Your Field Guide to Sana from Workday: The Agent Rundown
A practitioner's take on what shipped, what matters, and what you're going to have to explain to your VP.
tl;dr: Workday rebranded its Illuminate agents under the Sana umbrella in March 2026, the roster keeps growing, and the Agent System of Record underneath is doing more work than any single agent on the list. Here’s a practitioner’s rundown of what shipped, what’s worth piloting, and what’s mostly marketing. Caution: This is a long read. Go get some coffee. I’ll wait.
If you’ve been trying to keep up with Workday’s agent announcements over the past twelve months, I have some bad news and some good news.
Bad news: you’re going to need to learn a bunch of new product names. The “Illuminate” branding that Workday rolled out in 2024 is now mostly gone, replaced by “Sana from Workday” following the Sana acquisition that closed in November 2025. A bunch of agents that you might have read about under the Illuminate banner (”Illuminate Recruiting Agent,” for example) are now just “Recruiting Agent” inside the Sana umbrella.
Good news: the architecture underneath hasn’t really changed. The agents are still grounded in Workday data, still governed by the Agent System of Record, still inherit tenant security. The branding got a haircut. The plumbing is the same plumbing.
I’ve been saying this for a while now, and I’ll keep saying it: vendor AI branding has a shelf life of about nine months. The architecture is permanent. If you’re building your HR tech strategy around product names, you’re going to rebuild it three times a year. If you’re building it around data, governance, and workflow, you’re going to be fine.
With that framing, here’s the practitioner’s field guide to the current (April 2026) Workday agent lineup.
Before You Touch Anything: The UMSA
One thing Keith Bitikofer covered in his Philly RUG session that deserves to be front-loaded: if you want to use Workday Agents, you need to be on the UMSA. This replaces the old Innovation Services Agreement. It’s the gate. If your org is still on the MSA without the UMSA addendum, you’re not turning on agents yet. Check with your CSM before you plan anything else.
Start With the Platform, Not the Agents
Before we get into the roster, this is the part most agent write-ups skip. And it’s the part that actually matters.
Workday Agent System of Record (ASOR) is the control plane. Every Workday-built agent, and increasingly every third-party agent that wants to play nicely, registers here. ASOR is where you manage what the agent can see, what it can do, who can invoke it, and what data it’s allowed to touch. It’s the governance layer for your entire agent fleet.
ASOR is also the attestation layer. It’s the ledger that records where each agent came from, what version of the logic is running, which skills are enabled, and which humans are accountable for it. “We don’t know what agents are running in our tenant” is how you end up in a regulatory filing. ASOR exists so that sentence never gets spoken out loud in your company.
You access ASOR through the Agent Management Hub, which includes an Agent Registry, a view for Unregistered Workday Agents (yes, that’s a real section, and yes, you should check it), and links out to the Agent Marketplace. Third-party agents from Microsoft, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and partner ecosystems can register into ASOR using shared protocols including MCP and Agent-to-Agent (A2A). ASOR is becoming the universal control plane for agents, whether they were built in Workday or not. That’s a much bigger story than any individual agent on the roster.
If your HR tech team is going to care about exactly one Workday AI thing this year, care about this: an unmanaged agent in your tenant is a risk. A managed agent with a clear skill inventory, audit trail, identity, and permission model is a tool. ASOR is what moves you from the first thing to the second. Justin figured this out the hard way when I gave him unsupervised access to YouTube. Same concept, much higher stakes.
Workday Build is the platform for creating your own custom AI solutions inside Workday. This is Workday’s answer to “we want to build our own agents too,” which, if you read my last post, you know I have a few feelings about. Build is more structured and involves real developer workflows. The same rule applies: if no human on your team understands what the custom agent actually does, you don’t have an asset. You have a liability with a friendly UI.
Sana Agent Builder Pro (formerly called Flowise Agent Builder, if you’ve seen that name floating around) is the no-code/low-code tool for creating custom agents. It’s Build’s friendlier cousin, aimed at configurators rather than developers.
Flex Credits is the pricing model for all of this. We’ll come back to this one in detail, because it deserves more than a sentence. It deserves its own section.
The Front Door
These two are the agents your employees will actually touch. Everything else happens behind the scenes.
Sana for Workday
What it is: the new AI-native interface for Workday itself. Ask it questions, run transactions, get reports, navigate workflows, all in natural language. Replaces a lot of the classic Workday UI for users who prefer to chat rather than click.
My take: this is the most important shift in the Workday user experience since the 2016 redesign. For power users, it’s a convenience. For casual users (managers, frontline employees, anyone who uses Workday three times a year and forgets where everything is), it’s the difference between getting something done and filing a ticket. If you’re on a Workday tenant today, your employees are going to expect this within 18 months. Plan the change management now.
Watch out for: the security model still applies. Sana can only surface what the user’s permissions allow. This is a feature, not a bug, but it means “why can’t Sana show me my team’s salaries?” is going to be a recurring support ticket (depending on your security setup. I've seen some doozies, including several where manager didn't have access to pay info!). Get your comms ready.
One more thing Keith flagged in his RUG session that stopped me cold: Sana user access is managed separately from Workday. Your existing Workday security model does not automatically carry over. If you’re expecting seamless permission inheritance, you’re going to be surprised. Budget time for a separate access management workstream before you roll this out.
Sana Self-Service Agent
What it is: the workhorse. Ships with 300+ skills out of the box, covering the standard HR and finance self-service requests: address changes, PTO balances, benefit elections, expense inquiries, all the greatest hits.
My take: this is the agent that will replace the most tickets, and therefore the agent with the clearest ROI story. It’s also the one your Tier 1 HR support team is going to have feelings about. Have that conversation early.
Watch out for: “300+ skills” sounds impressive. In practice, the skills vary in maturity. Test the ones specific to your workflows before assuming they all work the way the demo works. And per Keith: you can’t use Proxy to test Agents or Sana Core. If Proxy is part of your standard testing workflow (and for most admins it is), you’re going to need to rethink how you validate before you go live. Plan for that extra testing time now.
The Talent Stack
These are the agents aimed at the recruiting, mobility, and frontline parts of the employee lifecycle.
Recruiting Agent
What it is: AI assistance across the recruiting workflow. Sourcing, screening, candidate communication, interview scheduling, the usual suspects.
My take: this is where Workday’s Hiredscore acquisition comes home to roost. The agent is meaningfully better than Workday’s pre-Hiredscore recruiting AI was (umm, crappy keyword matching ain't AI, Mr. Mobley). If your TA team still thinks of Workday Recruiting as a glorified ATS, this is the year that assumption may actually break.
Watch out for: the boundary between this agent and Paradox (which Workday also owns via partnership) is not always obvious. Ask your CSM which use cases go where. Also: the pricing on this agent has teeth. We’ll get to it.
Talent Mobility Agent
What it is: personalized internal matching. Surfaces roles, gigs, and projects for employees based on skills, goals, and history. Helps managers and recruiters find internal candidates.
My take: the use case is great. The execution depends almost entirely on your skills data. If your tenant’s skills model is thin or inconsistent (and let’s be honest, whose isn’t), this agent is going to surface noise. Invest in the skills data first, turn on the agent second. Also: the pricing on this one has teeth too.
Candidate Sourcing Agent
What it is: proactive identification of contingent talent for open needs. Aimed at procurement-adjacent hiring.
My take: niche but valuable for companies with large contingent workforces. If your contingent spend is significant, worth a look. If not, skip it for now.
Frontline Agent
What it is: self-service and workflow automation purpose-built for frontline workers. Shift questions, schedule swaps, benefits queries, the stuff hourly employees actually need.
My take: the most undervalued agent on the list. Frontline workers have been the stepchild of HR tech for two decades. An agent that actually works on a phone, in a break room, in 90 seconds, is a real unlock. If you’re in retail, hospitality, healthcare, logistics, or manufacturing, this one is worth a hard look.
The Operations Layer
These are the agents that live in the back office. Your employees will probably never see them. Your ops teams will.
Payroll Agent
What it is: automates payroll processing tasks, improves data quality, reduces manual reconciliation.
My take: payroll is the most conservative corner of HR tech for very good reasons (if you get payroll wrong, everyone notices). This agent is not going to replace your payroll analyst. It might eliminate 20% of the boring work that currently fills their day. That’s the right bar.
Watch out for: don’t let anyone pitch this as a headcount play. It isn’t. It’s a quality and cycle-time play.
Business Process Optimize Agent
What it is: analyzes your tenant’s business processes and recommends improvements. Think of it as a Workday-native process mining tool with opinions.
My take: potentially the sleeper hit. Every Workday tenant I’ve ever seen has business processes that have been amended, patched, and condition-ruled into Rube Goldberg machines. An agent that can spot the redundant approval step, the orphaned notification, the condition rule nobody remembers writing, is doing real work.
Watch out for: recommendations are only as good as your willingness to act on them. If your governance process requires six signatures to change a BP, the agent is going to produce insights that die in committee.
Deployment Agent
What it is: an AI assistant specifically for Workday administrators and implementers. Ask it anything about Workday configuration, troubleshooting, calculated field logic, business objects, you name it. Sourced from the Admin Guide, User Guide, Community Accepted Answers, release notes, and configuration documentation.
My take: this one should have been higher in the article. For the people reading this newsletter, it’s the most immediately useful agent on the list. 120,000 questions answered in February 2026 alone, with 49% request growth from January to February. Those aren’t vanity metrics. That’s a signal that admins are actually using it.
The Workday-cited stat is a 20-25% time reduction in research and troubleshooting. Based on how much time I’ve personally watched admins spend digging through Community threads for an answer that should have been findable in five minutes, I believe it.
One more thing, and this matters: as of the 2026R1 release, the Deployment Agent is available in your Customer Central tenant, does not require the UMSA, and does not consume Flex Credits. It’s free to run today. Which is a good segue.
The Finance-Adjacent
I’m not going to dwell here because this newsletter is for HR tech practitioners, but for completeness: Contract Intelligence Agent, Contract Negotiation Agent, Financial Audit Agent, Planning Agent, Revenue Contract Agent, and Supplier Contract Agent all exist, are either GA or in early adopter status, and live on the Finance side of the house. If your role straddles HR and Finance, worth a conversation with your Finance counterparts about what they’re piloting. Also, hold onto the Contract Negotiation Agent name. We’re coming back to it.
The Cross-App Extension
Sana Enterprise
What it is: the piece that extends Sana agents beyond Workday itself. Connects to Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, SharePoint, and other enterprise systems. Lets the agents find, orchestrate, and complete work across applications, not just inside Workday.
My take: this is the most ambitious piece of the March 2026 announcement, and the one most likely to get messy in the wild. The pitch is seductive: one agent, all your systems, completes the work. The reality is that every enterprise integration has its own quirks, its own permission model, and its own “hmm, that used to work” failure mode.
If you’re going to pilot Sana Enterprise, pilot narrowly. Pick one or two systems, not five. Prove the pattern before scaling it.
Watch out for: data residency. When a user in Frankfurt asks Sana Enterprise to “summarize the last five emails about this candidate,” where exactly does that summarization happen, and across which legal jurisdictions does the data travel? Global HR tech leaders have spent a decade carefully building tenant architectures that respect EU, APAC, and Latin American data boundaries. Cross-app agents have the potential to undo that work in a single well-meaning prompt. Get your Legal and Privacy teams in the room before you pilot this one, not after.
Also worth flagging: this is where the conversation with Microsoft (Copilot), ServiceNow (NowAssist), and Salesforce (Agentforce) gets interesting. All of them want to be the “front door” for work. Your IT architecture review board is about to have a lot of meetings.
Flex Credits:The Math Nobody's Modeling
Time to do the math.
Keith Bitikofer put a slide up at the Philly RUG session with a figure that got the room’s attention: “$50-75 per run of the Agent??” Double question marks and everything. When I first saw it, I figured the number was a rumor, or an early estimate that hadn’t been fully vetted.
It’s not a rumor. It’s on the rate card.
The Workday Flex Credits Rate Card v262, last updated February 12, 2026, lists per-skill consumption rates for every agent. The public marketing slide that shows Self-Service at 1-5 credits and BP Optimize at 1 credit is accurate. It’s also a curated view. The full rate card includes rows that are meaningfully higher.
Here’s what got highlighted:
Contract Negotiation Agent, full document review and redlining: 500 credits per document. At roughly $0.10 per credit, that’s $50 per contract.
Recruiting Agent, Talent Rediscovery (Fetch): 750 credits per unique requisition. That’s $75 per req.
Talent Mobility Agent, Internal Talent Visibility and Matching: 750 credits per unique requisition. Also $75 per req.
Compare that to Candidate Grading (Spotlight), which runs 6 credits per resume screen. Same Recruiting Agent, wildly different meters depending on which skill you invoke. The agent isn’t one thing. It’s a bundle of skills with very different price tags.
Run the math for a recruiting team at a mid-size company.
$45,000 a year, for one skill, on one agent. Fine.
Now layer in the platform meters.
API Requests: 0.006 credits each, or 60 credits per 10,000 calls. Integration Events: 0.25 credits each, or 25 credits per 100 events. Document Storage: 120 credits per GB stored annually, with a 10-credits-per-GB-per-month overage rate if you exceed.
Here’s the thing Keith made explicit that I hadn’t appreciated until I saw the deck: platform entitlements are “fair use” levels, not hard limits. When you exceed them, the overage draws down your Flex Credit pool. So your heavy integration month doesn’t just generate a separate line item. It eats into your agent budget.
But not every integration counts the same way.
Keith’s slide broke it down.
Doesn’t count toward entitlement (included with subscription):
Workday Core Connectors
Workday Everywhere (Slack/Teams)
Integrations to and from Workday acquisitions (Hiredscore, Paradox)
EIBs (for Integration Events only, not for API Requests)
Workday Applications built by Partners
Counts (and overage consumes Flex Credits):
Custom Studio integrations
Orchestrations
Document Delivery unless attached to an EIB
Customer-built Extend apps
External applications and AI Agents calling your tenant
Certified Partner integrations (including EIBs) for API Requests
Translation: if you’re a heavy Studio shop, you’re exposed. If you have a sprawl of custom Orchestrations, you’re exposed. If you built out Extend apps, you’re exposed. Go look at what your integration footprint actually looks like before you assume anything.
A few safety valves worth knowing. Sandbox testing is free. Non-production consumption is shown in the console for informational purposes only, never billed. Traditional Workday “AI” and machine learning features (the non-agentic stuff that’s been in your tenant for years) don’t consume Flex Credits at all. The meter runs on agents and platform consumption, not on the AI features you already have.
If you do go negative on your entitlement, you don’t get cut off. Annual true-up at reconciliation. No service interruption.
“No service interruption” is not the same as “this will be cheap.”
Ask me how I know. When Justin was in second grade, he figured out how to switch the payment method on his iPad from password to his fingerprint, and proceeded to rack up a thousand dollars in Roblox in-game purchases. I found out about it a day later. Apple didn’t cut him off. The system worked exactly as designed. The damage was done before anyone noticed.
Flex Credits work the same way. If nobody is watching the meter, the meter doesn’t care.
Keith told us the Platform Consumption Console (PCC) is where you watch all of this. Credit balance, active entitlement, rate card view, drill-down on Sana and Agent usage. If you’re evaluating any of this, know where the PCC is before you turn anything on. Watch it like a hawk.
My honest read: the public narrative around Flex Credits has been “pay for what you use, usage-based, very reasonable.” The full rate card tells a more complicated story. For admins and HR self-service, the economics are fine. For talent and contract agents, per-run costs are substantial, especially at scale. For shops with heavy Studio integration footprints, the platform side is going to bite before the agent side does.
Get your CSM to run an estimate against your actual tenant volume before you commit to anything. Make sure your Finance counterpart sees the full rate card, not the marketing slide. And if you’re a recruiting-heavy shop considering Fetch or Internal Talent Mobility at scale, model the annual cost before you green-light the pilot.
What I’d Actually Pilot First
Not a ranking. A sequence.
Get on the UMSA if you aren’t already. Nothing else on this list works without it.
Get ASOR configured and governed. Before you turn on any agent, make sure you understand how to manage them. This is not glamorous work. It is the work.
Start using the Deployment Agent today. It’s in Customer Central, it’s free, it doesn’t require the UMSA, and it will save your team real time. There’s no reason to wait.
Pilot the Self-Service Agent. Highest ROI, clearest user value, fastest to demonstrate impact, and the credit consumption at 1-5 credits per action is manageable.
Pilot the Frontline Agent, if you have a frontline workforce. Disproportionate value for underserved users.
Invest in your skills data before you turn on Talent Mobility. The agent is only as good as the foundation underneath it, and at 750 credits per requisition, you want signal, not noise.
Watch Business Process Optimize carefully. This one could be a sleeper. Worth the evaluation even if you don’t act on it immediately. At 1 credit per BP event, the economics are friendly.
Everything else: evaluate based on your specific business. Don’t let a vendor pitch drive your roadmap.
What’s Notably Missing
A rundown is only useful if it also tells you what isn’t on the map. A few agents I’d expect to see that haven’t shipped yet, or at least haven’t been named:
A Learning Agent. Curious, given that Sana Learning was a major piece of the acquisition. Workday Learning and Sana Learn are being positioned as complementary, but I’d expect a dedicated agent for personalized learning paths, content generation, and coaching within the next 6 to 12 months.
A Performance or Feedback Agent. This one is tricky, and I’m not sure “performance agent” is even the right framing. Performance management in Workday has always been where good intentions go to get buried under rating scales and due-date reminders. Slapping an AI on top of that stuff doesn’t fix the process. The shift I think is actually coming is bigger: performance stops being an annual event and starts being continuous feedback consumption and aggregation. 360 feedback, peer recognition, awards, signals pulled from meeting notes and email threads, all of it synthesized into something coherent. That’s a fundamentally different product than “help me write a review.” Workday hasn’t named that agent yet. When they do, it’ll matter a lot more than a draft-my-review button.
A Comp Agent. Compensation planning is another area ripe for agent help: market data, internal equity checks, recommendation drafting. Conspicuously absent.
Read the roadmap accordingly.
The Bottom Line
The Workday agent lineup is going to keep changing. Names will shift. Capabilities will expand. A vendor you haven’t heard of yet will get acquired, and whatever they built will get absorbed into this roster within a year of the deal closing.
What won’t change is the architecture. Agents grounded in trusted data. Governance through ASOR. Security that inherits from your tenant. The pieces that actually determine whether this stuff works.
What also won’t change is the economic model. Flex Credits are here to stay. Know your rates. Know your meters. Know what counts toward your entitlement and what doesn’t. The agent roadmap is exciting. The consumption math is what’ll show up on your Finance team’s invoice.
Learn the architecture. The product names will take care of themselves.
The Illuminate branding lasted about eighteen months. Sana will probably last longer, but not forever. What you build on top of the real plumbing underneath: that’s the part that compounds.
-- Mike
P.S. A HUGE shout-out to Keith Bitikofer for the Philly RUG session that sharpened most of the Flex Credits analysis in this post. Keith pulled back the curtain on the parts of the rate card that weren’t in the marketing deck, walked the room through what actually counts toward entitlement, and demoed the PCC live. That’s the kind of practitioner-to-practitioner knowledge transfer that RUGs exist for. If your local RUG has a Keith, show up. If it doesn’t, please consider being one.
P.P.S. Ultimately, Roblox gave me my money back, but also perma-banned Justin’s original account. To this date, I still have not been forgiven. He apparently purchased the Titanic in some game where a random player becomes a Jaws-like great white shark and eats boats (and other players). I will never understand Gen-alpha. Then again, we had Doom. We’re definitely more screwed up.