Workday signed a definitive agreement on Oct. 13, 2026 to acquire C1.ai at Workday Rising 2026 in Las Vegas. C1 AI is a leading agentic identity platform for people and agents, and Workday said the deal would extend its control over access across connected systems.
Workday and C1.ai
Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday’s president of product and technology, said, “Today's companies run on a combined workforce of people and AI agents.”
He also said, “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.”
That is a shift from managing employee status changes inside Workday alone to acting as the identity governance layer for people, money, and agents across email, CRM, code repositories, finance systems, and cloud infrastructure.
Access control at scale
Workday said every new hire, job change, and exit is a Workday event, and it said employees and agents using Workday can have the right access to apps, data, and systems from the day they join to the day they leave.
The company also said organizations often manage employee access across hundreds of applications through manual service tickets, spreadsheets, and periodic reviews, which leaves room for slow reviews and stale permissions.
C1.ai said its research shows that 95% of large U.S. companies already run autonomous agents.
Deloitte's State of AI research shows that only 21% of companies report having a mature way to govern autonomous agents.
Alex Bovee on IT tickets
Alex Bovee, C1.ai’s CEO and co-founder, said, “Enterprises can't secure the AI era using yesterday's IT tickets.”
He added, “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.”
The financial terms are not public, and the closing timeline is still the key unresolved point for anyone trying to gauge when Workday’s access controls could reach C1.ai customers and whether the combined governance model will arrive as one integrated system or in stages.
