Workday to acquire identity platform C1.ai to govern people and AI agents
What's the deal? Workday has signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, an agentic identity platform for people and AI agents. The companies announced the deal at Workday Rising 2026 in Las Vegas on October 13. Terms were not disclosed.
What does C1.ai do? It connects to the systems a business runs on — from email and CRM to code repositories, finance systems, and cloud infrastructure. The platform gives each person and agent the right access at the right time, then removes it once it's no longer needed.
Why now? Most organisations still manage access across hundreds of apps through manual tickets, spreadsheets, and periodic reviews. The rise of AI agents has sharpened the problem: C1.ai's research shows 95% of large US companies already run autonomous agents, while DeloitteDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → found only 21% have a mature way to govern them.
What's the endgame? Workday already governs the people, money, and agents at the heart of the enterprise. With C1.ai, it aims to become the identity governance layer across all three, controlling access from the day a worker or agent joins to the day it leaves.
What changes? The combined offering targets faster onboarding, fewer manual approvals, and prompt removal of access when roles change or workers depart. For agents, it extends Workday's Agent System of Record beyond registration to govern what each agent can reach across Workday and other systems.
"Today's companies run on a combined workforce of people and AI agents," said Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product and technology at Workday. C1.ai chief executive officer and co-founder Alex Bovee added: "Enterprises can't secure the AI era using yesterday's IT tickets."
The signal: As enterprises deploy autonomous agents faster than they can govern them, access control is becoming a core layer of the AI stack. By folding identity governance into its platform, Workday is betting that managing who — and what — has access will be as central to the enterprise as managing the workforce itself.
Read more: prnewswire.com
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
