Building on 21 years as one of the world’s top enterprise-apps and platform companies, Workday made it unmistakably clear at its annual Rising customer conference that the future is all about agentic AI, the power of unified data, and wide-open customer choice on model deployment.
While Workday has been an ambitious proponent of AI for the past dozen or so years, the company’s unambiguous shift to AI-first and AI-everywhere took off with three major steps during a 12-month stretch from February 2025 through February 2026:
- In February 2025, Workday recruited Gerrit Kazmaier from Google Cloud as president of products and technology;
- In September 2025, Workday acquired AI powerhouse Sana and CEO wunderkind Joel Hellermark for $1.1 billion; and
- In February 2026, Workday announced that cofounder and former CEO Aneel Bhusri would return as CEO to lead the company’s AI transformation.
Against that backdrop, the company’s agentic-AI blitz at this week’s Rising event in Las Vegas serves as the powerful transition for a company with a massive presence in the Fortune 500, a superb unified data repository, high level of trust among customers, and an annualized revenue run rate of $10 billion.
And in addition to the launch of its own agentic solutions, Workday also made a huge move by forging a strategic partnership with high-flying Anthropic to connect via MCP Claude’s frontier reasoning to Workday’s Sana agents as well as its HR data, finance data, and business rules.
Here are 6 big steps into the agentic-AI future taken by Workday at Rising:
1. New Workday Home: Sana orchestrates agentic work in response to natural-language requests, and also adapts to user preferences with Sana Wherever You Work, which “extends Sana into external AI tools and platforms employees already use, including Claude, Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot and Teams, and Slack.”
2. Autopilot Agents leapfrog copilots: In launching four new Autopilot agents, Kazmaier said, “Probabilistic AI is great at guessing, but in payroll and finance, a good guess isn’t good enough. Our agents can work in the background because they follow the same policies, permissions, and approvals that already run the business. That’s what lets them go beyond making suggestions to anticipate, advise, and act autonomously.”
And then chief AI officer Hellermark described the shift to the autopilot terminology: “Until now, AI has worked like a copilot – helpful, but only when you ask it something. That’s not enough anymore. Our agents work like autopilots – they get the work done on their own, and bring people in exactly when their judgment makes the difference.”
The four new agents are Talent Acquisition Agent, Accounting Agent, Payroll Agent, and Deployment Agent.
3. Helping customers create a blended workforce. Workday’s created headless technology for its Trusted Agent Platform so customers can “build, run, and govern custom AI agents with choice of model or framework under Workday’s permissions and audit trails.”
4. Workday Decision Intelligence is “an agentic HR and finance analyst that helps teams model scenarios using live data to compare workforce and financial trade-offs.”
5. To help business leaders determine where AI can have the biggest impact, Workday’s Work Intelligence agent outlines different scenarios and helps optimize workforce planning.
6. Acquiring “identify governance layer”: In an intersting blend of oversight for capital, humans, and agents, Workday says its acquisition of C1.ai will ensure that “every employee and agent using Workday can have the right access to the apps, data, and systems they need across their entire lifecycle.”
Final Thought
Across its entire history, Workday has had to slug it out in the marketplace with much larger competitors, and its aggressive agentic-AI launches, acquisitions, and partnerships are all intended to ensure it’s able to combine high levels of customer trust with its unique advanced technology to remain fully competitive with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and others.
Early this year when Bhusri returned as CEO, he said he wanted to accelerate product innovation and launches and rekindle within the company a startup culture and mentality. And at this week’s Rising, I believe Workday has taken some big steps in that direction.
