Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach announces ‘transformational’ acquisition of Sana at Workday Rising 2025

Workday has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Sana, a leader in AI-powered enterprise knowledge.

The announcement was made at Workday’s flagship event, Workday Rising 2025 held in San Francisco. 

While on the ground at the conference, UNLEASH discovers more about the deal by hearing first-hand from Workday’s CEO, Carl Eschenbach.

A ‘transformational’ deal

At Workday Rising 2025, Workday took the opportunity to announce its new deal with Sana, in a bid to streamline the company’s knowledge, data, action, and learnings into one interface. 

This acquisition has the opportunity to be transformational for Workday,” Eschenbach tells UNLEASH. 

Eschenbach explains that he uses the word “transformational” as 75 million people in the world have access through Workday either via their PC or phone. The deal with Sana will therefore help Workday “enhance and change” that user experience, allowing users to achieve everything they want to do in the enterprise. 

He adds: “When Workday came to market 20 years ago, one of the big differentiations was our UI UX. People came to Workday because they were tired of the antiquated UI UX experiences on prior HCM financial platforms. 

“Over the last few years, our UI UX and the innovation around it has moderated, so we see this as an opportunity to completely revamp the user interface for Workday.”

Eschenbach then circled back to Joel Hellermark, Founder and CEO of Sana who announced the deal earlier on stage, where he said: “The new UI of the future is AI.” 

To Hellermark’s point, Eschenbach shares: “Sana labs is logging into Workday for your entire workday – getting access to all content and information across all data sets in the enterprise. 

“That’s a super powerful value proposition that is going to transform the way people think about engaging with and through Workday.”

Through leveraging Sana’s technology, Workday’s employee experience will also become personalized and proactive, helping the business to better anticipate employee needs. 

For example, hiring managers will be able monitor their live recruitment pipeline through tailored dashboards while also automating the end-to-end performance review process, and receive proactive suggestions on onboarding new hires.

What’s more, Sana Learn and Sana Agent will continue to be developed, in addition to powering a new Workday experience. Sana will therefore be used to accelerate growth and continue to deliver innovation to its customers at scale.

Why has Workday bought Sana?

Through the deal, Workday aims to create a better work experience for the future, by improving enterprise knowledge, data and actions converge into one.

As a result, employees will be empowered to use AI agents that can achieve four key goals: 

1. Instantly search information and files across a company’s most critical data sources, such as Google Drive, SharePoint, Office365, and Workday, to get answers quickly.
2. Anticipating needs, summarizing insights, and assisting with projects through proactive actions.
3. Create presentations, documents, and dashboards, even full learning courses, based on company knowledge.
4. Reduce repetitive tasks through automation and routine.

Hellermark commented: “Our focus has always been on creating intuitive AI tools that improve how people learn and work.

“I’m excited to bring these tools to 75 million Workday users and partner with Workday’s iconic team to launch a new era of superintelligence for work.”

The deal is expected to close January 31, 2026 – marking the end of the fourth quarter of Workday’s fiscal year 2026.

Under the terms of the definitive agreement, Workday will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Sana for approximately $1.1 billion.