Workday's Rob Enslin says C1's real rival is SailPoint, as APJ customers ask how to stop experimenting with AI. Alex Zaharov-Reutt, Global AI and Technology Editor | Published 16 Oct 2026 The Asia Pacific and Japan media roundtable at Workday Rising 2026 started with the Ashes. An Australian journalist pointed out that a colleague moving home from Singapore was "coming back at the right time," because cricket season was coming and "we get to beat the English." But then we got into the real discussion - Workday, AI, real value and much more. Then Workday President, Asia Pacific, John Lombard, offered the room a deal. He'd been at Workday "three months and four days," he said, "so ask me anything. I can answer everything," he joked, good-naturedly, although he has obviously hit the ground running. The man most of the questions went to, though, was Workday President and Chief Commercial Officer, Rob Enslin, who joined in December 2024 after stints as CEO of UiPath, president of cloud sales at Google Cloud and about 27 years at SAP. He runs Workday's sales and decides how its new products, including the planned C1.ai acquisition, are taken to market. Alongside him were Lombard, who spent about a decade as APAC CEO of NTT Data (formerly Dimension Data) after senior roles at SAP and KPMG Australia, and Workday President, Japan, Chikara Furuichi, who joined in 2024 from cybersecurity company Tanium, where he was president for Asia Pacific and Japan. The three agents that matter most A journalist from Korea's Electronic Times asked which of the week's announcements would deliver the most value. Enslin started with the AI assistant for Workday Community, Workday's customer support site, which he'd shown off in the Community Day keynote. It summarises the help desk calls Workday receives and surfaces answers so customers "don't have to phone us for help," he said. Customers can also answer each other's questions, with Workday engineers connected in too. For immediate value from agents, he named three, in order: the Sana Self-Service Agent, the Developer Agent and the Deployment Agent. That's a telling list from the person responsible for sales. It skips the week's headline launches like Work Intelligence and the autopilot agents and picks the tools that are generally available today and easiest to prove. How APJ is different Another Japanese journalist asked how AI conversations with customers in the region had changed over the past year. Enslin pointed to the Singapore government, which he works with closely. "They are, I would say, very advanced in their thinking," he said, and "very well on their journey with many of our agent tools," starting with a better experience for Singapore's agencies. They're now working out which skills to switch on in the Sana Self-Service Agent. In Australia, Workday is working with "a couple of large companies" on use cases for Sana Enterprise, which connects Sana to other business systems. That's "more of a CIO discussion," he said, and often depends on how a company runs its AI across Claude, Copilot and other environments. Overall, he said, APAC is making progress on AI for HR and finance, but "it is lagging a little bit," and "that's true for Japan as well." The copy-paste economy Lombard added the most useful number of the session. Workday's own analysis of employees across the APJ region found that four out of five are struggling with what he called the "copy-paste economy," copying information from one system to another because their systems aren't integrated. They want agents to "move from the periphery to the core," he said. The customers he's met in his first three months want "really clear use cases and solutions and the ability to deploy these agents within their workplace." His warning to them echoed Workday's keynote message. "One of the things that's really important is the strong message that you need to redesign your business process," he said. Customers need those skills, both inside Workday and across its partners, to avoid simply adding an agent to an old process. Japan's CIO question Furuichi said the decision-making picture in Japan is different. Japanese companies are less likely than large companies elsewhere to have a dedicated CIO, he said, and in Japan, the decision on Workday tends to be split roughly evenly between IT and HR leaders. Enslin pointed to a Japanese customer in Workday's early program for Sana, which was given a year of free use in return for working closely with Workday on use cases. He'll be in Tokyo in two weeks. "How do I stop experimenting?" Enslin said customers everywhere are asking the same question: "How do I stop experimenting?" He described the typical CIO's dilemma. "I feel like the productivity is really good. With these tools, my employees are happy. But we really don't understand if we got anything from that," he said. "It's almost like I can't take it away because they're happy... They tell me they're more productive, but when I look at my numbers, it doesn't look like we're actually advancing anything." That's the same hidden productivity gap Wharton professor Ethan Mollick described in the Community Day keynote that morning. "I think we're getting out of the experimentation phase right now," Enslin said. Workday's pitch is that it can be specific about value because it works in defined domains. "We can be very specific in what value you get in HCM and very specific in what value you get in financials," he said. It also builds agents alongside customers using forward deployed engineers, getting daily feedback. "We harden these agents on the fly, and the speed of change is dramatic," he said. He singled out the Payroll Agent and Decision Intelligence as delivering "huge benefits." CIOs, CHROs and the "death match" I asked who leads AI decisions for Workday customers: the CHRO, the CIO, or both "having a death match." "I think you've got all three of those," Enslin said. Some CHROs are very advanced. Some CIOs understand how they can help. And in other companies they're fighting, "because they're also fighting for dollars," and for credit with the CEO. He was frank about how it got messy. Many companies started by experimenting with foundation model companies, and with Microsoft Copilot building agents on top of Workday by "extracting as much data as they could to create a flow on top of it." "If you understand the Workday environment, that's not a good idea," he said, because the result is weak, hard to change and can't be controlled. I added that it can also leak information. "Exactly," Enslin said. Workday's answer was to make its own platform open, with APIs, open data flows and MCP access. Now, he said, CIOs are telling Workday: "I want you to own all the agents that exist inside of HCM... But I want you to be able to connect into your agents through an MCP server." The deal Workday offers is simple. "You can connect whatever you want, but you'll go through Sana," Enslin said. Agents talking to Workday "will inherit all of our rules and all of our business frameworks." The split he expects: customers will use other vendors for agents outside finance and HR, and Workday for everything inside them. AI-native teams Enslin also said AI success depends on having "AI-native people." Workday's own agents are built by small, highly skilled teams in Hellermark's organisation, "not hundreds, three, four, five" engineers, who can build agents "at incredible speed." "If we didn't have that, I don't think we'd be anywhere where we are today," he said. Workday now generates code in its own proprietary language with AI, he said, and its engineers no longer write it by hand. Meanwhile, many CIOs are trying "to patch all of these things together," he said, and "experimentation is out of control." They can't manage the various agent control planes, and "none of the control planes coming out from all these other competitors actually understand identity," he said. "That's why we acquired C1." My question: will Workday sell against Okta? Enslin decides how C1 will be sold, so I asked him directly. At the executive press Q&A, Workday CEO, Aneel Bhusri, had said: "If we turned off access to Okta tomorrow, they'd be out of business." Okta has been a Workday partner for more than a decade and is widely used across APJ. Once the deal closes, will Workday's sales teams sell identity governance against Okta, SailPoint and Microsoft Entra? And what should a customer already running Okta on top of Workday do? Enslin was noticeably more diplomatic than his CEO. Here's his answer in full (lightly edited for clarity, as the room's recording wasn't perfect): "I think there's multiple [views]. I think there was a provocative statement, in a world where that's possible. But it's in the software world. Say, like the United Nations, we live in a weird political world. But everybody's kind of agreed that you can access, and there's been no real walls in the software industry that say 'okay'. ServiceNow's probably the second largest access into Workday. So it's not only Okta, [it's] ServiceNow. I don't think that will mature. I think what customers will have [to do] will be to figure out who does governance and things. Our competition will be SailPoint more than Okta. Okta does access. C1 is much more around governance than identity. How we bring that governance to our customers. They'll probably still have a combination of Okta and us. Then, you know, that'll be competition with Okta. I don't think that's where we are right now." When I suggested that competing with a partner is just business, he went on: "And there's at least lots of interest in this. If you look at the full stack for identity access governance, there's multiple layers of this, and they're all at different levels of maturity. Very fragmented. C1 has built an incredible technology team. It fits our ASOR discussion, and that's really why we think it's important. We're discussing simplicity when it comes to being able to identify who's coming in. Are they real, and so on." ASOR is Workday's Agent System of Record, its register for AI agents, and when I asked him to spell it out, Enslin explained it in HR terms: "So we actually treat an agent similar to how we treat an employee. They have an ID. They have rules. They have access rights. They have auditability, and so on. An agent can only do certain things, and that's why we talk about lawless and lawful. That's why when you come in, we validate [you] when you're coming through Sana. This person, these are the guardrails they can work in. They can't get outside of those guardrails." With so many agents out there, he added, "you've got to control them." "And you have to figure out what the traceability is. You have to figure out if the agent actually gave the right answer and so on. That's why C1 was an important acquisition to us." Data sovereignty is political An Indian journalist asked about data protection rules, which India and many other markets are tightening. "It's much more of a political discussion than a technical discussion," Enslin said. Saudi Arabia and the UAE require data residency for regulated industries, Europe requires sovereignty, and Canada is moving in the same direction. "Ultimately, we're going to do whatever governs that country," he said. Workday already has data centres in India, he said, and offers sovereignty in most of Europe. And it's not just the data. "The models we use also have to be data resident," he said, so a model hosted in the US can't be used where local rules forbid it. "We don't actually charge our customers for tokens" The same journalist asked who pays for the AI tokens behind Sana. Enslin's answer was the clearest explanation of Flex Credits I heard all week. "We don't actually charge our customers for tokens. It's the Flex Credits," he said, describing them as a "value currency." Which foundation models Workday uses, and how it runs them, "is up to us to make certain that we actually are doing it in a highly performant, operating margin way." "We drive the cost down ourselves, and the customer gets the benefit of the value," he said. Customers can see where the credits are going and which agents cost the most. Agents are fungible, so "we don't charge per agent," he said. "Flex Credits are like a universal credit. How you use the Flex Credit is totally up to the customer." That puts the burden on Workday. "If they're not getting value, they're going to switch it off," he said. "They don't have to shove software back to us and say I'm not using it. They can just switch it off themselves." He called it "a very different model than I think anyone else has taken on." Oracle might disagree: it has been bundling its Fusion AI agents at no additional licence fee. But Workday's approach does at least give customers a clear dial to turn down. My question: what's different from RPA? Enslin ran UiPath when robotic process automation promised to automate the back office, and Workday Chief AI Officer, Joel Hellermark, had called RPA "incredibly brittle." So I asked what makes agents different, and how Workday will prove value when, as Mollick said, employees hide their productivity gains. "With RPA, you don't understand the business process framework that underlies systems, but you can understand screens," Enslin said. That breaks as soon as screens change, and Sana's new interface changes from one user to the next as they type. "RPA just can't handle that," he said. "Generative AI just flattened that idea." He was candid about the limits of Workday's own agents, though. Sana Concierge "will struggle to work where it doesn't understand the model," he said. "It'll work fine in the open world where all the data is available, but it will struggle to go into an SAP system and do something there. Inside a Workday system, it's going to be amazing." He also admitted Workday still uses RPA internally. "Some of the RPA stuff we use internally works and does a really good job for a specific process. We haven't replaced it yet," he said. "It's just not a priority for us." He didn't directly answer the second half of my question, about hidden productivity gains, though his earlier answer about customers who "can't take it away because they're happy" covered similar ground. AI and Japan's shrinking workforce The final question came from a Japanese journalist, who asked how to explain Workday's platform and pricing to Japanese shareholders and finance professionals used to traditional practices. Enslin said AI has "a huge benefit to Japan with the diminishing population," and that many Japanese work processes are "well understood," making them good candidates. "Without having to completely change how Japanese work, the use cases for finance and HR will be transformative for Japan," he said. He closed by borrowing from Mollick. "If you're not experimenting with AI, even if you don't know what the outcome is, you have to, because it's going to change every single business model in the world in the next couple of years," he said. Companies that don't "will be completely left behind and might go out of business." Three things stood out. First, Enslin softened Bhusri's Okta line considerably. "Our competition will be SailPoint more than Okta" is the most precise statement Workday has made about C1's place in the market, and it matches what C1 actually does. Customers running Okta can relax, for now. Second, his Flex Credits explanation is a smart sales pitch: no per-agent licences, a universal currency, and the ability to switch off anything that doesn't deliver. Whether that beats Oracle's bundled agents will come down to how predictable the bills are, which Workday's own executives admitted all week is still being worked out. Third, there's a tension in his message. Customers need to "stop experimenting," but every company "has to" experiment or risk going out of business. Both can be true. Workday wants experimentation to happen inside its rules and its Flex Credits, with measurable outcomes, and outside the ad hoc Copilot flows built on extracted Workday data. What it means for Australian organisations Lombard's "copy-paste economy" figure will ring true for plenty of Australian organisations. If four in five APJ employees are copying data between systems, that's the first place to look for agent value. For Australian companies running Okta, Enslin's answer is clear: expect to run Okta for access and Workday with C1 for governance side by side. The vendor to watch is SailPoint. And for any Australian CIO in a "death match" with HR over who owns AI, Enslin's split is a useful starting point. Workday wants to own the agents inside HR and finance, and to let everything else connect through Sana and inherit its rules.

Workday has signed a deal to acquire C1.ai, an identity platform that manages system access for people and AI agents. It announced the agreement on October 13, 2026, at Workday Rising in Las Vegas. No price was disclosed. C1.ai connects to systems such as email, CRM, code repositories, and cloud infrastructure. It gives each person and agent the right access and removes it when no longer needed. The need is growing. C1.ai's research shows 95% of large US companies already run autonomous agents, yet Deloitte found only 21% have a mature way to govern them. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Workday's fiscal year 2027, which ends January 31, 2027, subject to customary closing conditions.

Workday to acquire C1.ai, a leading agentic identity platform for people and agents. Business · OCT 13, 2026 PR Newswire With C1.ai, Workday Can Give Every Person and AI Agent the Right Access from the Day They Join to the Day They Leave - and Everywhere in Between LAS VEGAS... With C1.ai, Workday Can Give Every Person and AI Agent the Right Access from the Day They Join to the Day They Leave - and Everywhere in Between LAS VEGAS, Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Workday Rising 2026 - Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY), the trusted agentic platform for HR, finance, and IT, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, a leading agentic identity platform for people and agents. C1.ai connects to the systems a business runs on - from email and CRM to code repositories, finance systems, and cloud infrastructure - giving each person and agent the right access at the right time and removing it the moment it's no longer needed. Most organizations manage employee access across hundreds of applications through manual service tickets, spreadsheets, and periodic reviews as workers join, move, and leave. The rapid adoption of AI agents has accelerated this challenge: C1.ai's research shows that 95% of large U.S. companies already run autonomous agents, yet according to Deloitte's State of AI research, only 21% report having a mature way to govern them. Organizations need to know who and what has access, why they have it, and when to remove it. Without those controls, AI agents can become lawless, creating security and compliance risks across the business. Every new hire, job change, and exit is a Workday event. Workday already governs the people, money, and agents at the heart of the enterprise. With C1.ai, Workday will become the identity governance layer for people, money, and agents. Every employee and agent using Workday can have the right access to the apps, data, and systems they need, from the day they join to the day they leave, and every move in between. "Today's companies run on a combined workforce of people and AI agents," said Gerrit Kazmaier, president, product and technology, Workday. "With C1.ai, we'll help secure that workforce by managing and enforcing exactly who - and what - has access to connected apps and systems, giving each person and agent the right access at the right moment to make work easier, safer, and more compliant." "Enterprises can't secure the AI era using yesterday's IT tickets," said Alex Bovee, CEO and co-founder, C1.ai. "Workday is the operational heart of the enterprise, and by bringing C1.ai's identity governance directly into that core, we'll be able to manage access for every human and agent in real time - making work faster without making it less secure." Managing Access for Every Worker and Agent in One Place Imagine a new hire spending their first few days filing tickets just to get access to Slack, Jira, and the finance dashboard - and then keeping that access long after changing roles. Workday and C1.ai will bring these processes together so that new hires get the right access when they start, employees gain and lose access as their roles change, and departing workers are removed promptly. This translates to less time waiting on system permissions for employees, fewer manual approvals for managers, and fewer open doors for attackers. Complete Visibility and Control for Agents Some agents act on behalf of an employee and should only reach part of what that person can, while others work on their own with broader access that needs close oversight. An agent that was retired last quarter shouldn't still be able to get in, and most companies don't yet have a way to manage access at that level of detail. The Workday Agent System of Record already gives companies one place to see and manage their agents. C1.ai will build on that, going beyond registering agents to also governing what they can access across Workday and other enterprise systems. Once registered, an agent can receive the access it needs, when it needs it, and lose that access immediately when its work or role ends. Transaction Details & Availability The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Workday's fiscal year 2027, ending January 31, 2027, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. BofA Securities is serving as financial advisor to Workday and Orrick is serving as its legal advisor. Qatalyst is serving as financial advisor to C1.ai and Ashurst Perkins Coie is serving as its legal advisor. About Workday Workday operates at the heart of the enterprise - HR, finance, and IT - where the margin for error is effectively zero. By tightly coupling AI with the context, guardrails, and trusted processes that run the business, Workday goes beyond AI that assists with work to agents that are capable of driving measurable outcomes. More than 11,500 organizations worldwide, including more than 65% of the Fortune 500, trust Workday to deliver. For more information about Workday, visit workday.com. (C) 2026 Workday, Inc. All rights reserved. Workday and the Workday logo are trademarks of Workday, Inc. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. About C1.ai C1.ai is the identity platform for the AI era. Our platform connects humans and agents to enterprise systems with scoped access, enforced policies, human approval, and a record of every action. With C1.ai, the fastest path to AI adoption at scale is the governed path, giving organizations visibility and control without sacrificing security or slowing innovation. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding Workday's intent to acquire C1.ai, the expected timing and closing of the acquisition, and the expected benefits and capabilities of the combined solutions. These forward-looking statements are based only on currently available information and our current beliefs, expectations, and assumptions. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of our control. If the risks materialize, assumptions prove incorrect, or we experience unexpected changes in circumstances, actual results could differ materially from the results implied by these forward-looking statements, and therefore you should not rely on any forward-looking statements. Risks include, but are not limited to, the satisfaction of closing conditions, regulatory approvals, our ability to successfully integrate C1.ai's operations and technology, and other risks described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including our most recent report on Form 10-Q or Form 10-K and other reports that we have filed and will file with the SEC from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. Workday assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release, except as required by law. Any unreleased services, features, or functions referenced in this document, our website, or other press releases or public statements that are not currently available are subject to change at Workday's discretion and may not be delivered as planned or at all. Customers who purchase Workday services should make their purchase decisions based upon services, features, and functions that are currently available. SOURCE Workday Inc. Published by News Desk · WeeklyReviewer The WeeklyReviewer news desk monitors breaking developments around the clock - sourcing, verifying, and publishing real-time industry news across business, technology, politics, science, sports, and world affairs. Every story that comes through the Live Wire is reviewed for accuracy before publication, keeping our readers ahead of the curve without the noise.