Workday Has the Numbers. The Productivity Problem Is Still a Choice.
Workday Has the Numbers. The Productivity Problem Is Still a Choice.
Workday processes more than 5 million expense reports every month. One in five employees still loses more than seven hours a week shuttling data between the systems those reports touch. That gap — the scale of what the software already touches and the friction of what employees still do manually — is not a technology problem. It is a business model one. And it is the reason Workday is now pushing its AI past answering questions and into completing the work itself.
That push is the actual news. On May 21 at the Sana AI Summit in New York, Workday announced Sana for IT Service Management and a new Travel Agent — both built directly into the Workday core, both designed to act rather than respond. The architectural argument: because these agents sit next to the system of record for people and money, they inherit the same employee records, budget data, and policy configurations that already run payroll and workforce management — and they use those to decide when to act and when to pause for a human. Workday claims the agents can access the same configuration that runs payroll and use those rules to authorize a booking or flag a policy violation. The specifics of how the automation layer connects to those systems remain unclear from public documentation.
The competitive context makes the move easier to understand. ServiceNow reinforced its own ITSM position earlier this year by acquiring Moveworks, which was built for IT ticketing from the ground up. Bhupendra Chopra, chief revenue officer at IT consulting firm Kanerika, put the tradeoff plainly: most large enterprises have workflows, integrations, and tribal knowledge baked into ServiceNow. Ripping that out for better data context is a multi-year migration, not a switch. Sana for ITSM makes sense where Workday already has the HR and finance relationship and IT support is a greenfield problem.
The mid-market is the more plausible early battlefield. Sana for ITSM will automate workflows for employee onboarding and offboarding, access changes, and everyday IT requests like password resets and software installs. When a new hire appears in Workday's system, the agent initiates account provisioning and hardware requests without a human filing a ticket. When an employee transfers departments, access adjusts automatically. The Travel Agent coordinates team schedules, checks budget availability, books flights and hotels against company policy, and pushes receipts directly into Workday expenses — no human expense report required. Early adopters are likely existing Workday HR and finance customers evaluating greenfield IT support; the realistic enterprise sales cycle means meaningful penetration is 2027 at the earliest. The mid-market battleground is AI-first buyers who have not yet committed to ServiceNow — not Fortune 500 ITSM incumbents who have already built the migration cost into their roadmap. Abhishek Mundra, associate practice leader at HFS Research, noted that Sana's tighter integration of HR, finance, and IT data could give CIOs better agentic accuracy as automation moves from answering questions to completing tasks — but he warned against vendor lock-in. The integration benefit does not have to come from the system of record vendor, he said.
The Travel Agent is already in early access. Sana for ITSM enters early adopter testing in the second half of 2026, with general availability planned for later in the year.
The 7+ hours per week figure comes from Workday's own research — a survey of 6,100 professionals the company conducted for this announcement. It is illustrative of the problem Workday is trying to solve, not an independently verified benchmark. The 5 million monthly expense reports is a harder number: that is operational volume Workday disclosed, and it is the kind of figure a company only publishes when it is confident in what it represents.
Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday's president of product and technology, framed it at the announcement: employees have been navigating a maze of tools, switching context constantly, and re-entering data across systems just to resolve an IT ticket or manage travel and expenses. AI, he said, lets Workday break free from the limitations of enterprise applications. Whether that turns out to be true depends on whether the agents actually inherit the context Workday claims — and whether the enterprises that need this most are the ones willing to buy it from the vendor that already runs their HR and payroll.