Today, C1.ai signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Workday.
Six years ago – almost to the day – Paul Querna and I bet that identity would be the most important control point for companies in the future. AI has laid bare that the bet was correct. And today that bet gets a bigger stage.
The workforce changed shape#
In the cloud era, the enterprise had a stable shape. People joined, changed roles, and left. IT granted access through tickets, and security checked the work once a quarter. It worked because every identity started as a person in an HR system.
Every company now runs on a combined workforce of people and AI agents. Agents spin up in seconds. Some act on behalf of an employee. Others run on their own, around the clock, across email, CRM, code repositories, finance systems, and cloud infrastructure. Agents don't file tickets, and they don't wait for a quarterly review.
C1.ai is the identity platform built for the agentic enterprise#
We built C1.ai to replace legacy IGA and IAM with one platform that governs every identity in the enterprise, human or agent. Every identity gets the right access, for as long as it's needed, and every action is on the record. We built a platform that delivers identity governance at the speed of AI. That's how the fastest path to AI becomes the safest one.
Identity belongs at the core#
Every new hire, job change, and exit is a Workday event. More than 11,500 organizations, including more than 65% of the Fortune 500, run their people, money, and agents on Workday. With the Workday Agent System of Record, they have one place to see and manage their agents.
Identity governance belongs at that core. Workday knows who each person is and what each agent is for. C1.ai governs what each of them can access, across Workday and every other system they touch. Together, every person and agent gets the right access from the day they start to the day they leave, and through every move in between.
Joining Workday will get our mission to far more organizations, far faster.
What's next#
To our customers: you trusted us to govern access for your business in the AI era, and we're excited to keep earning that trust.
To our partners: many of our best wins came side by side with you.
To our team: you built an incredible technology platform which powers some of the most important businesses in the world. Let’s do more of that.
When we started C1.ai, we said identity would become the control plane for how work gets done. Today, the company at the center of the workforce agreed. Now we get to prove it at scale.
