Workday has agreed to acquire C1.ai, an agentic identity platform, while separately expanding Sana as an action-oriented interface across HR, finance and IT. Taken together, the announcements show how enterprise software providers are assembling a control plane for agents that can do work, not simply answer questions.

C1.ai is designed to give people and agents scoped access, policy controls, human approvals and records of actions. Workday says the transaction is expected to close in its fourth quarter of fiscal 2027, ending 31 January 2027, subject to customary conditions. Sana Concierge is expected to enter general availability in the first quarter of 2027 after an early-adopter phase.

The governance significance lies in joining identity to execution. An agent needs a lifecycle comparable to a worker or service account: a named owner, a defined purpose, least-privilege access, time-limited credentials, approval boundaries and rapid revocation when its role changes. An audit trail must capture not only the final result but the systems, data and delegated tools used along the way.

Enterprises should resist creating a parallel identity regime for AI. The stronger approach is to bring agents into existing joiner, mover and leaver controls, while adding model-specific testing and observability. Workday’s direction makes that architecture a product proposition rather than a policy aspiration.

Execution Level Governance- What audit-ready agent governance actually looks like
David Girvin, founder and CEO of Assury argues that model-in-the-loop review, AI governing AI, is fundamentally unreliable for regulated environments: even the best-performing models miss a meaningful share of violations, the reviewing model is typically provided by the same vendor being reviewed, and prompt injection or context poisoning can compromise both the acting agent and its supposed overseer simultaneously. He makes the case for deterministic, architecturally enforced controls instead, walking through Assury's approach of autonomy zones, session risk accumulation, and credential starvation, which lets a compromised agent be cut off from its tools instantly rather than relying on time-boxed access. The conversation touches on why David is sceptical of just-in-time credentialing as a solution for agent security more broadly, since agent sessions don't run on predictable human timescales, along with the current gap between how identity and security vendors are pitching agent protection and what he sees happening at the execution layer in practice. He also discusses the compliance and audit implications of probabilistic decision-making, arguing that regulated industries will increasingly need tamper-evident, hash-chained audit trails that can withstand scrutiny from auditors and regulators who are only beginning to understand agentic risk, and reflects on a named frontier lab's own published framework as an example of the gap between research and practitioner reality. Elsewhere, David reflects candidly on building a bootstrapped security company in an increasingly crowded market, why he turned down aggressive VC funding to stay in control of the product, and what a credible third-party assessment of his own gateway would need to look like given that Assury sits directly in the execution path for every customer's agents.
BrightTALK
Share this post
The link has been copied!