“Today, work is actually more complex than it should be,” said Pierre Gousset, VP for solutions at Workday. “[There are] too many systems to navigate for end users, too much toggling between tools and too much time figuring out how to get the work done instead of actually doing it. It’s because when intelligence is scattered across multiple systems that are disjointed, the intelligence cannot really activate in the flow of work.

“And that’s what changes with Sana. Think of Sana as the unified AI platform for work that’s the intelligent entry point that makes everything else in the platform accessible and actionable.” Gousset said the platform’s AI operates within Workday’s deep understanding of enterprise data, including people, job architecture, organisational structures, approval chains, and compensation. “This gives us an unfair advantage that no other AI, we think, can replicate.

If you integrate Sana with the rest of your enterprise applications, then it gives your agents the best possible context and access to deliver work end to end.” Sana includes a conversational interface within Workday, a self-service agent for HR and finance tasks, and an enterprise layer that connects to external systems. The platform can connect to applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, and SharePoint, allowing workflows to be executed across systems from a single interface. According to Workday, the system brings together four core capabilities: Find: Gives instant, cited answers from company knowledge and Workday data.

For example, an employee can ask, “How many vacation days do I have left?” or “What’s the current contract value of Acme Inc?” and get a clear answer in seconds. Act: Executes tasks across connected systems, grounded in enterprise permissions. For example, an employee can ask, “Update my home address and show how this affects my tax forms and benefits” or “Update the Acme Inc contract value to $431K.” Build: Turns knowledge into ready‑to‑use dashboards, summaries, and documents.

For example, a manager can ask, “Generate a dashboard showing pipeline stage and interview feedback from Workday Recruiting.” Automate: Sets up no-code, multi‑step workflows so agents can run work behind the scenes. For example, an employee can ask, “Set up a monthly workflow to review my email inbox for receipts, check them against policy, and send me a report to approve before submitting.” In a series of examples, Gousset demonstrated how Sana operates. The system was used to check a user’s paid time off balance, extract deal details from a Microsoft Teams meeting transcript to update Salesforce, and generate an expense report by scanning a user’s inbox.

In the final step, that process was converted into a recurring workflow that could run automatically each month, illustrating the shift from one-off tasks to ongoing automation. He likened the catalogue of reusable workflows to an app store for workflows in Sana, where organisations can browse, reuse, and adapt flows such as employee pre-boarding. “This is where Sana moves from being an assistant to being a system that can truly execute work with you,” he said.

“I’ve saved a lot of time, hours and hours across multiple systems. And this is the new type of experience, where AI is the user interface, where you replace thousands of different systems with a conversational experience that is a lot more intuitive, but also intelligent. “And here you see how the power of Sana enterprise is unleashed, that you can not only answer questions and get contextual answers, but you can truly execute work end to end that is grounded in your context, across your teams, across your processes, across the tools that you are using.

And this is how you are going to start transforming HR and finance.” * Jason Bannier is a data analyst at World Wide Worx and deputy editor of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Bluesky at @jas2bann.