Last year at US Rising, most people who visited our booth were curious about AI and unsure what it meant for Workday. This year the question had changed: “What are other customers actually doing with it?”
That shift tells us teams are ready to move. It’s also why our session with Amplitude, Ask, Don’t Hunt: Putting Workday Data in Users’ Hands with Claude and Custom MCPs, was full. We showed real examples from production tenants, and people wanted to see what works outside of a demo.
Workday gave everyone plenty to discuss. Sana is becoming the New Front Door to Workday, the agent platform went headless, autopilot agents started rolling out, and Workday announced a partnership with Anthropic. Not everything is available yet. The headline Talent Acquisition autopilot is still in early access, with wider availability planned for 2027. Here are the takeaways we think matter most for the teams who run Workday every day.
This was the first time we’d heard Workday lean publicly into the word “headless.” Salesforce made a similar move about a year ago, so it wasn’t a surprise, but it was notable. Headless means agents can work with HR and finance data without anyone logging into Workday.
Workday is covering both paths. If your people log in, Sana is the AI-enabled front door. If they don’t,Sana also works inside Claude, Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot, Teams, and Slack. Workday stays the source of truth either way, but the experience may move into tools your HRIS team has never had to own. Before anyone builds anything, decide where your people actually work and who owns the experience once it lives outside Workday.
Data came up in nearly every conversation we had. AI doesn’t do a good job when your data is a mess, and it won’t tell you it’s struggling. Feed it bad worker history and it can confidently tell you to fire your best employee and promote your worst.
Most tenants that have been live for years carry some baggage. It shows up in worker history from the original data conversion, in job profiles that drifted over time, and in supervisory orgs that no longer match how teams actually work. We expect a lot of cleanup work to come out of this AI push. Don’t start with a tenant-wide scrub. Start with the data your first AI use case will touch. And if you’re implementing Workday right now, you have a real advantage: you can design your data with AI in mind from day one.
“MCP” (Model Context Protocol) can sound abstract. In most of the use cases we’re seeing, it’s simple: a connection that lets you ask your systems a question in plain language instead of running a report and scanning rows. Picture a finance lead who needs cost centers trending over budget alongside headcount changes. Today that means two reports and a spreadsheet. With MCP connections to Workday and Adaptive, it’s one question. That’s the idea behind our session title: ask, don’t hunt.
Workday is backing this direction: its Agent-Ready Tools give any MCP-compatible agent an approved way to read data and act. We’ve already built custom MCP connections for clients, and read-only use cases are a smart place to start. They carry less risk, teach you quickly how agents behave, and show where your data needs attention.
Curious what that looks like in practice? See how we’re building MCP connections for Workday →
The best-received moment of the week wasn’t a product launch. It was Wharton professor Ethan Mollick saying the big secret of AI is that “actually none of us know anything at all.”
If you feel a little lost, you’re in good company. The way through is to use AI every day, at work and at home. That’s how you learn what it’s surprisingly good at and where it falls flat. It’s the same way you got good at Workday: the real learning happens in the tenant, not the textbook.
We’re putting these takeaways into practice. Two things are new on our side.
First, Kognitiv is now a Claude partner. With Workday and Anthropic connecting Sana and Claude, that means we can help on both sides of the conversation, whether the work lives in Workday or not.
Second, we’re offering current clients a complimentary activation of their first delivered Workday agent. If you’ve signed Workday’s agreement for agents (the UMSA), we’ll set one up with you at no cost for our time. Workday still bills Flex Credit usage separately. It’s a low-risk way to see an agent working in your own tenant instead of in a demo.
Rising made Workday’s direction clear: agents doing real work, inside Workday or outside it. Getting value from that comes down to fundamentals. Decide where your users will interact with Workday, clean up the data your first use case depends on, start with something practical, and keep using the tools.
If you’d like to talk through where your tenant stands, or set up that first agent, reach out at kognitivinc.com/contact.
Want to see what a custom MCP connection could look like for your team? Explore our Workday AI services.