Finance teams are underwater. Month-end close comes every month, quarter-end close every quarter, and the operational work never stops. With Sana Enterprise giving time back, it fundamentally changes what finance can be and elevates the entire function. It’s something the leaders I speak with are genuinely excited about.
Sana Enterprise has also cut our business requirements gathering from weeks to days. Sana Meeting Recorder captures stakeholder conversations, our agents turn them into business requirements documents, and Sana’s connectors link everything to our process blueprints in Miro and our process documentation. Review and sign-off cycles are shorter too, because each round builds on what we learned in the last one, so we get better at translating business needs every time.
The same is true for user acceptance testing, from writing test scripts to reviewing them. With that speed, finance can keep up as business strategy changes without being a bottleneck to growth.
Agent System of Record: Balancing Control Without Slowing Innovation
AI innovation is moving incredibly fast, and agents are popping up everywhere. A lot of leaders, especially CIOs, are asking: How do we orchestrate all of this? What happens when something goes wrong?
As Customer Zero, we use Workday’s Agent System of Record to create that orchestration layer. Instead of unknown agents operating on their own, employees register their agents in one place.
What’s been most useful for my team is that anyone can see which agents already exist, so no one rebuilds something that’s already there. That saves time, and it gives us control from an enterprise risk perspective. If something goes wrong, there’s a central repository where we can take action.
We want innovation to happen—that’s how you move with velocity. But having that control and orchestration layer in place creates a blanket of security, which has been a critical lesson for Workday as we empower more people to build their own agents.
3 Lessons Leaders Can Learn From
To me, Customer Zero doesn’t just mean going first—it means we’re building the path others can follow. Here are three lessons leaders can take away from our experience:
1. Re-Engineer Your Processes First
There’s real danger in layering AI on top of legacy processes. AI won’t stop to ask whether the process underneath is wrong. Put AI on top of something broken, and you get broken results.
Many organizations wonder why they aren’t getting value from AI, and often it’s because they haven’t re-architected the processes it runs on.
That’s why we aren’t using AI to pave over broken processes or chase isolated quick wins at Workday. Instead, we’re re-engineering finance from the ground up into a governed, scalable engine to pave the way for our agentic future.
Looking ahead three to five years, finance organizations that take the time to embed AI into the foundation of their processes will set themselves apart from those that simply layered AI on top of what they already had.
Source: blog.workday.com
