Workday makes Sana its interface, launches Agent Harness, decision and work intelligence

Workday made Sana the front door for its platform, launched Agent Harness, which enables enterprises to build AI agents that can run in isolated environments for finance and human resources data, and outlined ambient agents and tools for decision and work intelligence.

The announcements were made at Workday Rising in Las Vegas. Workday is rolling out a set of AI agents to cover multiple processes and workflows.

Holger Mueller, Constellation Research analyst, summed up the Workday moves. "Workday has delivered on its goal to make Sana the entry point for all its users. With that move, Workday is the only vendor offering an all-purpose agentic interface to start their work – not just the work inside of the enterprise application," said Mueller. "On the packaged agent front Workday has delivered good automation with the 'always on' paradigm, as agents never sleep and don’t take days off. Workday has provided useful agentic automation for enterprise."

For Workday customers, the move to make Sana Home the starting point for work will be the most notable. Sana, acquired a little more than a year ago, is Workday's agentic AI layer that brings tasks, agent activity, meetings and other work into one personalized view. If a customer has Sana Enterprise, Sana Principal Agent orchestrates across agents and apps.

According to Workday, Sana reduces the need for searching and switching context, enables employees to focus and carries governance and controls across the platform. Sana Home is generally available for multiple Workday customers and priced under its Flex Credits consumption model.

Workday's Agent Harness is designed to enable AI agents to use HR and finance data securely. Workday said AI agents will be able to run in isolated environments with context across business processes and built-in memory. Workday also added that Agent Harness will give developers the ability to build custom agents with Workday's Developer Agent or frameworks like Google ADK and TypeScript.

Agent Harness can be used for Workday agents as well as third-party agents that run outside Agent Harness but access data over model context protocol with governance. Workday said Agent Harness is generally available and uses Flex Credits under a consumption-based model.

Workday also took steps toward always-on ambient agents that keep memory and can orchestrate workflows continually.

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The company launched Talent Acquisition Agent, which orchestrates talent acquisition workflows across Workday Recruiting, Paradox, HiredScore and skills data.

In addition, Talent Acquisition Agent flags requisition risk and surfaces candidate recommendations. Workday said the ambient agent is looking to provide a unified experience that's always-on and human governed.

Talent Acquisition Agent will be generally available in the first quarter of 2027.

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Here's a look at some of the other key developments at Workday Rising. The company announced:

• Workday Candidate Profile, a reusable, candidate-controlled profile that prefills 80% of the standards fields in job applications across Workday-hosted career sites. Candidates review, reuse and update information across applications. Workday said Workday Candidate Profile doesn't perform screening, ranking or decision-making about candidates. Workday Candidate Profile will be generally available in December 2026 and is on by default and included in Workday Recruiting subscriptions.
• Workday Decision Intelligence, a horizontal analytics and decision intelligence application that works across Workday's products, data and business context. Workday Decision Intelligence uses governed data, runs predictive scenarios and executes decisions across Planning, HCM and finance.
• Workday Work Intelligence, a catalog of work broken down by tasks. Work Intelligence is focused on task-level visibility to identify where work can be optimized, automated or augmented or stay with humans. The goal is to give enterprises a way to measure what work costs across humans and AI.
• There were multiple updates including Admin Agent, AI Localized Payroll, Agentic CLM, Compliance Intelligence, Data Cloud, Developer Agent, Sana Agent Builder and agents across multiple use cases.