Workday launches Sana ‘Superintelligence,’ aiming to move AI from suggestions to action 

Workday on Tuesday (March 17, 2026) announced the global rollout of Sana, a new suite of AI capabilities the company is describing as “superintelligence for work.” The launch signals a significant shift in the enterprise software landscape, moving away from passive “copilots” that offer suggestions toward autonomous agents capable of executing business tasks across multiple platforms.

Workday leadership argues that the current crop of AI tools often fails because they exist as “bolted-on” additions that sit outside of a company’s core security and data frameworks. Because these tools are disconnected from the actual rules and compliance contexts that run a business, they frequently lack the accuracy required for HR and finance operations — business functions that Workday is well known for.

Sana is designed to solve this by living directly inside Workday’s existing security and permissions model. This “hybrid architecture,” as co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri describes it, allows the AI to inherit the same trust and data privacy controls that companies already rely on for their most sensitive information. Mr. Bhusri noted that for AI to truly function in an enterprise setting, it must be connected to trusted, deterministic systems, positioning Sana as the primary engine for searching, reasoning, and orchestrating work.

The rollout is divided into three distinct offerings. First is Sana for Workday, a conversational interface that replaces traditional menus and navigation bars, effectively becoming the new way employees interact with the platform. This is paired with the Sana Self-Service Agent, which arrives with more than 300 pre-configured skills. This agent can handle everything from calculating remaining vacation time to updating home addresses and assessing the subsequent impact on tax forms and benefits.

Perhaps the most ambitious part of the release is Sana Enterprise. This version extends the AI’s reach beyond the Workday ecosystem, allowing it to act as a central nervous system for the entire office. Through a series of new connectors, Sana can now find, summarize, and act on data stored in external applications such as Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Outlook, Jira, and Google Drive. For an employee, this means they can ask Sana to find a document in SharePoint, check a teammate’s availability in Google Calendar, and schedule a meeting all within a single conversation.

Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday’s president of product and technology, emphasised that the goal is to make Sana “the last software you have to learn.” He noted that while many AI projects currently live in browser tabs and look impressive in demos, they often fail to change how daily work is actually executed. By embedding AI directly into the flow of work, Mr. Kazmaier believes the platform can transition from providing suggestions to taking meaningful action.

The practical applications of this technology are categorised into four core functions: finding cited answers from company knowledge, acting on tasks across systems, building custom dashboards and documents, and automating multi-step workflows without the need for coding.

In a departure from typical enterprise software pricing models, Workday is making Sana for Workday and the Self-Service Agent available to customers through “Flex Credits.” Instead of requiring an entirely new license or a separate paywall, customers will receive an allocation of these credits as part of their existing subscriptions, allowing them to begin using the AI tools immediately. Sana Enterprise is also available to customers using Workday’s Human Capital Management or Financial Management suites.