‘I hope there's a world where AI is is complementary to humans’: Workday CEO vows to support HR workers as Sana integration automates more processes than ever before

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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