CFOs Gain AI Control Tool From Workday

Workday, a human capital management business, has launched Sana globally, an agentic workforce platform that addresses a critical challenge facing finance leaders: how to achieve measurable returns from AI investments whilst maintaining the rigorous compliance standards that finance operations demand.

The platform combines an AI interface, a self-service agent for automating finance and HR workflows and an enterprise system capable of delivering AI capabilities beyond the Workday environment. These agents can identify, orchestrate and automate workflows across the day-to-day systems that employees use throughout organisations.

Aneel Bhusri, co-founder, CEO and Chair of Workday, says: "AI only works in the enterprise when it's connected to trusted, deterministic systems, and that hybrid architecture is exactly what Workday is building. Sana is what brings it all together. It's not just a new Workday experience – it's a powerful way for people to search, reason and orchestrate work across the enterprise."

The finance challenge with AI

According to Workday, numerous organisations struggle to demonstrate measurable impact from their AI investments because agents, copilots and other AI tools remain disconnected from core business workflows. When tools are 'bolted on', they frequently fail to deliver enterprise-grade accuracy as they lack access to the data, business rules and compliance context embedded within the systems they work alongside.

This challenge is particularly acute for finance teams, where accuracy and compliance are non-negotiable. Research from McKinsey reveals that only 1% of business leaders would describe their company's AI strategy as 'mature' – indicating that AI has been fully integrated into workflows to drive substantial business outcomes – despite 92% planning to increase their AI investments over the next three years.

Built for finance operations

Sana's capabilities allow users to obtain instant, cited answers from company knowledge and Workday data, execute tasks across systems grounded in enterprise permissions, transform existing knowledge into ready-to-use documents and establish no-code workflows.

The platform has been designed specifically for finance and HR tasks, with agents inheriting the same controls trusted for sensitive finance and HR data to ensure accurate results that meet compliance standards. For CFOs managing increasingly complex regulatory requirements whilst driving digital transformation, this embedded compliance framework could address a significant operational risk.

Workday emphasises that this integrated approach differentiates Sana from solutions that operate separately from core enterprise systems, where the disconnect can create compliance gaps and data accuracy issues that finance leaders cannot afford.

Developing workforce AI capabilities

Beyond the technical capabilities of the platform itself, research from Gartner suggests that finance leaders need to work closely with managers and other senior leaders across their organisations to ensure specific use cases for AI exist and to help develop employee skills with the technology.

The study reveals that whilst 46% of managers are experimenting with AI to improve their work, only 26% of employees report doing the same. This gap in adoption rates could mean that organisations are not realising the full value of their AI investments across their workforce.

Carmen von Rohr, senior principal in the Gartner HR practice, says of the research: "Chief Human Resources Officers are under pressure to ensure effective workforce usage of AI tools, but they have overrelied on empowering employees to chart their own exploration of AI."

"Thus far, HR has largely focused on empowering employees to explore, learn and innovate with AI and have overlooked the role of the manager in driving effective use of AI tools."