Workday has signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, an identity governance company that controls what employees and AI agents can access across a business's software. Workday announced the deal on October 13, 2026 at Workday Rising, its customer conference in Las Vegas.
Terms were not disclosed. Workday expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2027, which ends January 31, 2027, subject to customary closing conditions. BofA Securities and Orrick advised Workday; Qatalyst and Ashurst Perkins Coie advised C1.ai.
Workday said C1.ai's product will extend its Agent System of Record, the part of its platform where companies register and manage AI agents, so that it also governs what those agents and employees can reach in Workday and in other enterprise systems.
What C1 built
C1, which was originally known as ConductorOne and rebranded in 2026, connects to the systems a company runs on, such as email, CRM, code repositories, finance tools and cloud infrastructure. It grants a person or an agent access when they need it and removes it when they no longer do, with policies, human approval steps and a log of every action.
The company's platform combines three categories of identity software that are often sold separately: identity governance and administration, identity and access management, and privileged access management. It covers human users, non-human identities such as service accounts, and AI agents. Earlier customers named by the company include DigitalOcean, Instacart, Ramp, Zscaler, Loom and Panther.
Workday's release cited C1.ai research that found 95% of large US companies already run autonomous agents, and Deloitte research showing that only 21% of organisations say they have a mature way to govern them.
“Enterprises can't secure the AI era using yesterday's IT tickets.”
The founders and the funding
ConductorOne was founded in 2020 by Alex Bovee, who is CEO, and Paul Querna, the CTO. Both worked at Okta: Bovee as a senior director of product management and Querna as a senior architect. Bovee was also an entrepreneur in residence at Accel, and Querna previously founded ScaleFT. The company started in Portland, Oregon and is now headquartered in San Francisco.
Funding databases list a $5 million seed round led by Accel in 2021 and a $15 million Series A led by Accel in June 2022. In August 2023 the company expanded the Series A to $27 million with $12 million led by Felicis.
In October 2025 ConductorOne raised a $79 million Series B led by Greycroft, with the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund and earlier investors Accel and Felicis taking part. Greycroft partner Marcie Vu joined the board. SecurityWeek put total funding at more than $110 million after that round; FundedIQ lists $111 million across four rounds, and a recruiting profile of the company puts the figure at $116 million. The same profile lists the company at 101 to 200 employees.
Why Workday is buying
Workday sells HR, finance and IT software and says it serves more than 11,500 organisations, including more than 65% of the Fortune 500. Its argument for the deal is that every hire, role change and departure is already recorded in Workday, so the same system should decide what access a person has on day one and remove it when they leave.
The company gave the example of a new hire spending their first days filing tickets to get into Slack, Jira and a finance dashboard, then keeping that access long after changing jobs. With C1.ai, Workday said, access would follow the employee's record automatically, cutting waiting time for staff, manual approvals for managers and openings for attackers.
The same logic applies to agents. Some act for a single employee with part of that person's access; others run on their own with wider permissions. Workday said an agent registered in its system will get the access it needs when it needs it and lose it as soon as its task or role ends.
Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday's president of product and technology, said companies now run on a combined workforce of people and AI agents and that C1.ai would help secure it by controlling who and what can reach connected apps and systems.
Part of a run of AI deals
C1.ai is the latest in a series of AI acquisitions by Workday. At the previous year's Workday Rising it agreed to buy Sana, which makes AI tools for learning and content, for $1.1 billion, and it also agreed to buy Paradox, which automates candidate screening and interview scheduling. Earlier it bought Flowise, an AI agent builder.
Workday did not say whether C1.ai will continue to be sold on its own to companies that do not use Workday, or what will happen to the C1 brand after closing.
