Solution Brief

Scale your business with Sana AI agents that know your business

Most organizations aren’t seeing a return on AI because tools are siloed, forcing teams to stitch insights together by hand adding cost and complexity without reducing the work. Leaders in HR, Finance, IT, and Legal need a partnership where human creativity is amplified by always‑on reasoning and scale. By grounding probabilistic AI in a deterministic business context, you can move beyond search and chat to automate end-to-end work and drive real outcomes.

Sana agents run inside Workday’s people and financial data, business processes, and security model, so they see the full picture of your workforce and your books so their recommendations are more accurate, more compliant, and more actionable than agents that sit on top of disconnected tools.

 

Today,  most teams handle contract reviews, payroll exceptions, or hiring spikes the same way: by adding headcount.

 

Workday’s agents change that equation. By uniting your people and financial data into a shared context, you can move toward continuous financial readiness, proactive workforce health monitoring, and a frictionless experience that evolves at the speed of your organization.

 

Workday’s approach to AI builds on this foundation, enabling agents to operate with the precision and trust required for mission‑critical operations.

 

  • Contract Negotiation Agent Leading enterprise solution provider serving more than 10,500 organizations worldwide (60%+ of the Fortune 500)
  • 3,700% financial ROI achieved
  • 148,000+ hours saved in one year by replacing manual review and analysis with precision AI and automated workflows

 

Discover how Workday integrates specialized agents and orchestration to bridge the impact gap with outcomes that are redefining the future of work.

 

Screenshot of an employee home screen in Workday, showing widgets with announcements, suggested action items, and the self-service agent feature.

How Sana works for your business

Most companies have invested in AI and are still waiting for it to pay off.

Sana is how Workday changes that - not as a chatbot you bolt on but as an experience embedded in the work itself.

By fully integrating Sana into the Workday ecosystem, we’ve moved beyond generic chat interfaces to a value‑centric approach that connects rich enterprise context with agentic reasoning. Every Sana‑powered decision is made with live insight into roles, permissions, policies, and financial impact.

 

The result is AI that scales across HR, Finance, IT, and Legal delivering a seamless, intuitive experience that operates within your existing governance and security frameworks.

 

Workday delivers enterprise-wide value through:

The Sana Platform

Serves as the technology foundation used to build differentiated AI solutions and orchestrate agents across the organization. It acts as the underlying engine that coordinates work between first and third party agents within a secure, unified framework.

Sana Agents:

Pre-built, domain-deep experts embedded directly into Workday products, such as HCM and Financials, to automate role-based processes. These agents leverage deep business context to drive real outcomes for specific functions like payroll, recruiting, and planning.

 

Self-Service Agent is modeled to deflect up to 75% of HR case volume, with a 30% reduction in time to resolve cases.

IT Transformation:

The conversational front door provides a simple interface to engage with agents and data, whether natively within Workday or across hundreds of external enterprise apps. Available in Core and Enterprise packages, these applications allow users to find information, take action, and automate complex workflows from a single intuitive surface.

 

In one large enterprise, this conversational experience reduced annual AskHR inquiries by 29%, from 35,000 to 25,000 cases.

screenshot of an employee home screen in Workday on a mobile device, featuring announcement bar, AI chat feature, and quick links to connected business apps.

Transforming HR, Finance, IT & Legal operations with Agents

Employees and managers lose hours every week hunting for answers and re‑entering data across systems just to get simple tasks done. Leaders need AI that can guide employees, complete steps, and only escalate when judgment is truly needed.

By shifting from manual processes to a team of agents, you automate work that once required human reasoning so people can focus on higher‑value decisions. Because these agents all run on the same Workday foundation, their hiring shortlists, pay insights, spend alerts, and audit findings stay in sync with your roles, policies, and financials as they change over time:

HR Transformation:Serves as the technology foundation used to build differentiated AI solutions and orchestrate agents across the organization. It acts as the underlying engine that coordinates work between first and third party agents within a secure, unified framework.

 

Recruiting Agent

46% reduction in candidate screening time and 70% reduction in manual recruiter reviews.

Finance Transformation:Move toward "lights-out" operations with a continuous financial close, prescriptive scenario modeling, and AI-driven spend governance that catches anomalies in real time.

 

Financial Test Suite

$283K duplicate payments reduced annually

IT Transformation:Quickly build and deploy custom agentic apps that inherit enterprise security and data models, while using automated support deflection to reduce ticket volumes.

 

BP Optimize Agent

22% average reduction in hours to complete end-to-end onboarding per employee

Legal Transformation:Review and process thousands of complex legal agreements in moments, extracting critical terms and redlining clauses in line with your playbooks, so legal decisions reflect both your risk appetite and the latest regulatory requirements.

 

Contract Negotiation Agent

65% faster pre-signature contract processing

Sana by Workday integrates with countless partner apps to streamline work.

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Connecting your entire ecosystem with universal agent orchestration

Growing expectations for AI adoption are placing immense pressure on leaders to deliver tangible business results across every department. To meet these demands without creating new silos, organizations need a single, open orchestration layer that extends beyond their core systems.

Sana Enterprise and Workday Everywhere provide universal connectivity, serving as a unified front door that integrates your agents with hundreds of external applications like Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft 365. This open ecosystem allows you to deploy innovation at a rapid pace, providing the flexibility to custom-tailor automated workflows that stretch across your entire technology stack.

 

To bridge this vision into reality, Workday standardizes connectivity across tools, data, and workflows. Agents can call each other and your external systems through a common integration fabric, rather than brittle point‑to‑point plumbing. This architecture ensures secure interoperability and fast agent deployment, allowing agents to operate harmoniously across your entire tech stack. By providing a consistent framework for integration, Workday enables organizations to leverage a diverse ecosystem of specialized capabilities.

Frontline Agent

Quickly fill shifts conversationally right where your workers are, finding the optimal replacement while balancing cost and well-being

90% reduction in time to find replacements, minimizing understaffed floor hours

10x less time spent annually (60k to 6k hours/year)

Securing your future with an AI workforce built on trust and outcomes

 

AI is most powerful when it can run work end‑to‑end while people stay in control of direction and judgment. In Workday, every agent is designed this way: automating the heavy lift of surfacing insights, proposing actions, and executing routine steps while keeping humans firmly in the loop for exceptions, approvals, and strategic decisions.

 

65% of organizations are piloting AI agents in their operations

 

What makes that safe to scale is the foundation underneath. Our agents inherit Workday’s unified people and financial data, security model, approvals, and audit trails. That means every recommendation and action is tied back to the same controls that already govern your payroll, close, and HR processes, not a separate system. Responsible AI isn’t a separate layer rather it’s built into how these agents are designed, deployed, and governed. From the Agent System of Record that manages identities and permissions to explainable outputs and full traceability, Workday imbues the confidence to push AI further without compromising on compliance or trust.

 

That’s why Workday’s AI isn’t just another assistant. It’s a decision engine built on the only system that already knows how your workforce and your finances truly run.

Agent System of Record

Central control over every agent.

Universal Identity

Treat Agents as “digital employees” with a unique identity, security profile, etc.

Inherited Permissions

Agents operate within your existing security groups and org hierarchy.

Unified Visibility

Track agent actions alongside human actions. See exactly what happened.

Flex Credits

Adopt AI on your terms, scaling usage as results come in.

Accelerate AI Innovation

Complimentary entitlement part of a Workday subscription.

Low Risk

No upfront commitment; only pay for what you use.

Transparent

Track and monitor agent usage and adoption.

Responsible AI

Enterprise‑grade guardrails built into every agent.

Maximize Your Investment

Maximize ROI through trusted user adoption.

Innovate with Confidence

Innovate faster without introducing unnecessary risk.

Reduce Compliance & Security Risk

Mitigate risk with a partner certified to the highest global standards.

Agents are at their best when they work alongside people, not instead of them. With Workday, you get a hybrid workforce where agents handle volume and complexity, while your people focus on judgment, relationships, and strategy. This is AI you can scale confidently across HR, Finance, IT, and Legal. The result is faster decisions, lower cost, and less risk all delivered through a simple, intuitive experience your employees will actually use.

Welcome to the new work day.

For more on enterprise-grade AI done right:

 

 
  • Find more AI resources on workday.com