Artificial intelligence (AI) is the technology trend of 2023, and there really isn’t any competition for that title. As I speak to customers, they are eager to discuss AI, both because of their excitement but also their questions about how they can leverage AI responsibly in their organizations.
With SAP Business AI, SAP is laser-focused on how we deliver AI that is relevant, reliable, and responsible. In other words, AI that enables organizations to get all the amazing benefits of the technology while SAP helps solves for the complexities. In this release, AI-driven capabilities will be generally available across SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite to help elevate the human experience with innovations like the talent intelligence hub, SAP’s AI copilot Joule, and generative AI use cases.
- The talent intelligence hub – a foundation for AI-powered talent development and acquisition – helps organizations align employees to the needs of their business, helps employees find opportunities that align to their aspirations, and helps improve their future workforce planning. This groundbreaking, foundational tech creates a skills portfolio for each employee in the workforce and feeds that data across SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite to help surface more relevant experiences everywhere from recruiting and onboarding to learning and development to performance and succession.
- With Joule, employees can experience a game-changing, conversational AI that draws from a wealth of business data across your organization. Imagine your most knowledgeable colleague, available anytime.
- Finally, generative AI in this release is focused on helping recruiters create job descriptions – an example of a discrete task that can eat away at productivity when performed manually at scale – as well as be prompted with AI-generated interview questions based on job descriptions in Microsoft Teams. You can expect more of these kinds of use cases to support secondary tasks in every release.
AI is just one area we’re innovating in. Across our product vision areas, we’re delivering faster than ever on helping organizations build future-ready workforces, create elevated experiences for their employees, and maintain and enhance an agile and compliant HR. From the Horizon visual theme to a new integrated learning experience to integrations in Microsoft Teams that meet people in the flow of work to harmonization with the cross-system workflow, this release is packed with new and exciting capabilities.
Read on – then check out our preview release – and learn how our latest release can help ignite the potential in your workforce today.
SAP Business AI in SAP SuccessFactors Solutions
At SAP, we understand that AI has the power to transform experiences for employees, managers, recruiters, and HR professionals. Available in November, this release will include a set of AI-fueled innovations.
Talent Intelligence Hub
The talent intelligence hub is generally available with this release, providing customers with the foundation for AI-powered talent development and acquisition. Talent intelligence is and will be a critical component of SAP SuccessFactors solutions moving forward, with use cases for skills information being added across the entire portfolio.
When organizations understand the skills they have today and the skills they need for the future, they can develop organization-wide talent development strategies. At the same time, talent intelligence enables highly individualized, employee-led talent development that gives employees highly meaningful and rewarding careers, but also drives organizations to where they need to go.
AI will drive the creation of skills information, as each employee will see skills inferences in their growth portfolios that suggest the skills they may already have using data from SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals. This can simplify the process for employees and helps ensure higher quality skills data across the organization.
With this release, the talent intelligence hub can drive individualized recommendations for employees both in the new integrated learning experience as well as in SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace. But this is just the beginning, and you will see many more use cases for the talent intelligence hub across the entire suite in 2024.
Generative AI Use Cases for Hiring
Recruiters and hiring managers can benefit from the use of generative AI to create tailored job descriptions based on data from within SAP SuccessFactors solutions as well as external sources. Additionally, interviewers can generate interview questions based on the candidate profile as well as the job description to help ensure they are contextually relevant. Interviewers are proactively notified within Microsoft Teams to generate interview questions, creating a more efficient and streamlined interview experience.
Generative AI Copilot Joule
Joule is SAP’s AI-powered copilot that uses natural language processing to understand employee requests, helping them to quickly find information and complete tasks, such as updating their name or location and giving or requesting feedback. Joule will be able to guide through more complex journeys in the near future. Joule will initially be available in English for U.S. and European data centers and will be rolled out in other regions in 2024 and beyond.
Future-Ready Workforce
Integrated Learning Experience
Within SAP SuccessFactors Learning, we are unveiling a new, integrated learning experience that is now generally available. It features a redesigned, re-architected home page that can surface recommendations unique to each employee. This individualized experience helps drive a culture of learning by tapping into each person’s aspirations, motivations, skills, and preferences while staying aligned with organizational goals and priorities.
Driven by the talent intelligence hub, SAP SuccessFactors Learning uses each learner’s learning history and skills within the growth portfolio. And with enhanced search and filtering capabilities, such as type-ahead suggestions and key results that populate as the learner is typing, it can be easy to quickly locate the most relevant content.
Elevated Experiences
Horizon Visual Theme
With this release, we have completed the rollout of the Horizon visual theme to all employee-facing pages. This modern, elegant user interface brings consistency across the entire SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite and will be available for every SAP cloud application by the end of 2024.
HR in the Flow of Work: Microsoft Teams App
With the SAP SuccessFactors app for Microsoft Teams, now available on the Microsoft Teams app store, we are bringing high-value, actionable HR processes directly into the flow of work. In this release, common self-service tasks, such as clocking in and out, updating location, or viewing a pay statement, can be completed directly from Microsoft Teams, helping to reduce the need to switch between multiple applications.
Enhancements to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central
We are excited to introduce SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central quick actions, which can streamline manager and employee self-service. From the home page, employees can quickly complete common HR tasks, such as updating their chosen name and personal pronouns, while managers can initiate a transfer, promotion, location change, and more. These quick actions are also available in Microsoft Teams, SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone, and Joule, so users can complete critical HR tasks directly within the applications they are already using.
Agile & Compliant HR
Cross-System Workflow
The cross-system workflow capability is now generally available, which is designed to harmonize data and processes across platforms in a hybrid landscape, enabling increased productivity and reduced cost. This can empower customers using SAP ERP Human Capital Management on premise to more rapidly unlock the value of HXM with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central while maintaining on-premise applications like time, payroll, and benefits – as needed – so they can progressively make their move to the cloud.
Time Management
We are introducing the ability for administrators to leverage employee time data to generate leave-related forms and documents, which can be e-mailed or downloaded in multiple formats. We have also enhanced the absence-counting rules framework to allow absences to be deducted based on different day types and conditions, helping to support unique legal and local regulations.
We are also introducing new capabilities for auto-submission and mass approval of time sheets, helping ensure time information is available and processed in advance of a payroll run. To further enhance the time sheet experience, customers can now leverage a new business rule to display specific time types to relevant employees based on defined conditions. In addition, role-based time sheet alerts can now notify only the most relevant stakeholders. For example, late arrival or excessive overtime alerts can be sent to only the manager so they can address the situation separately with the employee. Administrators now have more flexibility to valuate time over longer periods, such as by quarter or year.
Each of these innovations reinforces how we are continuing to deliver on our human experience management vision – putting people at the center of every organization. These innovations will be available in production during the weekend of November 17. Select capabilities will be in preview today.
Watch the highlights video and read the SAP SuccessFactors second half 2023 release brochure for more detailed information.
Amy Wilson is SVP of Product and Design at SAP SuccessFactors.