Use cases › IT / internal ops

Workday Sana agent: how the agent works and how to build one like it

Summary: Workday's Sana agent offers 300+ HR and finance self-service skills such as pay, time and absence, according to the source.

Source: https://cloud.google.com/transform/101-real-world-generative-ai-use-cases-from-industry-leaders source page fetched

Why this use case works

The skill count shows the pattern: many small, well-defined capabilities over one system of record rather than one general assistant. Each skill can be tested and permissioned on its own. (Our analysis.)

Agent pattern: Internal ops agent

An internal-ops agent living in a chat tool employees already use (Slack, Teams, WhatsApp), with read access to documentation and write access limited to creating tickets or records. Start read-only and widen permissions as accuracy is proven.

How a smaller team could replicate it

A mid-size company can map its top 20 HR and payroll questions, expose each as a skill tied to its HRIS (balance lookups, request submission, policy answers), and track usage to choose the next skills. (Our analysis, not a claim made by the source.)

Want a rough business case first? Try the AI agent ROI calculator, or ask us to scope it.

Risks and guardrails

Risks: exposing one employee's pay or absence data to another, and policy answers that differ by country or contract. Guardrails: strict identity-based data access, location-aware policy content, and skills that refuse rather than guess. (Our analysis.)

What to measure

Self-service share of HR tickets, skill usage distribution, error reports per skill, and HR team hours saved.

Related IT / internal ops deployments

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