Workday conversational AI platform automation as part of the company’s broader effort to help enterprises streamline workflows, especially across HR and finance, with autonomous AI agents.
The new Sana for ITSM capabilities are intended to automate workflows for employee on- and offboarding, access changes, and everyday IT requests.
Another new addition, the Travel agent, can help employees plan trips, book travel, and automatically manage expenses in one place, the company said.
The unification of cross-departmental workflows, according to , associate practice leader at HFS Research, warned that CIOs evaluating ITSM for Sana should be wary of vendor lock-in. There’s value in linking the system running IT service workflows to the system of record holding workforce and financial data, but “it need not necessarily be owned by the system of record vendors,” he said.
Entrenched ITSM ecosystems could slow uptake
That debate around integration benefits versus platform concentration is also likely to influence enterprise uptake of the new ITSM automation capabilities, according to Jain.
“Early adopters will likely be existing Workday customers looking to simplify employee workflows and reduce tool fragmentation,” he said, adding that Workday could face challenges winning over large enterprises with deeply entrenched ITSM environments, given the maturity and breadth of established platforms such as ServiceNow.
, chief revenue officer at IT consulting firm Kanerika.
“Moveworks is built for ITSM from the ground up. Sana for ITSM is built for consolidation. Those are different optimization functions. ITSM is harder than HR self-service. It requires understanding SLAs, escalation paths, technical constraints,” Chopra said.
“Most large enterprises with mature ITSM investments have workflows, integrations, and tribal knowledge baked into ServiceNow. Ripping that out for ‘better data context’ is a multi-year migration, not a switch,” he said.
Echoing Chopra, Jain said efforts to replace already-in-place, compliant ITSM systems could be expensive, risky and operationally disruptive. But, he said, mid-sized enterprises and AI-first enterprises may evaluate the new capabilities as a lighter alternative to complex traditional ITSM stacks, especially for employee support use cases.
Workday expects to offer Sana for ITSM early adopters in the second half of 2026, with broader general availability planned later in the year, the company said.
The Travel Agent is already available to early adopters and will also become generally available later this year, it said.
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