Last week I asked who’s accountable when an agent has its own identity. This week Workday bought a company to answer that.

Workday announced it’s acquiring C1.ai, an identity governance platform that handles access for both employees and AI agents. Same access lifecycle, same offboarding, same audit trail. They’re calling it the identity layer for people, money and agents. That’s a market answer to a question that was open a week ago. If an agent needs credentials to work across your systems, somebody has to issue them, scope them, and revoke them when the agent is retired. Turns out the answer looks a lot like HR. The other number floating around this week is Anthropic’s own workforce report. Headline figure is that employee-directed agents logged six hours of runtime for every estimated human hour by August. Worth reading the methodology before repeating that number though. Agent hours count inference and tool use. Human hours are estimated by multiplying headcount by a 40-hour week, not actual time records. And about 80% of interactive session time is the agent sitting idle waiting for someone to respond. So it measures machine runtime, not six people’s worth of finished work. The part that’s harder to dismiss is the hiring data. Junior share of technical hires went from 27% to 9% since early 2025. Anthropic calls the analysis descriptive rather than causal, which is fair, but the pattern is there. What strikes me about all of this together is how fast the governance tooling is catching up. A year ago nobody was selling identity management for agents. Now it’s an acquisition.