SECTION 3: Robotics Progress
Enterprise AI agents are stalling — not because of model performance, but because of permissioning. Every agentic workflow eventually hits the same wall: what is this agent allowed to touch, on whose behalf, and how does the system know? Workday's answer is to make its existing system of record the governance layer for agents. Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday's president for product and technology, told VentureBeat that customers often struggle when they cobble together solutions for their agents — the richness of the security model gets lost, and results become overly broad. "Sana makes sure the integrity of the approvals and security model is always adhered to," Kazmaier said. Workday expanded its partnership with Google to bring its Sana agent system of record to the Gemini Enterprise platform. Accuracy is harder to evaluate in HR and finance contexts than in most AI domains — "almost right is not acceptable" when paying people correctly or closing the books. Workday addressed this by building Gemini in as its base reasoning layer, then adding its context engine and business process logic on top, plus verification and classification models that "interrogate" outputs before execution. "Accuracy and identity, it turns out, are the same question: does the system know enough about the agent, the authorizing human, and the current state of the record to act correctly?"