2026 Tech Trends Through a Workday Lens

To help fill the agentic reality gap, Workday takes a platform approach to developing AI so that innovations can be scaled across its suite of applications, including human capital management (HCM), financial management, planning, supply chain, and analytics. The idea is to maximize the number of use cases throughout the enterprise where agents and other AI-enabled applications      can genuinely augment human performance—freeing employees from mundane tasks, elevating their skillsets, and helping to fill any productivity gaps. For instance, Workday offers purpose-built agents for collections, financial audit, spend and procurement controls, expense policy enforcement, and forecasting, among others. Workday takes a risk-based approach to agent autonomy: agents handle routine tasks and surface insights, while humans retain decision authority over consequential processes. Central to this vision is Workday’s treatment of AI agents as digital workers—a new form of labor that can be onboarded, monitored, and managed alongside human employees, rather than deployed as isolated tools layered onto existing workflows.

Workday has made key investments to strengthen its agentic foundation, acquiring both Sana and Flowise and integrating them into a unified AI platform. Sana—now Workday’s AI brand, positioned as superintelligence for work—powers the agents embedded across Workday’s applications, serves as the conversational AI interface for workers, and provides the underlying technology on which Workday builds all AI capabilities. Flowise’s agent-builder technology extends this foundation, enabling both business users and developers to create AI agents—from simple automated workflows to complex, enterprise-grade applications—directly on the Workday platform.

As a leader in digital transformation, Deloitte offers organizations the process, governance, and structural know-how needed to implement AI, and agentic AI, responsibly and effectively. This includes assistance with developing AI strategies, identifying scalable use cases, prepping the human workforce, and achieving rapid, measurable ROI by building, deploying, managing, or customizing Workday AI.

Architecture and design matter, perhaps more than ever, in the exploding world of AI. As consumption-based pricing becomes the norm across hyperscalers, uncontrolled AI usage and poorly designed agentic workflows can lead to ballooning costs. One of the most underestimated AI cost drivers is not the models themselves but the infrastructure required to feed them. Siloed data, legacy applications, and fragmented architectures create significant overhead in data movement, latency, and compute. Consolidating onto a unified system of record—where financial, workforce, and operational data coexist natively—can materially reduce these costs while giving AI the governed context it needs to perform.

The Workday tech stack is evolving to tackle these issues head on. For instance, Workday’s Agent System of Record (ASOR) gives organizations the visibility and governance needed to manage their agents, control usage and costs, and enable real-time insights. It is designed to provide a complete view of all AI agents—those native to Workday as well as those available from third parties such as Zora AI™ by Deloitte. Workday has also introduced Workday Data Cloud, a new data layer that will help organizations unlock the strategic value of their HR and finance data by connecting it to their existing analytics platforms and operational systems. Workday Data Cloud features zero-copy integration to Databricks, Salesforce, Google Cloud, and Snowflake to enable real-time insights while eliminating the need for costly data exports, bulky reports, and stale duplicates, thus helping to ensure only clean, governed data is used.

While these innovations go a long way toward giving organizations the tools they need to manage the explosion of AI, leaders still need to determine the most effective way to use them. Deloitte offers end-to-end support and advisory services ranging from AI strategy to Workday enablement. This includes designing solutions and optimizing architectures to extract maximum value from Workday Flex Credits—a program through which Workday customers can access AI innovation. Customers receive an initial allotment of credits at the start of each contract year, with the option to purchase more as they scale. Credits can be applied toward Workday’s AI agents, features, and platform capabilities—with full transparency into consumption and the ability to adjust usage as needs evolve. The model is designed to ensure AI investment scales in proportion to value received, not as an unchecked operational cost. From build to run to operate, Deloitte stands out as one of the few consultancies that can help tech leaders use Flex Credits and other tools to design a scalable, AI-optimized architecture that aligns costs directly with the value they receive from Workday.

AI elevates tech to a strategic, future-shaping function. However, success isn’t only about tools—it’s about redesigning roles, responsibilities, and structures to thrive in an AI world.  As the boundaries between business and technology blur, tech leaders may find themselves with a broader range of responsibilities as they are charged with investing in resilient infrastructure, prioritizing governance and cybersecurity, and aligning AI to measurable value.

In fulfilling these responsibilities, they may have opportunities to lead by example by demonstrating how the latest developments in AI, such as Workday Build, can be applied for real impact and value. Workday Build is a new developer platform that gives Workday customers and ecosystem participants the power to create, share, and scale AI-powered solutions directly on Workday.

Deloitte, as a leading human capital consultancy and Workday alliance partner, can help tech organizations to reshape themselves for the world of AI. Deloitte offers road-mapping sessions, maturity assessments, and customized labs to determine the skills technology organizations may need as they transform and how they can leverage AI safely and securely while keeping humans in the loop.

Innovation inspires positive change but it also raises practical concerns. In implementing AI, many organizations fear introducing algorithmic bias, exposing sensitive data, losing auditability, and making legal and regulatory missteps. These fears often serve as the gating factor in AI adoption. They must be addressed if an organization is to move forward successfully. To allay these fears, Workday makes trust, transparency, and security foundational to its platform. It invests in a continuous development and deployment pipeline based on the best practices of DevSecOps. This continuous release process applies to the security enhancements as well so every customer benefits from a security model designed to meet the needs of the most risk-averse and security-focused customers in the ecosystem. Advancements such as ASOR further bolster its commitment to balancing innovation with security by giving users visibility into agent permissions and behavior. ASOR further bolsters this commitment by giving organizations visibility into agent permissions, actions, and behavior. It also addresses a regulatory reality often overlooked in agentic AI discussions: compliance requirements like separation of duties apply equally to digital workers and human ones. By tracking agent identities, permissions, and full audit trails, ASOR enables organizations to enforce the same controls across their entire workforce—human and AI alike.

By making human-centered, responsible AI a design principle, not an afterthought, Deloitte can help organizations to safeguard their data before, during and after a Workday go live. Deloitte has codified transparency and responsibility through its Trustworthy AITM framework, which spans seven dimensions: transparency, fairness, robustness, privacy, security, responsibility, and accountability. Through this framework and its multi-disciplinary capabilities across finance, HR, risk and compliance, and cybersecurity, Deloitte can assist organizations in evaluating their AI readiness and ensuring human accountability in sensitive processes.