Workday Updates on Europe, Sana & AI Progress

PAC recently attended the Workday EMEA Rising event in Barcelona, where the vendor updated on the progress it is making a year after unveiling a major investment drive in the region.

It has been a big 12 months for Workday, with a string of eye-catching acquisitions and a raft of new AI features, as the company positions as what CEO Carl Eschenbach calls “the “enterprise AI platform for managing people, money and agents.” But what does it all mean for customers, prospects and Workday’s rapidly growing number of ecosystem partners?

EUROPEAN & MIDMARKET PROGRESS

A quarter of Workday’s revenue comes from outside of the US, and the EMEA region continues to be a major source of growth and focus for investment.

More than 2,700 organizations in the EMEA region are now live on Workday supported by a new €175m AI Centre of Excellence in Dublin and a recently-opened customer experience centre in Milan. Last year’s flagship wins with clients such as sports retail group Decathlon (a major win for its Financial platform in France) and the UK Government (the “Matrix” shared services initiative) have been followed up in 2025 with new/expanded deals at Carrefour and Randstad.

The topic is sovereignty is high on the agenda for many European buyers amid rising concerns over data privacy and security. Workday plans to launch an EU Sovereign Cloud in 2026, and with recent hyper-scaler outages also putting service resilience in the spotlight, it has also expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to run its core platforms on GCP in the EMEA region.

The UK remains by a distance the largest market for Workday in the EMEA region, and a major win with Metro Bank (supported by implementation partner Infosys). But Workday and its partners also shared examples of strong new customer activity in the Benelux, Nordic and French markets, often spearheaded by the Financial platform. It also plans to launch a new operation in the Middle East in 2026 where it will target the region’s massive national infrastructure programmes.

In order to extend its reach across the EMEA region, Workday has launched an international managed payroll service in partnership with Remote which enables clients to hire and pay employees across 75 countries. This forms part of Workday GO, a new offering designed to better frame its core HR and financial platforms for the midmarket sector (which it defines as between 500 to 3,500 employees). Workday has been building momentum in this highly-competitive area of the ERP market, and has developed deployment agents which it claims can cut implementation times by 25%.

PORTFOLIO EVOLUTION

The central thrust of Workday’s product strategy is to help its clients harness the potential of agentic AI across their HR and finance functions.

Eschenbach stated that 75% of new customers select at least one AI product as part of their initial purchase, while three-quarters of clients using its core platform have adopted AI services that it provides on the underpinning “Illuminate” AI engine.

While the majority of Workday clients remain at an early stage in their AI journeys, PAC heard several interesting examples of AI-enabled outcomes. One was UK outsourcing group Capita, which has to manage huge spikes in its recruitment cycles across its customer contact centres and support services contracts. The company typically takes on between 8,000 to 9,000 new staffers each year, and has used the HiredScore tool that Workday acquired last year to help it screen and review more than 300,000 applications. Capita states that this has driven a 43% reduction in lead time from the point of initial application to the candidate speaking to a human colleague.

Expanding this AI functionality has been a key feature of its increasingly aggressive AI strategy which has seen it make six acquisitions in the last two years. This started in 2024 with Evisort (document intelligence platform) and HiredScore, and has continued in 2025 with Paradox (a conversational AI platform for recruitment), Flowise (low/code, no-code agent development platform) and Pipedream (an integration platform for AI agents).

But Workday’s most interesting move was the $1.1bn acquisition of Stockholm-based Sana, a specialist in building AI agents as well as AI-infused search and learning services. Workday talked about Sana as being “the front door to work,” and the move is designed to ensure that customers use Workday’s agents as a pathway into harnessing corporate data at a time when other platform giants are jostling for a similar position.

That is not say that Workday is doing everything off its own bat, and another of the company’s most important recent announcements was the launch of Workday Data Cloud. This serves as a data layer to provide non-duplicative access to the financial and HR data in its core to other data management and analytics platforms from partners including Snowflake, Databricks and Salesforce.

WORKDAY BUILD & THE PARTNER ECOSYSTEM

On top of the acquisitions, Workday is extending its reach across its customers through the “Workday Build” proposition. This is an evolution of “Workday Extend,” which has been up-and-running for five years, and was designed to enable customers to build additional apps, functionality and – increasingly through Build and the acquired Flowise capability – agents on top of their core Workday platform in order to tackle specific business pain points. More than 1,400 companies (including the likes of GSK and Netflix) now have more 3,000 Extend/Build-supported applications in production on top of their core Workday systems.

One major client with several years of experience in developing on top of its Workday platform is Lloyds Banking Group. It had developed add-on services including a single source of data to analyse its end user device estate in order to identify potential security risks or pinpoint individuals that would benefit from an improved user experience. The bank also built an app to track potential conflicts of interest across its workforce, replacing multiple department-level tools, as well as a centraliIMG_0885 2zed tool for tracking and assessing the skills across its Technology and Data teams.

Lloyds saved more than £600,000 a year by reducing reliance on external contractor support to track and analyze performance metrics. While the bank has deep enough resources to build its own services with Extend, Workday is trying to make life easier for others by adding a Co-Pilot Development service, underpinned by Google Gemini, to simplify and accelerate development cycles.

IT services partners are also building repeatable, add-on solutions using Workday Build. Kainos has developed a Pay Transparency Analyzer tool to help businesses operating in the European Union address the forthcoming EU Payment Transparency Directive, which comes into force in 2026.

Workday has aggressively built out its partner network, going from 200 to more than 1,400 in the space of just three years. The vendor has teamed with a number of existing implementation and support partners to push the Go midmarket proposition, while global allies such as PwC, Accenture and Cognizant continue to play a vital role in helping enterprise clients extend the core platform deeper into their operations, while exploring and scaling AI use cases. PAC expects spending on Workday-related consulting and integration services to grow by more than 11% in the EMEA region in 2026, driven by expansion into new territories, full-suite deployments and the increasing maturity of Workday’s increasingly mature AI proposition.

PAC’S VIEW

One of the most interesting moments of Workday Rising was when Gerrit Kazmaier, President of Product & Technology, referred to the company as an “ERP” vendor.

Workday has never previously referred to itself in these terms, and for many years has positioned as a challenger to the established order in HR and, latterly Finance. But the company insists that rather than signalling an intention to expand into areas such as CRM, it is intended to reflect the progress it has made with the Finance platform, at a time when some prospects still only associate the company as an HR vendor.

The Finance platform has been a major growth engine for the company on both sides of the Atlantic, and several clients talked about Workday’s Accounting Center proposition, which has helped them to harness and analyze critical financial data from outside of the Workday platform, as a standout feature. Above all, Workday’s fundamental value proposition is to provide clients with a single, clean and consistent data set with 75 million users generating more than one trillion transactions on its platform, using its uniform data model.

Despite the increasingly aggressive M&A strategy, Workday has not diluted this positioning, and recent moves have been designed to add the building blocks that will help businesses build, deploy and orchestrate intelligent agents across its core. The Sana acquisition is a big swing for Workday, and not just in terms of the price tag. It is a bold bid to make Workday the first click of the day that people make to open up the tools, applications and agents that support their job. Sana’s user interface is compelling, and it will be fascinating to see if this particular bet pays off in the face of competition from other corners of the wider enterprise applications space.

There remains a healthly level of pragmatism about the short-term potential of AI among Workday’s customers and indeed among the wider community at the event. From a buyer’s perspective, the speed at which the Workday proposition is evolving through its acquisitions and the agentic story can be a bit overwhelming. PAC talked with one customer who said that its limited internal skills and resources meant it would struggle to reap the benefits of recent and forthcoming agent releases. There is an important role for services partners to play in helping them understand and harness the most relevant aspects of the Workday portfolio as it continues to evolve.

The Go proposition is an interesting play for the midmarket, which is a market segment where Workday already has a strong base of business on which to build. It is also where enterprise rivals such as Oracle, Netsuite, SAP and Microsoft – not to mention new challengers such as Rillet and HiBob – are looking to build market share. Taking a fresh approach, with faster roll-outs and support from specialist partners will help it engage with the many midmarket organizations that play a crucial role in Workday’s target industries.