Workday has launched two AI agents for its Sana platform: one for IT service management and one for travel. The company says the tools will help automate onboarding, access provisioning, travel booking and expense reporting across HR, IT and finance.
Workday Inc. is expanding its AI push beyond human resources and finance with two new agents aimed at IT service management and travel. The company announced the tools today for Sana, its AI-powered platform for knowledge discovery and work automation.
The new products are the IT service management agent and the travel management agent. According to Workday, both are designed to handle the administrative work that sits between departments and often slows down routine employee tasks.
This news matters because Workday is adding AI agents that do more than answer questions. An AI agent is software that can take actions on a user’s behalf, such as booking travel, creating accounts or filing expense reports. For non-specialists, this shows how AI is moving from chat tools into the workflows that run offices.
If you build self-hosted AI agents, separate “advice only” tasks from “action” tasks and give the latter clear approval steps. Workday’s example shows why agents need access to HR, IT and finance systems, but also why they should be constrained by policy, role-based permissions and audit logs. If you automate onboarding or travel, make the agent compile the work first and submit changes only after a human review gate.
Vice President and Head of Agentic AI Jerry Ting said in an interview with SiliconANGLE that the company wants to do more than core HR and finance automation. “Just doing HR and finance, in my view, is not ambitious enough,” he said.
The IT service management agent is aimed at employee changes that usually start in HR but require support from IT and other teams. That includes onboarding a new hire, changing a role, moving someone to another team or updating network permissions. Workday said the agent can coordinate equipment provisioning, software licenses, office space, account creation and other setup work across systems.
According to the company, the agent can also handle everyday IT requests such as password resets, software installations and access issues. Instead of sending employees through ticketing systems and waiting for a support response, the goal is to push as much of that work as possible into self-service.
Workday said the onboarding flow is a good example. The agent can create a username, set up roles, create an Outlook inbox, inventory a PC or laptop and provision software licenses. After those steps are complete, it drafts emails to managers and creates calendar events for the teams involved in the onboarding process.
Ting described the model as HR leading the process while IT acts as a support partner. He said the system is meant to reduce the manual work that used to happen through phone calls, clipboards and Excel spreadsheets.
The travel management agent follows a similar idea, but for trips and expenses. Workday said it already has 10 million active expense users. The new agent moves upstream from reimbursement into booking, so travel planning and expense handling are treated as part of the same workflow.
Ting said the agent can use stored context such as flight preferences, airline loyalty and company policy to suggest compliant flights. It can also review special cases, such as when someone wants to travel early for personal reasons, and flag any hotel night that should be treated as personal rather than business-related.
After flights and hotels are booked, the agent can begin preparing expense reports automatically. Workday said it can add travel details to the report instead of waiting for users to enter them later.
The system can also help after the trip is over. Using data from hotel stays, flights and corporate cards, the agent can identify missing receipts and request them from users. Workday said it uses AI vision to read receipt images, extract the data and match the information to the final expense submission.
For managers, HR and accounting teams, Workday said the result should be fewer missing items and less manual follow-up. Ting said the company built the agents directly into Workday so they use the same security and controls as the rest of the platform. He also said HR remains in the “driver’s seat” and keeps guidance and governance over the actions the agents create and complete.
Workday said the broader goal is to automate more of the administrative work that surrounds employees, not just the core HR and finance tasks the company has traditionally handled.
