Workday’s 2026R1 release, landing on 14 March, is not a cosmetic update. Across five meaningful feature areas, you can see a clear direction: Adaptive Planning is closing the gap between how planning software has historically worked and how planning actually happens inside real organisations. Configurable structures, role-based visibility, AI-assisted navigation. These are the kinds of changes that reduce friction for planners and give administrators more precise control.
Here is what is arriving, and what to pay attention to.
Configurable Workflows: replacing legacy Workflow and Process Tracker
Workday is replacing the legacy Workflow and Process Tracker with a new framework: Configurable Workflows. Using a graphical builder, you can now design reusable workflow definitions from scratch, assign tasks dynamically to users, user groups, or associations, and manage the full planning cycle lifecycle within Hubs.
The practical upside is significant. You can enforce data locking on submission and approval, automate task handoffs and notifications, and use sheet scoping to limit tasks to specific data slices, so planners only see what is relevant to them. Detailed monitoring and audit logs give you immediate visibility into where a cycle is progressing and where it is stalling.
This supports both bottom-up and top-down planning motions, which means it can flex to match how your organisation actually plans rather than forcing you to adapt your process to the tool.
What to do now: If your organisation currently uses Workflow or Process Tracker, this is not something to leave until the last minute. Start planning your migration to the new framework now. The legacy tools are being replaced, not supplemented.
Adaptive Planning Hubs: a centralised workspace for planners
Hubs is a new centralised workspace within Adaptive Planning. Administrators can build curated environments: a Finance Hub, a Sales Hub, a Budget Cycle Hub, that bring together the dashboards, sheets, reports, links, and tasks most relevant to a specific function or process.
For end users, this means less time navigating the application to find what they need, and immediate visibility of pending workflow tasks and key instructions when they land. For administrators, it is a meaningful step towards reducing the support burden that comes from users working out where to go and what to do next.
Hubs respect all existing access rules and permissions, so users only see what they are authorised to see. That is not a trivial detail. It means you can design a genuinely simple experience for planners without compromising your data governance posture.
Access rules on data entry columns in modeled sheets: protecting sensitive planning data
This is a feature many Adaptive Planning users have been waiting for. Previously, if you needed to restrict visibility of sensitive columns, including salary data, capital expenditure approvals, headcount requests, the workaround was often to build separate duplicate sheets for different user groups. That creates integration complexity and version control risk.
With 2026R1, you can apply access rules directly to data entry columns within a single modeled sheet. Planners collaborate on the same sheet and see only the columns they are authorised to access. Sensitive data stays protected without requiring architectural workarounds.
Beyond the security benefit, this has a real impact on data management efficiency. Consolidating workforce planning into one modeled sheet, rather than maintaining parallel versions, reduces the surface area for errors and keeps data current across the organisation.
Ask Workday for Adaptive Planning
Ask Workday for Adaptive Planning gains an enhanced prompting experience in this release, using agent orchestration to more precisely identify user intent and route queries to the correct skill.
In practice, this means that whether you are a modeler or an end user, you can ask targeted questions about specific accounts and get useful, contextual answers. Why is this cell locked for data entry? That kind of targeted, in-context feedback reduces the back-and-forth with administrators and helps users understand the model they are working with.
It is an early-stage capability that will mature over time, but the direction is clear: Workday is working towards a planning environment where users can interrogate the tool directly, rather than relying on documentation or internal support.
Predictive Forecaster: scalability and usability improvements
Predictive Forecaster receives two targeted improvements in this release. System guardrails now support larger datasets, with a clear distinction between forecast data and lever sheet data. Users also gain access to detailed lever sheet usage statistics on the history page.
For organisations running larger or more complex models, the scalability increase matters. It extends the range of what Predictive Forecaster can handle within a single instance. The usage statistics are a more subtle but genuinely useful addition: understanding exactly how your drivers are influencing your forecast is foundational to trusting the output.
What this release signals
Taken together, 2026R1 moves Adaptive Planning in a consistent direction: more control for administrators, less friction for planners, and better visibility at every level of the process. The shift from legacy Workflow tools to Configurable Workflows is the most operationally significant change for existing customers, and it warrants attention sooner rather than later.
If you are a current Mero customer, we will be in touch with guidance specific to your configuration. If you are an Adaptive Planning user working through any of these changes and would like a second opinion, we are happy to talk. Get in touch with the Mero team.