Workday Rising 2026: Sana Works Across Your Stack. Your Organization Model Decides How Far.

What happened

Workday Rising 2026 runs October 12–15 in Las Vegas. Agentic HR and agentic finance are the headline themes, with more than 400 sessions and dedicated tracks for HR, finance and IT (Workday).

The centerpiece is Sana, which Workday calls "the agentic experience across all of Workday." It comes in three versions: Sana for HR, Sana for Finance, and Sana for IT, which is built to deploy agents across the enterprise (Workday Rising). Launched in March, Sana finds answers, acts, builds and automates workflows. It inherits Workday's security model, permissions and audit controls, and it connects to systems including Salesforce, ServiceNow, SharePoint and Slack (Workday Newsroom). Workday has also introduced an Agent System of Record and an Agent Gateway, which govern Workday and third-party agents with identities, owners, role-based permissions and audit trails (The Relay).

Why platforms are implemented vertically but work runs horizontally

In most organizations, HR selected and implemented Workday for HR's own processes. Security groups, supervisory organizations and business process policies were configured to run hiring, compensation and absence, and they do that well. Finance chose its ERP, sales chose its CRM, and IT chose its service platform, each on its own timeline.

With Sana for Finance and Sana for IT, those same HR-built definitions now govern work far beyond HR:

• an access request in ServiceNow
• a spend approval in the ERP
• a quote approval in Salesforce

The work runs across all of these systems. This is the point where Workday's configuration becomes the company's operating model.

What it means for operators

Security configuration is now AI configuration. Because Sana inherits Workday permissions, the way security groups and business process policies are designed determines what agents can do. Many were set up at implementation for HR's needs. Reviewing them for enterprise-wide use is one of the most valuable steps a Workday customer can take this year.

One employment event, many agent consumers. As Hire to Retire Runs on One Event explains, a hire, transfer or termination should be recorded once and inherited everywhere. That now includes Sana's connectors and every agent that relies on role and reporting line. When the event is recorded once, every agent works from the same version of the organization.

Agents join the organization chart. The Agent System of Record gives each agent an identity, an owner, role-based permissions, an audit trail and cost tracking, much as Workday already manages workers. Organizations that also run SAP will have the SAP AI Agent Hub. Deciding which registry is the authority for which agents, and aligning both on the same role model, lets the two work together.

Decision rights come before configuration. When approval chains are written as decision rights by role, as Global HRIS Modernization Done Right recommends, agents can follow them consistently across countries, entities and systems.

Where the value is realized

Three moves put an organization in position to use what Rising announces, and to get more from every platform around Workday:

1. Audit security groups and approval chains against the decisions you want agents to take outside HR. Start with spend approvals, system access and headcount changes.
2. Trace one hire and one termination through every system Sana can reach. Make Workday the single source for each fact that gets re-entered along the way.
3. Define agent governance across vendors: one registry of record for each class of agent, a named owner for every agent, and one role model shared by Workday and the ERP.

Done once, this groundwork lets Sana for HR, Finance and IT build on a single foundation. It also turns an HR investment into the organizational backbone for enterprise AI.