Enterprise software providers are rushing to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their platforms, and this is having a consequent impact on the technology executives buy and the roles professionals play.
Joining this maelstrom of AI-powered change is Workday, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) company. The company has recently made significant changes to stay competitive and adapt to the growing importance of AI in business operations, including the return of co-founder Aneel Bhusri as CEO and the introduction of Sana, Workday’s new unified AI interface.
So what do the changes envisioned by the tech giant mean for senior executives in human resources, finance, and other business functions, as well as the staff they oversee? Computer Weekly visited Workday’s EMEA headquarters in Dublin for an Innovation Media event to learn more about the company’s roadmap and the impact it will have on users.
Workday’s competitive position
The event revealed that the rapid AI-powered change enabled by Workday and other technology companies is just the beginning of a larger transformation.
While employees at most companies are starting to dabble in generative AI (GenAI) services, Kathy Pham, vice president of AI at Workday, says the large-scale language models (LLMs) that power these technologies have limited impact. These probabilistic LLMs are typically trained on information on the Internet rather than within a company’s firewall and do not have access to contextual financial records, customer details, or human resources information within the company.
“They are disconnected,” Pham said of these LLMs, adding that successful providers help customers achieve better outcomes through a deterministic approach to AI. This is where Workday comes into play. The company aims to create agents that leverage tangible enterprise data points through its next-generation services, such as Sana.
“We believe agents need a deep understanding of how work gets done,” says Pham. “And most importantly to me, this is where the right engineering comes into play, working with a great and responsible AI team that provides context across security, AI, systems, data, and integration processes. We bring all of this together as we build systems for our customers.”
“We believe agents need a deep understanding of how their work is done. This is where good engineering comes into play, combined with a great and responsible AI team that provides context across security, AI, systems, data, and integration processes. We bring all of this together when we build systems for our customers.”
Kathy Pham, Workday
Work on this shift has already begun. At the Rising conference in Barcelona in November 2025, senior executives from Workday explained the company’s desire to deliver an agent-based AI platform that disrupts traditional ERP services. Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday’s president of products and technology, described the platform as the “gateway to work” in his keynote address.
In Dublin, Pham said Workday will be the gateway to this work, using a deterministic approach. She says employees should be able to log into Workday and use the built-in agent service to ask questions in natural language about important issues, like regional pay differences, and receive personalized answers from corporate data sources.
Sana sits at the center of Workday’s deterministic approach to AI. Pierre Gousset, vice president of solutions at Workday, describes Sana as an intelligent entry point for accessing data and taking AI-powered actions. “It’s where organizations build, coordinate, and manage agents that can deliver work across areas such as human resources, finance, and IT,” he says.
“Sana gives you access to an AI that is not only powerful, but also has Workday’s deepest understanding of data, people, job structures, organizational structures, approval chains, and compensation limits. This gives you an unfair advantage that we don’t think other AIs can replicate.”
Workday is keen to position Sana as a game-changer in business-centric AI, but the platform shouldn’t be viewed in isolation from other enterprise applications. To that end, Gousset said integrating Sana with services from other providers will give Workday agents the best possible access to data that powers end-to-end process automation.
“Sana is designed to work with the broader enterprise ecosystem, and we do this through secure integrations with platforms like Salesforce, Databricks, Snowflake, Google, and Microsoft 365. We want to make this possible because we want people to use Sana not just to answer questions in Workday, but to trigger actions across all enterprise systems.”
Gousset detailed the four main features of Sana’s agents. Help experts act on this insight. Build output through dashboards, reports, and documents. Automate processes and create multi-step workflows. The final feature, workflow automation, he says, is about Sana moving from being an assistant to a system that collaborates with experts to perform tasks.
While this agent-driven transformation actually seems powerful, it’s important to remember that other providers are making similar transformations. And while embracing emerging technologies will enable professionals like Workday to create new data-driven services, the rise of AI also creates risks for software companies, particularly the potential for disintermediation.
“Our success will be built on the foundations established by the deterministic guardrails we have put in place. These foundations will help organizations successfully evolve into the world of AI.”
Claire Hickey, Workday
Some industry experts suggest that up to 35% of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools could be replaced by AI agents by 2030. In a one-on-one interview in Dublin, Computer Weekly asked Clare Hickie, Workday’s chief technology officer, whether disintermediation has caught the attention of executives.
“I understand why you asked the question, because it tells me what’s being said in the media right now, and it tells me some of the curiosities that might apply based on where we are in the world in this transition period from an AI standpoint,” she says. “But what I want to say, and this is no more than what we said at this event, is that AI is often probabilistic, which means it can make mistakes, but we operate through a deterministic application stack.”
Hickey says that in an uncertain world, CIOs will seek the degree of certainty that a trusted software provider can provide. She says this is where Workday shines, with a strong history of building services for leading companies in risk-averse sectors that need deterministic AI solutions to tough challenges.
“You can never go wrong with payments,” she says. “When it comes to financial results, audits, and compliance, we can’t be wrong, so our success will be built on the foundations established by the critical guardrails we put in place. These foundations will help organizations successfully evolve into the world of AI.”
new technology, new skills
The key to Workday becoming the “gateway to work” will be the extent to which CIOs and other buyers can leverage the company’s technology to support AI-powered workplace transformation.
At the event, Gusset demonstrated how Sana’s agents automate processes across the enterprise ecosystem, helping line-of-business employees manage tasks like onboarding new employees and reporting, and adding repeatable workflows like getting executive-level approvals.
“Think about how much time you save by not having to work across multiple systems. This is a new type of experience, where AI is the UI, replacing dozens of enterprise systems with a conversational experience that is more intuitive, but also more intelligent.”
Pierre Gusset, Workday
“Think about how much time you can save by not having to work across multiple systems,” he says. “This is a new type of experience where AI is the UI.” [user interface]And it will replace dozens of enterprise systems with a conversational experience that is both more intuitive and more intelligent. This capability allows companies to transform work. ”
Hickey said the fundamental purpose of these and other services is to ensure that agents do more than answer questions or summarize information. At Workday, we want to combine data and enterprise context to develop agents that make a big difference in workplace productivity.
“Context means agents understand skills, decision lines, authorizations, security, and really where the friction points are,” she says. “And that context is what allows us to deliver 100% positive outcomes, but equally, more importantly, that layer of productivity that we really need, especially around AI and agents.”
Examples discussed at the event included Recruiting Agent, which allows recruiters to break their reliance on manual processes and spend less time filling roles and more time finding talent. Another example is Workday’s Payroll Agent. It brings together data and context to create a service that helps staff spend less time on compliance-focused tasks.
“This feature is just the starting point for Workday,” says Hickie. “How these agents are delivered is determined by the depth and breadth of the levels. It’s not necessarily about the single role that an agent explicitly performs. Many of these agents will be able to complete end-to-end workflows.”
This higher degree of automation raises important questions about the future of work, not only for the professionals performing these tasks, but also for the companies like Workday that are enabling workplace transformation. Workday CEO Bhusri acknowledged the scale of the change at a press conference in March.
“Sometimes what keeps me up at night is that low-level HR functions are being replaced by agents. There’s no getting around that. And what the industry, including Workday, needs to figure out is that they have to find a way to take care of the employees who leave.”
“Our team has worked with the United States, at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level, and with the European Commission, so the policy response to the issue is critical. [around AI-enabled disruption] That is our top priority.”
Chandler Morse, Workday
In Dublin, Workday CEO Chandler Morse acknowledged concerns about AI disruption. He said Workday is urging lawmakers to consider incentives for employers to reskill.
“Our team has worked both at the US, federal, state and local levels and at the European Commission, so policy responses to these issues are a top priority for us,” he says.
Beyond policy, Mr. Bhusri suggested at a press conference in March that Sana itself could offer a potential solution to the intractable challenge of employee turnover, automating low-level manual tasks and helping employees reskill in the new skills they need. Gusset told Dulin that Workday views agents as an extension of the company’s employees.
“Agents don’t replace humans,” he says. “Most agents work in conjunction with humans to accomplish specific tasks, so we need to be able to define not only technically but also organizationally which parts of the process are jointly managed by humans and agents.”
Here, he pointed to Workday’s agent record system. This tool helps organizations consider the privileges and skills needed for agents and humans in AI-powered workplace transformation. “In reality, it’s about building a framework that allows companies to incrementally rethink their processes alongside AI.”
What’s clear, Hickey said, is that the pace of change will only continue to accelerate. Yes, Workday technology is driving workplace transformation, but the company also wants to help employees and their managers embrace the new roles and skills needed in the AI era.
“Our technology is helping other companies manage that change from a development perspective,” she says. “We are looking at where the skills gaps are in the roles that are starting to be defined, and we want to help individuals train, learn and grow within their current roles. We are truly moving into this moment of change.”
