Is the move to agentic HR the “next evolution of cloud HR?” Aashna Kircher, head of HR products at Workday, uses this phrasing to make the often nebulous idea of AI agents more understandable. And this week, Workday gave it concrete form.
To answer that question, look at what the HR tech giant unveiled: The press got a first look at the fruits of its November 2025 acquisition of Sana, a Swedish AI company with the innovation to power what the software giant calls the “new front door of work.”
Workday’s new offerings
With Sana, Workday has wired its platform for action through agents that can write, execute and move work forward across enterprise systems, not just surface information. In a press release, industry analyst Josh Bersin called Workday’s integration with Sana “a major milestone in the market.”
In terms of the new announcement, there are two angles. Sana for Workday influences how HR and finance users interact with Workday. There is also Sana Enterprise, which scales the same conversational AI experience across the entire enterprise app ecosystem, beyond Workday and into other areas of the business tech stack.
Developments include agentic HR tools such as a self-service agent with 300-plus skills. Executives at Workday indicate that early adopters in a pilot program experienced a 25% case volume reduction from this shift to autonomous process execution.
Workday is offering agentic AI via flex credits, a consumption model execs say is based on outcomes, such as cases deflected or contracts analyzed, rather than subscriptions. All current Workday customers on existing terms get the AI innovation included.
This is what Kircher frames as end-to-end process transformation within “deterministic rails” that deliver governed technology based on Workday’s reliable data structure.
“We can provide transparency,” she told HR Executive during a call. “We can provide control and access that already maps to enterprise, workflows, data, security and auditability today. And then we can also apply the ability to execute.” This final element, the ability to execute, is the agentic factor, which adds the transactional layer.
A deeper look at HR leadership
HR’s purpose was always handling the human complexity work, including culture, skilling, talent navigation and helping people make sense of role changes. That work was often crowded out, not because HR didn’t value it, but because the operational weight was always louder and more urgent. Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product and technology, used a telling phrase for this: “work undone today.”
“Sana is the closest thing we have to a superintelligent co‑worker. It sees the full picture of your organization in Workday, it knows which systems to touch, and it can coordinate the steps between them,” said Joel Hellermark, senior vice president and general manager of AI, Workday, in a release. “Instead of dozens of tickets and handoffs, you ask for an outcome and Sana delivers it.”
So, what will the workforce think of a “superintelligent co-worker?” Here, the CHRO has a role to play. Undertaking an agentic approach ushers in a time of learning for many employees, says Kircher. Employees are expected to navigate cultural changes, role expansion and role definition changes. She says that the business leaders she talks to say those things are more important now than they’ve ever been before. “And HR plays a really, really key role in doing that.”
Kircher explains that agentic tools can boost culture and change missions, and “be a multiplier for HR,” to reach employees while driving engagement, behavior and learning.
‘Unbundling job architecture’
Workday also surfaced a fresh way of presenting these tools when addressing role and work redundancy. Kazmier said that Workday’s new agentic tools amplify workers’ strengths, allowing them to function as polymaths.
“On the other side, it compensates for your weakness by making sure that the things you don’t know, the things you don’t pay attention to, are actually happening for you in the background,” Kazmier said. “At a more fundamental level, what AI does is it’s basically unbundling the job architecture.”
HR leaders are likely to understand how complex this will be from an operational standpoint. Factors such as unbundled jobs, work being done in the background and rapid learning on how to feed and analyze the ins and outs of agents are part of a cultural storm for many organizations.
The more AI transforms work, the more employees need someone to help them make sense of it. That someone is HR, according to Kircher. She’s found that many HR leaders insist on remaining “human-centered in how they talk about and engage with their organizations.”
She says this is still a key part of the identity of human resources. “One thing I’ve observed recently is that the human-centricity of skilling, navigating culture and strategic talent decisions is more important now than ever.”
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