Workday Channel Chief: Partners Are Key To AI And ‘Defining The Future Of Work’

In the wake of its Sana and C1.ai acquisitions, Workday is increasingly leveraging agentic AI to redefine HR and finance business processes. That’s changing the game—and creating opportunities—for the company’s channel partners, channel chief Bronwyn Hastings tells CRN.

Agentic AI is transforming financial and human resource management business processes and redefining how people work.

Workday, as a leading developer of enterprise finance, HR and payroll applications—and with a couple of agentic AI-related strategic acquisitions under its belt—is now a major player in providing the technology that’s driving that AI-fueled transformation.

And that means Workday’s channel partners, which today account for about 80 percent of Workday application implementations, are playing an increasingly important role in the success of those AI initiatives within many businesses and organizations.

“Partners have always been foundational for Workday,” said Bronwyn Hastings, who joined Workday in July as the company’s global channel chief, discussing the company’s agentic AI strategy in an interview with CRN. “What’s exciting is they’re becoming a core contributor to growth rather than an extension of growth.”

Partners are “being encouraged to lean into these new areas of being able to build agentic AI responses across HR and finance. It’s really allowing them to expand their businesses and [take] a more comprehensive approach to the future of work,” said Hastings (pictured), whose official title is senior vice president of global partners.

Hastings is a channel veteran who has held senior channel management posts at Docusign, UiPath, Google, Citrix, SAP and Oracle. In her interview with CRN, she noted that her resume includes experiences with application, software platform and agentic AI companies.

“Bringing all those three things together and then having the opportunity to define the future of work—who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?” she said.

KPMG, the global consulting and professional services company, is a longtime Workday strategic alliance partner that provides systems integration, cloud deployment and digital transformation services around Workday’s applications. (KPMG also just announced that it is adopting Workday internally as its own human resource management system.)

KPMG “really helps bridge the gap between what the platforms do and what our clients need,” and helps them leverage “the power of those insights and intelligence,” Chris Long, U.S. head of consulting and a principal at KPMG, told CRN. Much of that is provided through the KPMG Powered Delivery methodology, part of the company’s Powered Enterprise transformation framework.

“What we’re hearing from our clients, from an AI perspective, is that they’re really looking to move beyond isolated use cases and really lean into how they leverage the power of the data, the information, that is embedded in these Workday platforms” to meet business transformation goals, Long said.

Channel Impact Of AI Announcements At Workday Rising

This week at the Workday Rising conference in Las Vegas, the company launched a wave of new agentic AI products and platforms including autopilot agents that automate a range of functions across the company’s HR, payroll and financial management cloud applications.

Equally important was the news that Workday had struck a deal to buy C1.ai, a startup developer of leading-edge agentic identity technology for people and agents, in a move to boost the identity and access management capabilities of Workday’s applications.

The C1.ai acquisition deal, expected to be completed by Jan. 31, 2027, complements Workday’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Sana, developer of an AI-native enterprise knowledge management, workplace learning and conversational agent platform, in November 2025. At Rising this week Workday announced that Sana is the new agentic home screen and front-end user experience software for Workday applications.

No less important was Workday’s acquisition earlier this year of Pipedream and its integration platform that gives AI agents the ability to initiate workflows, pull data, and execute tasks across Workday and third-party applications.

The vision, Workday executives said at Rising, is that humans and AI agents will not just work side by side but collaborate within environments such as Workday. And partners will play a major role in making that a reality.

Workday’s AI initiatives provide a way for the company’s partner ecosystem to “become a driving contributor” to its AI strategy, not just a go-to-market extension, and bring value to customers, Hastings said. “It’s a very exciting time for partners to be leaning in with us.”

The Workday Partner Ecosystem

Workday works with a broad range of channel partners, more than 1,675 altogether, including global systems integrators, VARs and solution providers, MSPs, and ISVs, along with the major hyperscalers and leading data platform companies including Databricks and Snowflake. The company categorizes partners as advisory, innovation, services or MSP partners.

In addition to handling more than 80 percent of Workday implementation projects, partners today also source more than 30 percent of net-new annual contract value, Hastings said, up from a low single-figure percentage just a few years ago.

“It always takes the right partners with the right knowledge to really bring AI and agentic to life for customers with real use cases and real value,” Hastings said. The goal today is to ensure that “partners are deeply embedded with customers” to fully realize the benefits of AI.

KPMG is one of those partners. In addition to implementing Workday, KPMG helps businesses and organizations adopt industry best practices and, more recently, layering AI on top of that as clients look to make optimal use of enterprise data and their employees’ experience to improve decision making, Long said.

“And what’s important to our clients is making sure that they’re getting sustainable results and value from their investments,” he said.

Long said one of the biggest challenges around AI today is building client trust in the technology and its outputs. “CFOs and CROs are really looking to embed AI into everyone’s day-to-day work. And in order to connect it into that business process and help employees take action, you’ve got to have trust in the data,” he said.

PwC, the global professional services giant, also partners with Workday to provide business transformation services around the vendor’s HR and finance applications.

“But now with AI, it’s no longer just about transformation. It’s about agentic AI transformation and how you get there,” said Claudio Valera, global Workday practice leader at PwC, in an interview with CRN. “We’re seeing a lot of activity and a lot of interest and movement in the market right now around how to get value from their investment in Workday when it comes to agentic capabilities and just overall transformation capabilities.”

Expanding Initiatives With ‘Innovation’ Partners

Workday has been especially active over the last two years in expanding the number of “innovation” partners it works with, particularly systems integrators and ISV partners who integrate their products with Workday software (known as “build-with partners,” in Workday parlance) and those who develop products on the Workday platform (called “build-on” partners).

“Starting about two years ago, the way we think about developing, growing, curating the ISV ecosystem has taken on a lot more importance and significance for the growth of our business,” Mark Woollen, group vice president of partner innovation who heads up Workday’s ISV program, told CRN.

Build-on partners, now numbering about 170, develop Workday-native applications that extend the functionality of the vendor’s applications. They can orchestrate business processes for specific vertical industries, for example, or provide analytics capabilities that tap into Workday data for decision support tasks. Many ISVs make their products available through the Workday Marketplace and more than 60 have joined the Workday Agent Partner Network.

Woollen said PwC is one such innovation partner, leveraging its expertise in the healthcare space, for example, to develop a Workday-native physician compensation application.

The new agentic AI capabilities announced at Rising this week continue the evolution of Workday’s software into a “trusted agent platform” that ISVs can use to develop agentic applications.

“This is really important for our partners across the board, and in particular the ISV partners,” Woollen said. “It allows them to bring new innovation, new IP [intellectual property] to our shared clients and customers.”

He cited Auditoria, which develops finance automation software, and Censia, a developer of talent intelligence and workforce analytics apps, as examples of companies building agentic products on Workday. Customers, Woollen said, “need those agentic capabilities from the Auditorias and Censias of the world” while also seeking assurance that “they are trusted and that, effectively, as you’ve heard us say, they’re lawful agents.”

Woollen also stressed the importance to innovation partners of this week’s announcement that Workday is applying the Sana enterprise knowledge, learning and AI agent technology it acquired last year to be the new agentic home screen and front-end user experience software for the company’s cloud applications.

By providing a universal Workday user experience across both Workday and ISV applications, the new interface will make it easier for innovation partners to develop applications that tap into Workday workflows, Woollen said.

Channel chief Hastings noted that partners are very-well aware that agentic AI is disrupting “traditional deployment economics” and have responded by “moving away from routine configuration and maintenance” services and are expanding into higher-value “redesigning business” services such as developing agents for vertical industries, custom workflows, and specific personas such as CFOs.

Hastings acknowledged that all this requires some “agility of learning” for partners and Workday is providing assistance through “forward-deployed engineers” who work with partners as they develop agentic AI solutions and services.