Workday has signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, an agentic identity platform for people and AI agents, the company announced October 13 at Workday Rising 2026 in Las Vegas. The transaction, disclosed in an 8-K filing, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Workday's fiscal year 2027, which ends January 31, 2027. Financial terms were not disclosed.
C1.ai connects to the systems a business runs on — email, CRM, code repositories, finance systems and cloud infrastructure — and grants each person and agent the right access at the right time, removing it the moment it is no longer needed. Workday plans to build the platform on top of its existing Agent System of Record, moving beyond merely registering agents to governing what they can actually reach across Workday and other enterprise systems.
The pitch rests on a stark gap. C1.ai's research says 95 percent of large U.S. companies already run autonomous agents, yet according to Deloitte's State of AI research only 21 percent report having a mature way to govern them. Most organizations still manage employee access across hundreds of applications with manual service tickets, spreadsheets and periodic reviews — processes that break down when non-human identities multiply faster than anyone can track them.
"Today's companies run on a combined workforce of people and AI agents," said Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday's president of product and technology. "With C1.ai, we'll help secure that workforce by managing and enforcing exactly who — and what — has access to connected apps and systems."
C1.ai CEO and co-founder Alex Bovee framed the problem in sharper terms: "Enterprises can't secure the AI era using yesterday's IT tickets." On stage at the event he described the division of labor — "Workday answers 'who is this,' C1 really answers 'what are they allowed to do'" — and called C1.ai "the runtime enforcement layer for agents." Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri added that HR has become "a natural source of identity" as agent access proliferates.
Underlying data from C1.ai's third annual Future of Identity Report, a March survey of 508 IT and security leaders at U.S. organizations with more than 1,000 employees, gives the deal its urgency: 80 percent of organizations reported at least one identity-related breach in the past year, 47 percent said they now have more non-human identities than human users, and only 22 percent claimed full visibility into those identities.
Workday says more than 11,500 organizations worldwide use its platform, including more than 65 percent of the Fortune 500. BofA Securities is advising Workday with Orrick as legal counsel; Qatalyst and Ashurst Perkins Coie are advising C1.ai.
The acquisition signals where enterprise AI budgets are shifting: from buying more agents to controlling the ones already inside the building. An agent that was retired last quarter should not still be able to log in — and, on the evidence, most companies currently have no way to check.
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