processes, rather than something that can or should replace them entirely.

“So the power is really bringing the deterministic enterprise applications like Workday, and our competitors, SAP, Oracle, are in a similar place, with probabilistic reasoning.”

Hellermark noted that although 100% of Sana’s software engineers now use Claude Code, with 80-90% of its code being AI-assisted, the firm is hiring as many software engineers as it can right now.

This “paradox”, he said, feeds into his hope that AI could drive workers to quickly reskill.

“So my hope is that this era will result in the return of the polymath, that will see a renaissance of sorts where people can very quickly upskill into new domains and will remove some of the sort of specialist needs, and people will increasingly become generalists.”

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Payroll and HR solutions provider Zellis has announced plans to acquire elementsuite in a move the firm said will expand the capabilities of its HR software offering.

The transaction, for which financial terms were not disclosed, will see elementsuite combined with Zellis’ own payroll and HR software to create an end-to-end, AI-powered platform.

Headquartered in Watford, elementsuite provides an AI-powered HR and workforce management (WFM) software suite designed to manage the full employee lifecycle.

Prominent fast food giants McDonald’s and Five Guys are listed as customers.

Subject to customary closing conditions, Zellis and elementsuite will now become one company in a move Zellis said will see both sets of customers gain access to new AI-powered software capabilities.

“We’re excited by the opportunity that this combination brings for new and existing customers of both elementsuite and Zellis,” commented Zellis CEO Abigail Vaughan.

“Bringing together the depth of talent across both businesses and combining the strength of elementsuite’s HR and AI capabilities with Zellis’ payroll, HR and AI capabilities will deliver even more value to our combined customers.”

Founded in 1963, Zellis specializes in the provision of payroll, HR, and managed services to customers across the UK and Ireland with more than 500 employees.

The firm itself has grown to become the largest provider of its kind in the UK, serving more than five million customers’ employees and over 60 million payslips every year.

Zellis eyes AI gains with latest acquisition

The elementsuite acquisition is Zellis’ latest move to expand its AI capabilities and follows the release of its HCM AIR solution, which is designed to enhance functionality and the employee experience, in June of last year.

Commenting on the move, Steve Elcock, CEO and founder of elementsuite, said Zellis’ standing will enable the firm to better meet the needs of the market.

“We are incredibly proud of the AI enabled HR suite we have developed in recent years and, with the support of Zellis, are looking forward to bringing the benefits of our technology to more businesses,” he said.

“Zellis’ leadership in payroll will further enhance our overall offering and will help us better meet market demand.”

Across all industries, the need to find and recruit high quality talent has reached a significant point. Skills shortages are arguably now the greatest barrier to growth for many organizations, which is why recruitment and retention is now an increasingly important priority for business leaders.

According to a PwC’s Workforce survey, 23% of UK workers expect to change jobs within the next twelve months, up from 18% in 2022. This suggests that the ‘Great Resignation’ is certainly not over, meaning it’s up to employers to entice prospective employees more than ever.

With organizations battling rivals to gain traction within finite talent pools, they are having to showcase to potential hires an enhanced level of employee experience – from benefits to well-being through to flexible working, training and career development opportunities. They’re also having to demonstrate how their organizational values and purpose align with an employee’s own drive and priorities.

It’s vital to recognize however, that technology – and in particular, applications and digital services – now sit at the heart of the recruitment process. Global research by Cisco AppDynamics finds that the average person now uses a total of six applications or digital services when looking for or applying for a new job – and this increases to eight in the U.S. and nine in India.

Today's job seekers use a wide range of different digital services – including jobs sites, social media, employer websites and employer review sites. And most are using these services daily so as HR leaders double down on their strategies to attract talent, they must ensure their applications and digital services – whether that’s careers pages on their websites or email and messaging services for candidates – are performing at an optimal level. Otherwise, they risk annoying and alienating potential hires.

Jobseekers have no time for employers that deliver poor digital experiences

With people now entirely reliant on digital services to find, research and apply for new jobs, their expectations for these services are now sky-high. 97% of jobseekers state it’s important the applications they use to find and apply for jobs provide a fast and seamless experience, without any delays or disruption. Additionally, 64% claim that if these applications fail to perform, it puts them off working for the potential employer.

For employers, this is a stark message – if their recruitment-focused applications and digital services suffer from disruption or downtime, they are jeopardizing their chances of attracting almost two-thirds of potential new hires.

People now want the same level of digital experience from their employer (or potential employer) as they get in every other area of their lives. They expect their experience when looking for and applying for a new job to match that when they’re streaming movies and music, ordering groceries, or connecting with friends online.

HR leaders need to recognize that people are no longer willing to accept second rate digital experiences just because applications and digital services are work-related. And they also need to be aware that people’s reactions when they encounter poorly performing applications are now incredibly strong. 73% of people admit that they would feel anxious and angry if the applications they were using to find and apply for a new job didn’t perform properly.

Employers can secure leading talent by optimizing application performance

The message from job seekers to potential employers is clear – they simply won’t put up with disruption or downtime when using jobs-related digital services. In fact, more than half claim that employers have only one shot to impress them with their digital services. There are no second chances.

This is why it’s so essential for HR leaders to work with their IT departments to ensure that they are providing potential hires with fast and seamless experiences at every stage of the recruitment process.

Currently, many organizations are struggling to manage application availability and performance within multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Technologists don’t have the unified visibility they need to get a clear line of sight on applications running across on-premises and cloud native environments and this makes it extremely difficult for them to identify and troubleshoot issues before they impact end users – whether that be customers, current employees or potential new recruits.

To mitigate this risk, organizations need to implement an observability solution which spans across both cloud native and on-premises environments and allows technologists to monitor the health of key business transactions distributed across their entire technology landscape. With real-time insights from the business transaction’s telemetry data, technologists can swiftly understand the root cause of issues and expedite resolution, so that applications are operating at peak performance at all times.

Significantly, the research shows that employers that can deliver seamless digital experiences can take a big step towards becoming an employer of choice for candidates. 78% of people claim that they would want to work for an employer that provides brilliant, seamless digital experiences throughout the recruitment process.

At a time when HR leaders are looking for any advantage, they can get over their rivals in the jobs market, this is a potentially game changing benefit. By focusing on digital experience throughout the recruitment process, employers can steal a march on the competition and attract the high-quality talent they need to grow.

When you’re setting up a business, you’ll no doubt have concerns about the costs involved. How much will payroll run to? What will the rent be on your business premises? What is my tax bill likely to be?

Once you start factoring in the costs of sourcing and running your technology stack, expenses can soon become unmanageable, particularly when soaring energy costs are making it harder to keep the office lights on.

Fortunately, there are plenty of free software options for small businesses out there, many of which will be more than enough for your needs before you even consider the paid tiers.

To help keep your business costs down, we've pulled together some of the best free software tools on the market, covering a range of use cases that most businesses will need from the get-go, whether that's business communications, productivity, or HR. They also provide some of the best Microsoft Office alternatives.

1. Slack

Best for business collaboration

www.slack.com

Whatever your industry, effective communication between your team members is almost certainly vital to the smooth running of your company.

Online communication tool Slack enables you to try its services for free for an unlimited period of time. If you choose this software, you can group your team messages according to channels, which enables those working on a particular project to communicate more effectively.

Under the terms of the free plan, you’ll have access to 10,000 of your team’s most recent messages. Other benefits include unlimited one-to-one voice and video calls for individuals, as well as 10 integrations with other apps such as Google Drive and Microsoft 365.

If you’d like access to a wider range of features, you can upgrade to one of the company’s paid plans, which offer services such as group video and voice calls.

2. Trello

Best for project management

www.trello.com

If you’re juggling numerous projects across your company, you could improve your efficiency with project management software Trello. Based on the Japanese model of Kanban management, Trello uses virtual boards that enable you to visualise your progress on key projects and then decide on your next steps. The most common analogy used to describe the software is a whiteboard covered in Post-It notes.

You can also assign tasks, establish timelines, create calendars, and view metrics. Once you’ve created a new task, every aspect of the task can be managed, tracked, and shared with other members of your team.

Another point in Trello’s favour is that the software has integrations with apps such as Confluence, Slack, Dropbox, and Evernote.

3. Wave

Best for business accounting

www.waveapps.com

For many small business owners, invoicing can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of the accounting process, Using the free version of Wave’s customisable software, you can create an unlimited number of invoices in any currency.

You can also view your transaction history with your customers, set up invoices reminders to email your customers when payment is due, and track sales tax. Another of the software’s most attractive features is the ability to set up recurring billing for repeat customers, which could drastically reduce the amount of time you spend chasing payments.

4. Skype

Best for videoconferencing

www.skype.com

With the rise of remote working, it’s essential that you choose the right video conferencing platform for your business’s needs. While a number of rivals have emerged in recent years, Skype’s free plan remains one of the most attractive on the market. As well as supporting one-to-one chats, the app enables you to hold group video calls with up to 100 participants.

A major advantage here is that you don’t need to download an app in order to use the service, and can do so through your browser.

5. Wix

Best for website building

www.wix.com

If your business requires a website (and in the digital age it almost certainly will), the free website-building tools offered by Wix may well come in handy. Operating through a simple drag-and-drop interface, the software enables you to add key elements to your site without any knowledge of coding, which makes the process far less demanding for beginners.

If you’re seeking a no-frills website, the company provides hundreds of design templates for free. Be aware however that the free version will automatically display ads for Wix on your company’s site.

6. LibreOffice

Best alternative to Microsoft Office

www.libreoffice.org

If you’re a fan of traditional Microsoft Office packages such as Word, Powerpoint, and Excel, but would rather avoid the price tag, LibreOffice offers an attractive, free alternative.

Its main services are Writer (word processing), Impress (presentations), Calc (spreadsheets), Base (database), and Draw (vector diagrams). As the successor to OpenOffice, LibreOffice is compatible with a range of document formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

7. Thunderbird

Best email platform

www.thunderbird.net

Whatever your organisation's size or industry, sending and receiving email is likely to be at the heart of your operation. Although arguably less well-known than some of its rivals, free email app Thunderbird is likely to offer all the features you need to manage email communications across your business.

Its main features include a mail account setup wizard, a quick filter toolbar, tabbed email, smart folders, and an add-ons manager. There is also a one-click address book feature, which enables you to add people to your contact list by clicking on an icon next to their name when they send you a message.

If you’re sharing large documents, you can also speed up the transfer by uploading these to an online storage provider and sharing the link.

8. Duplicati

Best business backup suite

www.duplicati.com

Open source backup software Duplicati enables you to back up files and folders through strong Advanced Encryption Standard/AES-256 encryption. It will also save space across your network with incremental backups and removal of duplicate data.

If you opt for Duplicati, you can run updates through the web-based interface or via the command line interface. The software is configured by a web interface that runs in any browser, and therefore can be accessed from anywhere.

Duplicati is compatible with Windows, MacOS, and Linux operating systems.

9. Mailchimp

Best email marketing platform

www.mailchimp.com

While the term “spamming” evokes a sense of dread in most legitimate business owners, email marketing can nevertheless be a key to the successful operation of many companies.

Mailchimp is an American marketing automation platform and email marketing service. Using the free version, you’ll have access to a number of features such as one-step automation, which will deliver messages to your customers depending on who they are and how they interact with your company.

This version enables you to send messages to a single audience of up to 2,000 contacts. Although this is likely to be sufficient for many small businesses, you can increase these figures by upgrading to one of the company’s paid plans.

10. Freshteam

Best HR management platform

www.freshworks.com

Smart HR software Freshteam offers services such as applicant tracking, onboarding, and time-off management. Free for up to 50 employees, the company’s Sprouts plan includes a dedicated recruitment team inbox, a basic careers site, and an employee directory.

If you’re unsure whether Freshteam is right for your business, or have questions over which plan to choose, the company offers a free demo of its services. The free plan is also available as iOS and Android mobile apps.