Workday Rising 25 - will Workday's $1.1 billion acquisition of Sana Labs really be L&D's "iOS for enterprise" moment?

Alongside this week’s Rising 25 conference, Workday took time out to announce the planned $1.1 billion acquisition of Learning & Development (L&D) tools provider Sana Labs. 

Founded in 2016, Sana’s main products include Sana Learn, a coaching and feedback tool featuring an AI tutor, and Sana Agents, AI-powered knowledge assistants that generate insights and content from enterprise data.

As per the official blah blah:

With Sana, Workday will create the work experience of the future, where enterprise knowledge, data and actions converge into one. This will help people get their work done and empower employees with AI agents that can:

• Find answers, information and files by instantly searching across a company's most critical data sources, including Workday, Google Drive, SharePoint, and Office365.
• Act proactively by anticipating needs, summarizing insights, and assisting with projects.
• Create presentations, documents, and dashboards, even full learning courses, based on company knowledge.
• Automate repetitive tasks and routine work by executing workflows end-to-end.

The announcement adds: 

Sana Agents extends enterprise AI beyond basic search and chat. With the platform's no-code agent builder, users can create AI agents to automate repetitive tasks and act proactively on their behalf. These agents streamline workflows while helping ensure that every action remains secure and compliant with company policies through the Workday Agent System of Record...Sana Learn will complement Workday Learning with hyper-personalized skill building capabilities and AI-native content creation at scale. Enhanced by AI-driven internal mobility with Workday Talent Optimization and HiredScore, this comprehensive learning suite will help employees build skills faster and help enable organizations to scale personalized learning experiences, supporting employee reskilling and upskilling initiatives. 

Why?

Workday Chief Technology Officer  Peter Bailis  picked up on the rationale for the planned acquisition:

Sana, you can think of this as an AI-native platform. They started in Learning. They have a kickass Learning platform. It's basically the most beautiful Learning platform you can imagine…It’s kind of unparalleled in its quality of user experience, and we're going to sell a lot of it.

But the real cherry on top is what Sana does for workers. So you can think of Sana as enterprise search over all of your data, workflows on top of those different systems, and then agents go and automate more of those tasks. So we hear from Sana customers that have adopted their agent products. They literally have their new browser tab pointing to Sana. And you can think of this as, say, a ChatGPT but connected to all of your enterprise data.

So I can go and ask, ‘What was the status of that latest sales opportunity’, it pulls from Salesforce, pulls from Google Drive, pulls from my calendar, pulls from e-mail ,to go and answer my questions. This is such a game changer for Workday because Workday, look, let's face it. It's an ERP system. It's a system for people to go manage their people and money; with Sana it becomes the place where more and more work happens. Sana customers are in the platform 7 times per day on average, and that transitions Workday to the place where work is done.

That's an incredible opportunity with AI, he argues, and will be offered to customers in a couple of ways:

One, for Learning as a separate sort of add-on within the Workday Learning platform…With Flex Credits, one, they’re included in your allotment and your base SKU. Two, with Sana agents, there's something we can offer to every single one of our 75 million users. No extra SKU, no add-on charge, pay for what you use, and we think people are going to use a lot of this. It's an incredible product incredible environment.

That iOS moment?

Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday’s recently-appointed President of Product & Technology, adds the bold claim that:

It's going to be a game changer. It's the new front door to work, and that's a statement of true conviction. AI predominantly is going to revolutionize how people interface with software. That's where a lot of it value truly lies. And we had the opportunity with Sana to bring a company to us who has completely rethought how people interface with information and with AI-based actions by bringing them together 1 experience. And we're going to bring this across the entire Workday platform for every customer, every worker out there. 

In most technology innovation cycles, there is a moment of profound change in how people are consuming information, he argues:

Think about mobile, for instance, right, an iOS, right? We think about Sana like the iOS for enterprise in the future. And we see it being like a power combination with Workday because we have incredible distribution. We have 75 million users already. And you can 100% expect us to leverage that to bring Sana as an experience to every one of them.

Now the beautiful thing about Sana is that it's not just an incredible enterprise search and enterprise action experience. It also gives us the opportunity to encompass many, many more workflows that people are not doing in Workday today.

Going back to that stat that people engage with Sana today on average seven times a day in the current form, Kazmaier argues:

We truly believe, if we bring this to all of our customers and we open up that AI extensibility for them, that many, many, many things that they are doing today with legacy ticket-based automation, programmed exits, DIY AI systems, they will just naturally fall into this because it's so easy. The art of good engineering is making it so easy that people almost fall into success with it They cannot even imagine another way of doing this anymore. And that's what we are creating with the Sana experience.

My take

There is not a single solution today in the market, which does what we can do together with Sana. 

A bold statement from Kazmaier. How it works out in practice will be seen over time, of course, but the pitch made this week at Rising sounds compelling. For more on L&D and Workday, check out Workday Rising 25 - Chief Learning Officer Chris Ernst on how Workday is putting its own L&D advice into practice.