Workday is building AI into the platform itself: Workday Illuminate agents across HR, payroll and finance, Sana as one place to ask for work in plain language, and AI inside Workday Adaptive Planning. We help you decide what to switch on, prepare the data and security, and build what Workday does not provide.
We look at where time goes in close, planning, payroll and HR service, and match it to Workday AI that is available today or announced.
We check data quality, security roles and approval steps, so agents act inside the same rules as people.
We switch on and configure Workday AI, build what is missing on Workday Extend or Workday Build, and measure the result against the baseline.
Workday AI is no longer a single feature. Workday Illuminate is the name for AI across the platform, and it includes agents that do defined pieces of work inside business processes. Workday lists agents for areas such as financial audit, payroll, recruiting, talent mobility and business process optimisation, and has announced further finance agents for financial close, cost and profitability, and continuous financial testing.
Sana is the newest layer. Workday describes Sana as its agentic experience and orchestration engine: a user asks for something in plain language, and Sana checks permissions, policies and approvals before coordinating the agents that do the work. Sana is available as the Workday home screen, which administrators can choose to switch on, and Workday is bringing it into Microsoft Teams, Slack, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini Enterprise and Claude, without giving those tools raw access to Workday data.
For FP&A, Workday lists several AI capabilities in Workday Adaptive Planning. Adaptive Decision Intelligence supports decisions such as pricing or acquisition scenarios with governance and traceability. Variance Analysis flags material variances and explains them in plain language, with drill-down to the underlying transactions. Predictive Forecasting builds forecasts from internal and external data and tracks accuracy. Workday also lists a Model Context Protocol server that connects external language models, such as Claude or ChatGPT, to Workday Adaptive Planning.
These features work best on a clean model. Levels, accounts and versions that are hard to explain to a person are just as hard for AI. That is why we often start with the model itself before switching AI on.
Workday treats agents much like workers. Its Agent System of Record is designed to onboard and manage AI agents, assign roles, set data access, control actions and track performance. Agent Gateway connects agents from Workday and its partners using shared protocols, the Model Context Protocol and the Agent-to-Agent protocol.
In practice this means AI design is also security design. We map which agent can read which data, which actions need human approval, and how every step is logged, so finance, HR and audit teams can trust what the agents do.
When Workday does not provide what you need, it can often be built inside Workday. Workday Extend supports custom applications on the Workday platform. Workday Build brings together developer tools, Agent Gateway APIs and data access for AI solutions, and includes the Flowise agent builder, a low-code tool for designing agents. Building inside Workday keeps the result under Workday security instead of copying data to another system.
No. The AI features in Workday Adaptive Planning work on the data in your planning model. Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM add more connected data, which usually improves the results.
Workday designs agents to work within roles, permissions and approvals, and Sana does not give outside AI tools raw access to Workday data. The setup still matters, so we review roles and approvals before any agent goes live.
Yes, through governed routes such as Workday APIs, Agent Gateway and the MCP server for Workday Adaptive Planning, with clear rules on what is read, written and logged.
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