The Workday-Sana deal is the biggest shift I've seen since Recruiting. Here's what nobody's saying.

Andy Maren — April, 29 2026

Josh Bersin nailed the analysis on the Workday-Sana acquisition. If you haven't read his take, go find it — it's worth your time.

But there's something I haven't seen anyone say yet. And I've spent a decade implementing Workday, so I want to say it clearly.

AI agents are about to make half of your Workday configuration obsolete. Not in five years. Now.

What this acquisition actually signals

Sana isn't just a learning platform. It's an AI-native system built around the premise that knowledge work — including training, skill development, and content delivery — should be automated, personalized, and agentic. Workday didn't buy Sana for its content library. They bought it for its architecture and its AI approach.

This is Workday making a bet on what the platform looks like in three to five years: not a system that HR professionals configure, but a system that agents operate.

That's a fundamentally different product than what most Workday customers are running today.

The part nobody's talking about

The teams still manually configuring business processes? They're going to struggle.

The teams learning how to train agents to do that work? They're going to win.

I know that sounds stark. But I've been close enough to enough Workday implementations to know how much time gets spent on configuration work that is, at its core, rule-based logic application. That's precisely the category of work that AI agents are getting very good at, very quickly.

Workday isn't just adding AI features. They are rethinking the entire platform architecture. The Sana acquisition is one of the clearest signals yet that this is where they are actually going — not as a roadmap item, but as a strategic commitment.

The part that worries me

Most organizations aren't ready for this.

They're still cleaning up data from implementations that went live three years ago. They have field-level customizations that were built around workarounds that nobody documented. They have business process configurations that were set up by consultants who are no longer around and that nobody fully understands.

AI agents need clean data. They need coherent process logic. They need a Workday instance that was built with intentionality and maintained with discipline.

If your Workday instance is a mess — and a lot of them are, through no fault of the teams running them — this wave is going to be harder to ride than the vendor demos suggest.

What I'd be doing if I were in an HR ops or Workday admin role right now

Get ahead of your data quality. I know that sounds unglamorous. But the organizations that will deploy agentic AI in Workday effectively are the ones that have clean, consistent data as the foundation. That's the work that matters most right now, and it's almost never the headline.

Understand what you actually have configured and why. Document it if it isn't documented. Know which business processes are supporting real requirements and which ones are historical artifacts that could be simplified.

Get curious about what AI-native configuration looks like. It's not far away. The consultants and admins who are learning this now will be worth more than the ones who wait.

I'm genuinely curious what other Workday people are thinking about this. Excited? Nervous? Both at the same time, which is where I land?

Come find me on LinkedIn. I want to hear from you.

Update your curiosity.

— Andy

Andy Maren is the founder of Trailhouse Solutions, an advisory firm for HR and payroll leaders navigating the shift to agentic AI and modern HR technology. She has spent a decade implementing Workday across payroll, absence, and time tracking.