Workday, an enterprise platform spanning HR, finance and IT, has agreed to purchase C1.ai, a company whose technology controls what employees and AI agents can access across business applications.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
According to Workday, most organisations still rely on manual service requests, spreadsheets and periodic audits to manage which employees can reach which systems.
The challenge has grown more acute with the rise of autonomous AI agents.
C1.ai’s own findings indicate that 95% of major US enterprises already have autonomous agents in operation, yet separate research from Deloitte’s State of AI programme suggests only 21% report having a mature way to govern them.
Without adequate controls, Workday said, AI agents risk becoming ungoverned, creating security and compliance exposures across the business.
C1.ai tackles this by linking directly into the tools a company depends on daily, from email and customer relationship management software to code repositories, financial platforms and cloud infrastructure. The platform continuously calibrates permissions so that each individual or agent holds only the access their current role demands.
Workday product and technology president Gerrit Kazmaier said: “Today’s companies run on a combined workforce of people and AI agents.
“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.”
Recruitment, promotions, transfers and departures all originate inside Workday. Embedding C1.ai’s capabilities into that workflow is expected to create a natural trigger point for granting, adjusting and revoking permissions in real time, the company said.
In practical terms, a newly hired employee would receive appropriate system access from their first day, see those permissions shift automatically when they change roles, and lose all access promptly upon leaving, Workday said.
The complexity deepens with AI agents. Certain agents operate under the umbrella of an individual employee and should be limited to a fraction of that person’s permissions, while others function autonomously and require broader but closely monitored access.
Workday already maintains an Agent System of Record that serves as a single register for an organisation’s agents. C1.ai is expected to extend that foundation by actively policing what each agent can reach and stripping permissions the moment a task concludes.
C1.ai CEO and co-founder Alex Bovee said: “Enterprises can’t secure the AI era using yesterday’s IT tickets.
“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.”
Completion of the deal is anticipated during the fourth quarter of Workday’s fiscal year 2027, a period that concludes on 31 January 2027, and remains conditional on standard closing requirements.
BofA Securities and Orrick are advising Workday on the financial and legal aspects respectively, while C1.ai has engaged Qatalyst as financial adviser and Ashurst Perkins Coie as legal counsel.
In a related announcement, Workday unveiled Work Intelligence, a new capability designed to map how AI is altering the individual tasks that make up each job and to flag the skills workers will need going forward. The tool is underpinned by Workday Skills Cloud, which is claimed to serve more than 3,450 customers and draws on a structured taxonomy of over 75,000 defined skills.
Last year, Workday acquired Swedish AI company Sana in a deal worth approximately $1.1bn in a move to enhance its enterprise platform by integrating the latter’s advanced AI capabilities.
