Workday embeds Sana AI for HR inside Microsoft Copilot

Workday expanded the reach of its Sana AI self-service agent for HR into Microsoft Copilot.

Over the last few years, the company has built its core HR and finance functionality into Teams, Slack and other AI touchpoints its customers' employees use every day while also expanding the capabilities of its Sana agentic AI to automate tasks.

The company's overall plan is to deploy its technology -- and AI tools -- to meet employees where they work, rather than making them bounce from an employee portal to an email, chat or help desk ticket to answer routine questions, said Laila Almounaier, vice president of connected experiences at Workday.

"It's about, in this example, Copilot being able to securely hand off to our agent -- which executes the task in Workday -- using the customer's existing approvals, its policies, its processes -- and send those results back into Copilot so workers can stay in the tools they're using," Almounaier said.

The Sana self-service agent embedded in Copilot can answer plain-language questions about vacation balances, family leave and travel policies, file time-off requests, pull up pay statements and handle expense-report questions, among a host of other user-configured tasks. The agent also enables managers to initiate performance reviews and approve timesheets.

Back in the Workday platform, the agent applies user-configured workflows, data security, approvals and business rules to perform the various tasks.

"There's no margin for error when you're talking about this level of data," Almounaier said. "By bringing our self-service agent into Microsoft Copilot, we're not just answering questions -- we're safely executing the transactions that touch people and money on [guard]rails that customers already trust."

For IT staff, the Copilot integration is an app available in the Microsoft Marketplace and requires no separate logins, deployment or licensing.

Workday's Copilot integrations are the latest confirmation of a trend with many different enterprise IT vendors, said Holger Mueller, analyst at Constellation Research. Embedding Workday -- or anyone else's -- functionality in assistants like Copilot or collaboration apps such as Microsoft Teams or Salesforce's Slack hands over the interface to a third party.

But these large back-office app vendors are willing to make that tradeoff in the agentic AI era.

"At the end of the day, the customer pays the bills, and that means the customer has to win -- which happens when employees win," Mueller said. "It's a good thing to see Workday being available in Copilot. There's nothing to lose for Workday, as the employee is still a fully licensed Workday user."

Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with over 30 years of experience, specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.