Sana - AI Agents For Every Team

In September 2025, Workday announced its acquisition of Sana, a Stockholm-based AI startup, for approximately US$1.1 billion. This move signals Workday’s ambition to expand beyond HR and finance software into a broader, AI-driven employee experience. Or in the words of Workday themselves - Sana will turn Workday into the new front door for work. In this blog, we’ll look at who Sana are, what they do, and how they could help your organisation.

Who are Sana?

Sana was founded in 2016 in Sweden and has since become one of Europe’s most talked-about AI firms. The company has grown quickly, serving more than a million users across hundreds of enterprises, including the likes of Polestar, Electrolux, and Merck. It operates internationally, with offices in the US and UK as well as its Stockholm headquarters.

From the outset, Sana has focused on rethinking how employees access and interact with organisational knowledge. The company has built tools that combine learning, knowledge management, and AI agents into a unified experience. This vision of making work smarter, faster, and more personalised was a key reason Workday pursued the acquisition.

What do Sana do?

Sana has two flagship products: Sana Learn and Sana Agents. Sana Learn is an AI-native learning platform that allows organisations to create courses, assessments, and training material in a fraction of the time it would normally take. For companies struggling to keep pace with compliance updates, onboarding, or skills training, the ability to generate content in days rather than months is a major advantage. Just as important, Sana Learn doesn’t treat learning as one-size-fits-all. Its platform adapts to individual employees, providing tailored tutoring and personalised learning journeys.

Sana Agents extend this approach to everyday work. Instead of being confined to training content, these AI-driven assistants can connect to multiple data sources - including Workday data, Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, and other business systems - to retrieve information, summarise documents, or generate reports. The agents can also automate repetitive tasks, reducing the burden on employees and managers. A key design principle behind Sana Agents is accessibility: they are built to be configured with low- or no-code, meaning business users, not just developers, can create and deploy them.

What makes Sana especially compelling is the integration of these capabilities. Learning, knowledge retrieval, and workflow automation are often handled in separate silos. Sana combines them into a single, AI-driven layer that sits across an organisation’s knowledge and people data. For Workday customers, this promises a future where employees can not only manage their HR and finance tasks but also learn, search, and automate within the same ecosystem.

How can Sana help your business?

With Workday bringing Sana into its platform, the potential applications for organisations are broad. For learning and development teams, Sana Learn could dramatically accelerate how new training content is created and distributed. A compliance module that might previously have taken months to design and roll out could now be produced in a matter of days, ensuring employees stay up to date without long delays.

For employees, the benefit lies in personalisation. New hires, managers, and specialists each need different forms of support, and Sana’s adaptive learning engine provides content and tutoring that reflects those needs. This kind of tailoring helps employees progress more quickly and makes learning more engaging.

The agent technology opens up further possibilities. Imagine a manager preparing for performance reviews. Instead of gathering feedback manually from multiple systems, an AI agent could collate the data, summarise key points, and produce a draft report. Or consider a project team needing insights from thousands of documents spread across drives and applications. Rather than losing hours searching, an agent could surface the most relevant information in seconds.

The real promise lies in scale. By combining Workday’s vast datasets on employees, roles, and processes with Sana’s AI models, organisations can begin to deliver proactive, context-aware support at every level. That could mean anything from smarter onboarding journeys to more intelligent reporting and workflow automation.

Summary

Workday’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Sana represents more than just an investment in learning technology. It’s a step towards a new kind of enterprise platform: one that blends HR, finance, learning, and knowledge management into a seamless, AI-driven employee experience. Sana’s AI-powered learning and agent tools promise faster content creation, more personalised learning, and intelligent automation that reduces repetitive work. For businesses, this could mean greater efficiency, improved employee engagement, and smarter decision-making. Alternatives exist, of course, but Workday’s move shows the direction of travel for the enterprise software market – and it’s a future powered by AI.

How can Viewpoint Analysis help?

At Viewpoint Analysis, we help organisations cut through the noise when it comes to vendor selection. The Workday/Sana acquisition highlights how fast this market is evolving, and choosing the right partner has never been more complex. Our HR selection services are designed to make the process faster, clearer, and more confident:

• Technology Matchmaker – map your business needs to the most suitable vendors, including Workday and its competitors. Learn more here.

• Rapid RFI – quickly gather structured vendor responses to test capabilities and fit.

• Rapid RFP – run a focused vendor evaluation process without months of effort.

• 30 Day Technology Selection Process – move from requirements to vendor decision in just a month, with our structured methodology.

With so much change in the market, Viewpoint Analysis helps you make confident decisions at speed - we'd love to be at your side.