How Workday’s Sana Tool Can Improve AI Integration for HR

Workday has announced that Sana – its agentic workforce platform – has been made available to customers globally. 

Its capabilities span an AI interface, a self-service agent to automate HR and finance workflows and an enterprise system to deliver AI capabilities outside of the Workday platform. 

This development allows agents to find, orchestrate and automate workflows across day-to-day systems being used by employees.

Aneel Bhusri, co-founder, CEO and Chair of Workday, says: “AI only works in the enterprise when it's connected to trusted, deterministic systems, and that hybrid architecture is exactly what Workday is building. Sana is what brings it all together. 

“It's not just a new Workday experience – it's a powerful way for people to search, reason and orchestrate work across the enterprise.”

Measurable AI investment 

According to Workday, many organisations are not seeing measurable impacts on their AI investments, because agents, copilots and other AI tools are often disconnected from business workflows. 

Tools that are ‘bolted on’, says Workday, often fail to deliver enterprise-grade accuracy because they do not have access to the same level of data, business rules and compliance context as the systems they work with. 

This follows findings from McKinsey, which shows that only 1% of business leaders would call their companies AI strategy 'mature' – meaning that AI has been fully integrated into workflows to drive substantial business outcomes – despite 92% planning to increase their AI investments in the next three years. 

Workday says that capabilities from Sana allow users to gain instant, cited answers from company knowledge and Workday data, execute tasks across systems that are grounded in enterprise permissions, turn existing knowledge into ready-to-use documents and set up no-code workflows. 

These capabilities have been designed specifically for HR and finance tasks – as agents inherit the same controls that are trusted for sensitive HR and finance data to ensure accurate results that meet compliance standards. 

AI for HR

Workday has also developed AI designed to improve the hiring process. In particular, it has developed a Military Skills Mapper, which uses AI to analyse a candidate's background against specific job descriptions and identify transferable skills.

This can make military veteran candidates' qualifications clearer to hiring teams so they can better utilise new talent pools – as Workday finds that more than 200,000 service members are transitioning into civilian life each year.

Joe Wilson, Global Chief Technology Officer at Workday, who also serves in the US Air Force Reserve, says of the tool: “Veterans bring hard-earned skills – leadership, adaptability and teamwork – that don't always show up clearly in traditional hiring processes. 

“With the Military Skills Mapper, we're using Workday innovation to make those capabilities unmistakably visible to the organisations that need them most.”

Improving AI literacy

Research from Gartner recommends that HR leaders work closely with managers and other senior leaders across their organisation to ensure there are specific use cases for AI and help develop employee skills with the technology.

The study finds that while 46% of managers are experimenting with AI to improve their work, only 26% of employees say the same.

Carmen von Rohr, Senior Principal in the Gartner HR practice says of the research: “CHROs are under pressure to ensure effective workforce usage of AI tools, but they have overrelied on empowering employees to chart their own exploration of AI.”

“Thus far, HR has largely focused on empowering employees to explore, learn and innovate with AI and have overlooked the role of the manager in driving effective use of AI tools.”