Workday has signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, an identity-governance platform for employees and AI agents, with plans to connect access permissions to hiring, job changes and departures across enterprise applications.
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Workday’s fiscal 2027, which ends January 31, 2027, subject to customary closing conditions. The planned integration would extend Workday’s existing Agent System of Record, a service for registering and managing organizational AI agents, into controls over what those agents can access.
C1.ai connects to business systems including email, customer relationship management applications, code repositories, finance software and cloud infrastructure. Its platform supports scoped access, policy enforcement, human approvals and records of actions performed by people and agents. Workday serves more than 11,500 organizations worldwide with its HR, finance and IT services.
Workday plans to use workforce events as triggers for those permissions. A new employee would receive access when joining, gain or lose permissions when changing roles, and have access removed on departure. The company says bringing these processes together would reduce manual tickets and approvals across connected applications.
The agent controls would address both software acting for an employee and agents operating independently. Workday says registered agents would receive access as needed and lose it when their task or role ends, extending governance beyond simply maintaining an inventory of deployed agents.
Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday’s president of product and technology, said the acquisition would help the company manage and enforce access for a workforce that combines people and AI agents. C1.ai chief executive and co-founder Alex Bovee said the companies intend to bring identity governance into the systems that already manage enterprise operations.
Workday’s agent ecosystem already includes OLOID’s Aura identity-assurance integration, which applies identity checks to sensitive workforce actions such as credential recovery and account unlocks. That service addresses verification of the person requesting an action, while the C1.ai agreement concerns governance of access across systems.
Enterprise application controls have also expanded through Pathlock’s Nexus platform, which governs human users, agents, bots and service accounts across business applications. Workday’s proposed acquisition would bring C1.ai’s access-management capabilities into its own workforce and agent-management environment.
Sources: Workday
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
