India, March 20 -- Before Workday made the announcement official, Dataquest joined a leadership briefing with the company's senior executives to understand the thinking behind Sana and what it signals for the future of enterprise software.

When enterprise software companies speak about AI now, the easiest thing to say is that everything is about to change. Interfaces will fade, assistants will take over, and software as we know it will be reinvented. But that still feels a little removed from how enterprises actually work. Businesses do not run on possibilities alone. They run on approvals, records, reconciliations, policies and processes that have to work every single time.

That was also the central point Workday wanted to make in the ...