In today’s world of constant change, HR leaders are being asked to do more than ever before: anticipate skills shifts, personalize the employee experience, and navigate complex regulations—all while staying agile in the face of accelerating business transformation.
SAP SuccessFactors HCM gives organizations the tools to lead with confidence. Part of the SAP Business Suite, SAP SuccessFactors brings together global core HR, AI-driven insights, and a unified skills foundation to connect people and processes, close skills gaps, simplify compliance, and build a workforce ready for what’s next.
With the second half 2025 (2H 2025) product release, we’re excited to introduce hundreds of new features and enhancements in SAP SuccessFactors, many enabled by AI. Together, these innovations help HR teams, business leaders, and employees work smarter, move faster, and stay future-ready.
Drive better people and business decisions
Data about people, skills, performance, and business outcomes exists everywhere, but without a clear view, it’s difficult to act. People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud, now generally available, is designed to help organizations make better workforce decisions by unifying SAP and third-party data. Through intuitive dashboards, AI-assisted insights powered by Joule, and hundreds of HR metrics, leaders can now move from insights to action with unprecedented speed.
With pre-built use cases spanning critical areas like skills, compensation, recruiting, learning, performance, and succession, People Intelligence makes it easier to uncover trends, identify opportunities, and take action. By bringing together clean, centralized HR data and powerful AI, it equips HR and business leaders with the intelligence they need to drive meaningful workforce transformation.
Build a future-ready workforce
To stay competitive, organizations must continuously evolve alongside their people. This release introduces new innovations that align skills, performance, and development with future business needs.
We are excited that the Performance and Goals Agent in SAP SuccessFactors is now available. This agent empowers managers to lead consistent, high-impact performance conversations by analyzing employee data, such as performance goals, activities and achievements, and continuous feedback, to create tailored conversation prompts for each employee. Using Joule, managers receive AI-guided insights like goal progress summaries, key accomplishments, growth focus areas, and development recommendations. Users can ask follow-up questions to dive deeper into any of these areas.
Additionally, business rules integration in performance management support consistent and transparent performance reviews by automating feedback prompts and actions based on predefined conditions, such as dynamically exposing a comment field only when a rating condition is met.
Succession planning is also getting a boost with skills-based successor recommendations in SAP SuccessFactors Career and Talent Development, which analyzes skills, proficiency levels, and internal work experiences captured in employee growth portfolios to recommend potential successors who might have been overlooked using traditional metrics. And with the new person-based model for talent management, organizations can drive smarter talent decisions, faster reskilling, and greater workforce agility by unifying learning and talent data in a person-based view that follows employees across changing roles, teams, and assignments.
Enable agile and compliant HR
As regulations evolve and business needs shift, HR must stay both agile and compliant. This release introduces new capabilities to help teams adapt quickly while ensuring accuracy and trust.
The new SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Scheduling solution,available to early adopters in January 2026, supports optimized shift planning in manufacturing and other production industries by aligning workforce skills and staffing levels with operational demand. Geofencing in SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking helps prevent fraud and ensure compliance by defining work site locations and ranges to govern where employees can clock in and out. SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central simplifies U.S. leave management by connecting with FMLA service providers to automate leave deductions and improve tracking accuracy.
Across the suite, our updated home page delivers a more intuitive and personalized experience for users with streamlined navigation, targeted communications, and real-time insights across desktop and mobile.
Extend applications to easily adapt
As workforce expectations and business priorities evolve, flexibility is key. This release delivers new capabilities to help seamlessly connect and optimize HR processes, maximizing investments while supporting the changing needs of people and the organization.
SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone is now enhanced by Joule and generative AI to deliver faster access to information, improved self-service, and more informed decision-making. Joule streamlines tasks with role-based self-service, workflow automation, and real-time insights, while generative AI simplifies feedback, coaching, and goal updates with context-aware insights. Employees can also quickly find company-specific knowledge through Joule for accurate, relevant information when they need it.
Lead the future of HR
With the 2H 2025 release, SAP SuccessFactors HCM helps HR leaders navigate complexity with ease. By uniting global HR, AI-driven insights, and a unified skills foundation, organizations can make smarter decisions, develop future-ready talent, and stay agile in a rapidly changing world.
To learn about our latest innovations and enhancements, check out the SAP SuccessFactors 2H 2025 release brochure or watch the video.
Bianka Woelke is group vice president and head of Application Product Management for SAP SuccessFactors.
