I'm Going to the Sana Summit. Here's My Pre-Commitment
Publishing this Wednesday so you can hold me to it Thursday.
tl;dr;
I got an invite to the Sana Summit on May 21. I'm going. The room will be Geoffrey Hinton, Tyler Cowen, Ethan Mollick, Aneel Bhusri, and somewhere in the back, me. Most of the recaps Friday will read like Davos liner notes. I'm publishing this before the event so I'm on the record about what I refuse to be impressed by (and what I'm actually watching for).
I had to read the email twice.
The Sana Summit. May 21. The New York Public Library. Geoffrey Hinton on the (virtual) stage. Tyler Cowen. Ethan Mollick. Sara Imari Walker. Aneel Bhusri.
And somewhere in the back of the room, me. A Sr. Manager from the basement of an HRIS team at a Fortune 10, holding what I assume will be a name badge in a font I cannot read.
I don't fully know why I got invited and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Maybe the newsletter. Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe the RUG. Maybe CVS is a big enough customer that at least one of us was going to end up there. Maybe someone in Workday's orbit reads this and decided the practitioner column deserved a chair. Probably some of all of that.
What I do know is what I'm bringing into the room.
The product story already shipped. In March, Sana for Workday went live worldwide. Sana Self-Service Agent. Sana Enterprise. All priced through Flex Credits. Bersin already wrote his big take. Sapient too. Twelve hundred customers are already registered on the Agent System of Record.
Thursday is not a roadmap event. It's a consecration. Workday is buying philosophical legitimacy by putting Aneel Bhusri on a stage with a Nobel laureate. Every vendor does this when they want to graduate from "enterprise software" to "intellectual authority on the future of work." The photos will be tasteful. The recaps will be reverent. The analyst class will spend a week quoting it.
Most of the room will be fine with that. I am going to take notes anyway.
So here it is. The pre-commitment.
Here's what I won't do.
I won't post selfies with Hinton. (Probably won't get close enough to anyway.)
I won't write a recap that opens with "what a privilege to be in the room with such brilliant minds." If you see that sentence in a newsletter Friday, the writer has been captured.
I won't let Tyler Cowen's productivity numbers sit unchallenged when they map poorly onto an actual Workday tenant.
I won't nod through the Aneel Bhusri keynote without asking the questions the keynote will not answer.
Here's what I will do.
I'll watch the gaps. What's not said about Flex Credit math when an agent pilot ramps to production. What's not said about the security model when Sana Enterprise reads and writes across Slack, Salesforce, SharePoint, and Box at the same time — all under the Workday security groups you've been meaning to clean up since 2022. What's not said about who owns the governance review the day an agent recommendation breaks comp equity six months after twenty people approved it by not questioning it.
I'll do my best to bring the basement into the room. Not loudly. Just in the questions I ask and the parts I choose to remember.
And Friday, when the consecration recaps are everywhere, I'll write back. From inside the room. Un-consecrated.
The cool kids' room is in midtown Manhattan Thursday afternoon. Surprisingly, I'll be there.
The actual work is in the basement, where it's always been. I'll be back there Friday.
— Mike
Practitioner Un-consecrated
The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.
P.S. Justin asked me what I was doing this week. I told him about the conference. He asked who was going. I told him Nobel winners, Wharton professors, and his Dad. He looked at me for a second and said, "Wait - they invited YOU?"
Same question I had, kid. Same question I had.