Workday Launches Sana ITSM and Travel Agent to Automate Enterprise Workflows with Policy-Aware AI

Workday introduced two AI agents at its Sana AI Summit in New York on May 21: Sana for IT Service Management and a Travel Agent. Both are built directly on the Workday platform and inherit the same security controls, approval chains, and governance policies that enterprises already use for payroll, hiring, and finance.

What Sana for ITSM Does

The ITSM agent targets the operational workflows triggered by employee changes. When someone joins a company, switches teams, or leaves, the agent orchestrates access provisioning, equipment assignment, software licensing, and permission updates across connected systems. It also handles everyday IT requests like password resets and software installations through conversational self-service inside Workday.

“We wanted to build something that handled IT completely, from the moment an employee joins the company to the moment they leave, and everything in between,” Joel Hellermark, Workday’s chief AI officer, told the company’s newsroom. “Workday already holds the organizational truth that makes that possible.”

The key design choice: Workday already stores employee roles, reporting structures, and org policies. The ITSM agent reads that context in real time rather than requiring a separate identity or governance layer. Complex requests that exceed the agent’s scope get routed to human teams with relevant employee data and permissions already attached.

The Travel Agent

Workday processes more than 5 million expense reports per month, according to its press release. The Travel Agent collapses the gap between booking and reimbursement. Employees coordinate schedules, review budgets, and book flights and hotels through a conversational interface that checks company policy and personal preferences in real time.

“The best expense report is the one you never have to do,” said Max Wessel, Workday’s SVP of product, in the announcement. Once travel is approved, expenses generate automatically. Post-trip, the agent uses AI vision to extract receipt data from images and matches transactions to expense reports.

“It should feel like your expenses and your booking is the same thing,” Jerry Ting, Workday’s VP and Head of Agentic AI, told SiliconANGLE.

Availability

Sana for ITSM opens to early adopter customers in the second half of 2026 with general availability planned for later this year. The Travel Agent is already in early adoption and also targets general availability by year-end.

The Governance Bet

Workday’s approach is the opposite of standalone agent platforms that bolt governance on after deployment. Because both agents run natively inside Workday, they operate under the same policy enforcement, audit trails, and role-based access controls that HR and finance teams already manage. No new admin console, no separate identity provider, no additional security review.

“Just doing HR and finance, in my view, is not ambitious enough,” Ting told SiliconANGLE. “If you think about the name Workday, it’s all the stuff you do in your day that’s not your core job. We want to automate a lot of that.”

For enterprise buyers evaluating agent platforms, the question Workday is forcing: do you add agents that require their own governance stack, or extend agents from the system that already has one? With 11,500+ customers and existing data on employee identities, org structures, and financial policies, Workday is betting the answer favors incumbents who already hold the organizational graph.