Workday extends Sana AI to ITSM after HR, finance

Workday conversational AI platform Sana for Workday is now ready to talk about IT Service Management (ITSM) automation as part of the company’s broader effort to help enterprises streamline workflows, especially across HR and finance, with autonomous AI agents.

The new Sana for ITSM capabilities are intended to automate workflows for employee on- and offboarding, access changes, and everyday IT requests.

Another new addition, the Travel agent, can help employees plan trips, book travel, and automatically manage expenses in one place, the company said.

The unification of cross-departmental workflows, according to Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at Pareekh Consulting, could provide significant advantages to CIOs: “If HR, finance, onboarding, access requests, payroll, travel, and IT support are tied together in one platform, enterprises can reduce friction, automate approvals faster, improve employee experience.”

“At the same time, Sana’s agentic backend will also get more organization context and can be more accurate, which is increasingly becoming important for CIOs trying to automate operations with agents,” Jain said. “Identity, reporting structures, cost centers, approvals, budgets, and role-based permissions become critical when AI starts automating tasks instead of just answering questions.”

However, Abhishek Mundra, associate practice leader at HFS Research, warned that CIOs evaluating ITSM for Sana should be wary of vendor lock-in. There’s value in linking the system running IT service workflows to the system of record holding workforce and financial data, but “it need not necessarily be owned by the system of record vendors,” he said.

Entrenched ITSM ecosystems could slow uptake

That debate around integration benefits versus platform concentration is also likely to influence enterprise uptake of the new ITSM automation capabilities, according to Jain.

“Early adopters will likely be existing Workday customers looking to simplify employee workflows and reduce tool fragmentation,” he said, adding that Workday could face challenges winning over large enterprises with deeply entrenched ITSM environments, given the maturity and breadth of established platforms such as ServiceNow.

ServiceNow’s recent acquisition of Moveworks also strengthens its position as an ITSM software provider, according to Bhupendra Chopra, chief revenue officer at IT consulting firm Kanerika.

“Moveworks is built for ITSM from the ground up. Sana for ITSM is built for consolidation. Those are different optimization functions. ITSM is harder than HR self-service. It requires understanding SLAs, escalation paths, technical constraints,” Chopra said.

“Most large enterprises with mature ITSM investments have workflows, integrations, and tribal knowledge baked into ServiceNow. Ripping that out for ‘better data context’ is a multi-year migration, not a switch,” he said.

Echoing Chopra, Jain said efforts to replace already-in-place, compliant ITSM systems could be expensive, risky and operationally disruptive. But, he said, mid-sized enterprises and AI-first enterprises may evaluate the new capabilities as a lighter alternative to complex traditional ITSM stacks, especially for employee support use cases.

Workday expects to offer Sana for ITSM early adopters in the second half of 2026, with broader general availability planned later in the year, the company said.

The Travel Agent is already available to early adopters and will also become generally available later this year, it said.