Workday buys Sana to address the ‘era of superintelligence for work’

Workday has agreed to buy Sana for $1.1 billion, and plans to combine Sana’s AI-based search, agents and learning with its own finance and HR software to drive personalized employee experiences.

It expects to close the deal by the end of January, subjuect to regulatory approval.

It’s less than a month since it agreed to buy Paradox, an agent that uses conversational AI to simplify job application processes, and Flowise, a low-code platform that facilitates the creation of AI agents. Those acquisitions are part of a restructuring plan devised to accelerate international growth by investing more in artificial intelligence and less in salaries: In February Workday said it will lay off 1,750 employees, or 8.5% of its workforce.

Goal: “Reimagine the future of work.”

“Sana’s team, AI-native approach, and beautiful design perfectly align with our vision to reimagine the future of work,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product and technology at Workday, in a company statement in which he assured that this move “will make Workday the new front door for work” by offering “a proactive, personalized and intelligent experience.”

However, the agreement ensures that, while part of Workday, Sana will continue to develop its existing solutions for learning and work (Sana Learn and Sana Agents).

Sana founder and CEO Joel Hellermark said, “Our focus has always been on creating intuitive AI tools that improve how people learn and work. I’m excited to bring these tools to 75 million Workday users and partner with Workday’s iconic team to launch a new era of superintelligence for work.”

By bringing together technology from both companies, Workday users will be able to find answers information and files by searching data sources including Workday, Google Drive, SharePoint and Office365, and access agents that can summarize information, assist with projects, create documents and dashboards based on company knowledge, and automate repetitive tasks, the company said.

Workday’s management team is currently in San Francisco for the company’s annual Workday Rising event, where, in addition to this acquisition, it has announced a series of agents (Workday Illuminate) for HR, finance and education. HR, finance and education, which will be available in 2026, and Workday Data Cloud, a data layer designed to help organizations unlock the value of HR and finance data by connecting it with existing analytics platforms.

The company also announced partnerships at its big event with other technology vendors including Databricks, Salesforce and Snowflake that aims to give its customers direct, non-duplicative access to core HR and finance data within the platforms they already use and enable them to integrate that same data into Workday under this same approach.