Workday to Buy C1.ai as Identity Governance Layer
Workday said the deal will let it govern access for employees and AI agents from hire to offboard.
Workday, Inc. (WDAY), the cloud-based human capital and financial management software company, said it has agreed to acquire C1.ai, an identity-governance software company, in a transaction expected to close in the fourth quarter of Workday’s fiscal year 2027, ending January 31, 2027, subject to customary closing conditions.
The company did not disclose a purchase price, cash-versus-stock mix, or exchange ratio.
Workday said the combination is intended to make it the identity governance layer for people, money, and agents, giving every employee and agent the right access from the day they join to the day they leave. That framing puts C1.ai’s access-control technology alongside Workday’s existing record of who is on the payroll, what they are authorized to spend, and which systems they can touch.
“Today’s companies run on a combined workforce of people and AI agents,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, president, product and technology, Workday.
The rationale sits inside a broader push by enterprise software vendors to fold identity and access decisions into the same platforms that already manage employees, workflows, and spend. ServiceNow’s 2025 purchase of Moveworks was pitched as extending agentic AI to every employee, and Salesforce’s completed Informatica deal was described as a data foundation that lets AI agents operate safely at scale. Palo Alto Networks’ CyberArk acquisition, closed in February 2026, was framed as extending privileged-identity controls to human, machine, and agentic identities.
Workday’s own recent deal activity has followed a similar thread. In August 2025, it said it had entered a definitive agreement to acquire Paradox, a candidate-experience agent, and had acquired Flowise, a low-code platform for building AI agents, while unveiling an AI developer toolset and the Workday Agent Partner Network. The C1.ai purchase is the identity-governance step in that sequence: the layer that decides which of those people and agents may act, and on what.
The company said the close is expected in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027, subject to customary closing conditions. Until those conditions are satisfied, the transaction remains an agreement rather than a completed combination.