Workday

Workday's agents act rather than only answer. Workday states they autonomously complete tasks and take action on behalf of employees and managers, handling everyday requests and multistep processes. Each agent carries multiple skills, some available out of the box and others customizable, managed at a granular level.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18

Sana, Workday's central agent experience layer, interprets user intent and coordinates multistep workflows across Workday native agents, orchestrating specialized agents behind the scenes, with actions routed through the Agent System of Record. Work is coordinated across several agents rather than run as a single task.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18

Agents answer from the customer's own material. Workday's HR agent answers routine questions from company policy and Workday data, and agents work on the customer's live HR, payroll and finance records. Answers change as the policy and data change rather than through retraining.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18

A person is brought in when a case needs one. Workday's HR agent routes cases that need a human to the right specialist, and Workday states its agents act with appropriate human oversight and visibility into their decisions. Requests can route into existing channels, and the escalation is carried by a shipped agent rather than left to the customer to build.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18

Workday's compliance page publishes a consolidated ISO 27001, 27017, 27018 and 27701 certificate, an ISO 42001 certificate, a SOC 3 report for Workday Enterprise Products, FedRAMP Moderate, IRAP, HIPAA and the EU Cloud Code of Conduct. The customer facing control on the agent layer is the Agent System of Record, which applies precise identity permissioning and data security uniformly to every agent, including third party agents.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/why-workday/trust/compliance.htmlread 2026-09-18

Every interaction through the Workday Agent Gateway, the secure hub for any agent using Workday data including third party agents, is managed and measured, so a customer knows exactly how its agents are working together. The Agent System of Record applies comprehensive observability uniformly across agents. What it measures is the agents' own behavior, at interaction level.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/agent-system-of-record.htmlread 2026-09-18

Sana carries a user's request through a conversation and coordinates agents within it, which is conversation state within a session. Workday's statements that its agents learn from experience describe absorbed learning, which is not a memory the customer can review. The HR and finance records agents draw on are the business record itself. No agent memory with a stated lifetime, or one that can be reviewed, edited, deleted or scoped by user, team or workspace, is documented.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18

Customers get a choice of deployment region. Running Workday on AWS lets customers choose a deployment region and deploy applications in a specific geography outside Workday operated data centers to meet data residency requirements. Workday states that core data for EU headquartered customers resides in European hosting locations in Belgium, Germany and Ireland.

Sourceworkday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/solution-brief/workday-aws-cloud-solution-brief.pdfread 2026-09-18

Workday ships a catalog of named Sana agents browsable on its site, among them an Accounting Agent, an Admin Agent, a Payroll Agent, an HR agent and a Developer Agent, with some capabilities available out of the box and others customizable. Each agent does its own job, so removing one leaves the rest whole.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18

Sana is a conversational entry point where users state what they need, and some agents are described as working ahead of a request, such as the Payroll Agent catching issues before payday. No event, schedule or monitoring configuration that starts an agent without a person asking is documented, so the autonomous side is asserted per agent rather than specified.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18

Which models run behind Sana agents and the Agent System of Record, and who chooses them, is not published on Workday's public pages. Its product documentation sits behind a customer login.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18

Outside tools can reach Workday's platform. Its Developer Agent brings Workday's data, APIs and more than 50 Build skills into the tools developers already use, so they build against Workday without switching context.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18

The Agent System of Record gives real time insight into how agents perform in the workforce so leaders can understand and optimize them, which is a live metric on operations. No way to test workflows with fixtures, mocks or datasets before production is documented, and neither is a pre release evaluation, scored test cases or a controlled optimization loop.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/agent-system-of-record.htmlread 2026-09-18

Workday's agents act on Workday's own HR, payroll and finance data through skills and Workday's APIs, and third party agents reach Workday through the Agent Gateway. No agent operating a browser or desktop interface is documented.

Sourceworkday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18