At its annual SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, execs from SAP SuccessFactors announced a set of new products and updates to its human capital management (HCM) platform offering amid the show. The enterprise software behemoth is looking to better leverage AI and agents, integrate and maximize data insights, and help reshape how companies think about skills and training.
“Three themes that are unmistakable,” said SAP SuccessFactors CEO Dan Beck said of customer needs and related product development. “Excitement about AI. How do I adopt it? There’s tension there. What does that mean for the future of work? What does it mean for leadership?…The second theme is data. [Customers] want to make better decisions…want to do more with data. And thirdly is skills…We’re actually living into the promise of skills.”
AI onward. SAP execs describe their strategy to address this moment of rapid change as a “flywheel,” noting that by combining the breadth of SAPs applications, the deep wells of business data available to customers, and new AI use cases powered by that context and data, organizations can transform the way work gets done.
Beck pointed to new AI tools and features inside SuccessFactors such as asking your paycheck a question with Joule, a new feature aiming to reduce employee-HR help desk tickets. It works by arming Joule in SAP’s payroll solution so employees can get answers related to pay from AI informed by company policy and relevant context. Beck contends that about half of all HR help desk tickets are related to payroll.
SAP also announced its new Performance and Goals Agent that gives managers insights and helps facilitate better performance conversations with their employees. The tool, as showcased at Sapphire, can alert a manager of an upcoming performance review, flag that the employee has not begun their self-evaluation, for example, and work on your behalf to nudge the employee to complete it or even aid them in completing the document.
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“In the last six months, we taught Joule 10 new languages. So for the first year-and-a-half of Joule, it spoke English. Now it speaks 11 languages,” Beck told HR Brew. “By the end of the year, we’re taking it to 30 languages…The other thing we’re doing, in addition to the language capability, is bringing Joule to mobile. Of 154 [general availability] use cases, 97 of them will be available on mobile.”
These SAP offerings are also designed to invite collaborators on AI development; the company is partnered with top foundational models like Anthropic, Microsoft and Google, and opened the development up for customers to build out use cases with the underlying technology.
“SAP has signaled very clearly in both our actions and our announcements, a spirit of openness. We are not the only game in town on AI,” Beck said. “We are dutifully playing nice in the sandbox.”
Don’t forget data. New People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud uses people, skills, finance, and business data to build out useful new insights.
“This is our new analytic offering built in Business Data Cloud… this is the logical successor product to Workforce Analytics,” Beck said of SAP’s data product launched in February. “Do I have the right mix of labor…What am I paying for skills? What is my cost of labor? A logical intersection of SuccessFactors and finance data.”