Workday faces growth threat as customers use Anthropic, Microsoft agents

Workday spent years becoming the place where companies keep their most sensitive people and money data. Now some customers are reaching that data with AI agents Workday didn’t build.

Tools powered by Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s agent platforms can query Workday records directly, skipping Workday’s own AI products entirely.

The details

Workday sells cloud software for human resources and finance. Its pitch for the AI era has centered on its own agents, which it has rebranded under the name Sana.

The problem is that external agents can do much of the same work. Agents running on Anthropic’s Claude, or built with Microsoft’s Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry, can read and act on Workday data without customers ever touching Workday’s AI tools.

The industry term for this risk is disintermediation. Put simply, a middle layer moves in between a vendor and its customers, and the vendor becomes plumbing.

So far, Workday’s own numbers don’t look like a company being sidelined. As of Q2 2026, over 5,500 customers were using Workday’s AI agents, a jump of more than 35% quarter-over-quarter.

Its AI SKUs also contribute close to $600 million in annual recurring revenue. That figure reflects growth of over 200% year-over-year.

Workday’s response: become the gatekeeper

Rather than trying to block outside agents, Workday has moved to govern them. Its main tool is the Agent System of Record, or ASOR.

ASOR works as a registry for AI agents, both Workday’s and everyone else’s. External agents get registered, tracked and overseen, with security controls, permission handling and audit trails built in.

Alongside ASOR sits the Agent Gateway, which handles connections from outside agents. Workday supports interoperability standards including Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A).

Workday also lets customers decide how external agents get in. Access can be configured as delegate or ambient, depending on permissions. Delegate access generally means an agent acts on behalf of a specific person. Ambient access is broader, letting an agent operate in the background within its granted permissions.

Microsoft is part of this arrangement rather than purely a threat. Under a partnership between the two companies, agents built on Microsoft’s platforms can register in ASOR for unified tracking and governance.

Background

CEO Aneel Bhusri has acknowledged the financial potential in monetizing agent access. Workday has built an Agent Management Hub and APIs designed for configuring external agents, signaling it sees outside agents as a revenue line, not just a security headache.

What this means

For investors, the story splits into two tracks. The near-term track looks healthy: a customer count past 5,500, quarterly growth above 35% and AI revenue approaching $600 million.

Workday’s counter is a platform play. If you can’t guarantee customers use your agents, make sure every agent runs through your registry, your gateway and your permission system.

What to watch next: how Workday prices external agent access, how many third-party agents get registered in ASOR, and whether growth in Sana adoption holds its pace as Anthropic and Microsoft tools spread.