THE AI INTERVIEW
off-the-shelf solutions stop fitting.“ We know you’ re going to have to customise,” Jerry says.“ There’ s that last mile that’ s industry-unique, organisation-unique – do it with us. Do it in a secure, compliant way. Don’ t do some homegrown thing and then hack your way back into Workday.”
Jerry runs a centralised AI team at Workday that evaluates use cases and determines which agent types fit which tasks. The team exists to prevent a pattern he sees in IT departments.“ They’ re not as nuanced about the use case – they just try to automate the human, and then you get really strange results,” he says.“ You breach trust with your stakeholders, and then you’ re stepping back on your AI deployment.”
How Workday’ s Pipedream and Sana acquisitions extend agent reach An agent that only accesses Workday in a‘ walled garden’ approach has limited use. Work happens across platforms, with employees using Microsoft Teams and Slack and IT systems running on ServiceNow, for instance.
Workday’ s Pipedream acquisition addresses what Jerry identifies as a fundamental constraint, with the platform serving more than 5,000 customers and offering connectivity to applications including Asana, HubSpot, Jira, Recurly and Slack. Jerry offers employee onboarding as an example, where a customer might need badge creation integrated into the workflow.“ We can call out to ServiceNow and say,‘ As part of employee onboarding, we can get that badge for the employee and do that as part of a business process that lives in Workday’,” he says.
Workday also completed its acquisition of Sana in early November after announcing the US $ 1.1bn deal in September. Sana serves more than one million users across hundreds of enterprises with two products. Sana Agents enables organisations to build AI agents using a no-code interface, while Sana Learn provides learning management with AI-native features. The platform indexes company information from sources including Google Drive, SharePoint and Office 365, making it searchable through AI.
26 February 2026