Workday AI agents in 2026: what they do for HR self-service and IT

Workday's AI agents for employee self-service now run under Sana, launched worldwide in March 2026 (Workday's 2025 agents were announced as Workday Illuminate). The Sana Self-Service Agent handles time off, expenses, pay questions and profile updates, with 300+ skills across pay, time and absence. It is paid for with Workday Flex Credits, and every subscription includes an allocation. Self-service with Sana is generally available in Slack and Microsoft Teams. IT work is newer: Sana for IT Service Management and the Sana Concierge HR and IT agent are with early adopters, and Concierge is expected to be generally available in calendar Q1 2027.

At a glance

What is Sana, and what happened to Workday Illuminate?

Workday introduced its agents under the Workday Illuminate brand. In September 2025 it announced a batch of Illuminate agents for HR and finance, including a Case Agent for HR service administration, a Business Process Copilot Agent, a Performance Agent and an Employee Sentiment Agent, saying they would be available in 2026.

On March 17, 2026, Workday launched Sana from Workday and described it as available to customers worldwide. Sana has three parts: Sana for Workday (the conversational interface), the Sana Self-Service Agent (HR and finance tasks), and Sana Enterprise (Sana across third-party apps). Workday groups its capabilities as Find, Act, Build and Automate, with cited answers from company knowledge and Workday data. Sana runs inside Workday's existing security, permissions and audit framework.

At Workday Rising in October 2026, Workday made Sana the new Workday Home and introduced Sana Concierge, which it says combines Workday Help and the Case Agent with the earlier self-service and IT service management capabilities. If you read older material that names individual Illuminate agents, expect the names and packaging to have moved since.

The Agent System of Record was announced in February 2025 as a way to onboard, govern, budget and audit agents from Workday and third parties in one place. The 2026 Sana announcements we checked do not restate its status, so confirm with Workday what is live in your tenant.

What the Self-Service Agent covers for employees

Workday's Self-Service Agent page says the agent completes time-off requests, expenses and profile updates end to end, and walks employees through higher-stakes moments such as promotions or job changes. Examples include booking PTO, explaining pay changes and laying out promotion eligibility rules. Employees can use it in Workday or through Slack, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Gemini. Chats are deleted after 30 days and actions are kept in the standard Workday audit trail.

The strength here is that the agent sits on the system of record: it knows the employee's pay, time and absence data, and it acts through Workday's own business processes and approvals rather than around them.

How Workday AI agents are priced

Workday sells AI through Flex Credits, a usage-based model. Workday's Flex Credits page says customers buy credits annually, can top up through the Workday Marketplace, and get a complimentary allocation sized by company size. Credits cover AI agents, Data Cloud, Sana from Workday, agent-ready tools and the Developer Agent.

The page gives two published rates for the Self-Service Agent: 1 credit per action for instant information retrieval and 5 credits per action for autonomous task completion. Workday does not publish a price per credit; the rate card and pricing are available through sales. For Sana for Workday and the Self-Service Agent, the March 2026 release says there is "no extra license, no separate paywall," with usage drawn from the included allocation. Workday has not published how large the included allocation is.

The practical question for a buyer is volume. Model how many self-service actions employees will run each year, split by retrieval and completion, before assuming the included credits cover it.

Does Workday's AI work in Slack and Microsoft Teams?

Partly today, fully later. Workday's October 2026 release says self-service with Sana is generally available today in Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Teams and Slack, and that Sana itself will be available on those platforms in late 2026. Sana in Claude Cowork is in early access. The release gives no Slack- or Teams-specific task list, so check which Self-Service Agent skills work in chat versus only in Workday.

Where Workday's AI stops: IT actions

Workday is clearly moving into IT. Sana for IT Service Management, announced in May 2026, is described as handling password resets, software installs and access changes, and triggering access changes when employees join, transfer, change roles or leave. Sana Concierge lists password resets and application access among its requests.

As of October 2026, though, neither is generally available, and Workday's releases do not name the identity providers, device management tools or ITSM systems they act on, or say whether Sana for ITSM replaces an existing service desk or works beside one. Device management is not mentioned at all. For a 200 to 1,000 employee company, IT work usually spans an identity provider (Okta, Entra ID or Google Workspace), MDM (Jamf, Intune or Kandji), dozens of SaaS apps outside SSO, and a ticketing tool. Questions to ask Workday:

1. Which identity providers and SaaS apps can Sana for ITSM act on, and with what permissions?
2. Does it manage devices, licenses and asset returns?
3. Does it replace our service desk, or route to it?
4. How many Flex Credits does an IT action consume?

How Workday HR events can trigger IT onboarding and offboarding

Even without Workday's IT agents, Workday is the right trigger for IT work, because hires, job changes and terminations run as Workday business processes. The common pattern is to send those events to the identity provider and an IT automation layer.

Okta's Workday Real-Time Sync is a good example of how this works and where it needs care. It receives Hire, Termination, Job Change and Title business process events almost immediately, but it requires Workday as the profile source, an integration system built on Okta's template, and business processes edited to call it. Okta recommends scheduled imports every one to two days because some changes do not trigger real-time sync, and immediate deactivation only happens if an immediate termination reason is configured; otherwise the worker is deactivated the day after the termination date.

Identity provisioning covers the account and SSO apps. It does not order laptops, remove local accounts in apps outside SSO, recover devices or reassign file ownership. See how to revoke access when an employee leaves for the full sequence, and which HRIS automates onboarding and offboarding for a wider comparison.

Using Harmony with Workday

Harmony is an AI service desk that resolves IT and HR requests in Slack and Microsoft Teams and runs the workflows behind them. It keeps Workday as the HR system of record and uses it as the trigger for IT.

What the integration does. The Harmony Workday integration syncs employee profiles, job details (title, department, cost center), manager relationships and org hierarchy, employment status and key dates. A new hire in Workday starts onboarding, a role or department change adjusts access, and a termination starts offboarding to revoke access and recover assets. Harmony workflows can reach anything in the Workday REST API.

Onboarding. The New Hire Onboarding agent starts 14 days before the start date by default, collects the new hire's and manager's profiles, and opens a parent ticket with linked tasks such as laptop ordering, workstation setup and identity provider account creation with role-based groups. It routes approvals for hardware and software access and notifies the manager when everything is done.

Offboarding. The Employee Offboarding agent picks up the end date from Workday, gathers the employee's assigned assets, and opens IT tasks (account termination, VPN removal, factory reset, asset return, ownership transfer, physical access) and HR tasks (exit interview, final payroll, benefits termination). Urgent cases go through Employee Account Termination.

Everyday requests. Employees ask in Slack or Teams for an MFA reset or application access, and Harmony verifies identity, routes approval and acts through integrations, opening a ticket only when a human is needed. HR questions and time off can run on the same agent through Harmony for HR, with human approval on any HR action.

How the two fit together. If your employees live in Workday and your HR team wants answers drawn straight from pay and absence data, Sana's Self-Service Agent is a strong choice for that slice. Harmony fits where requests span HR and IT, or where IT runs on systems Workday does not manage. Some companies will run both; others will put one front door in Slack or Teams.

Results and pricing. Harmony resolves up to 90% of routine requests. Customer-reported figures published by Harmony: Cyera resolves roughly 85 to 89% of employee requests automatically, and Fireblocks agents processed 915 application access requests. Harmony is rated 4.8 on G2 (80 reviews), Gartner Peer Insights (32) and Capterra (19). Each deployment is a custom quote scoped to company size and use, and it is available through AWS Marketplace private offers.

Limitations. No published self-serve pricing; G2 reviewers ask for more flexible reporting and dashboard widgets; some integrations need extra setup steps; and Harmony, founded in 2025, is younger than Workday.

This guide is written and maintained by Harmony. Details about other products come from their public pages, listed under Sources, and were last checked in October 2026. If something is out of date, email us and we will fix it.