With 2025 just around the corner, HR leaders are looking for ways to drive results using powerful technologies like business AI to advance skills in the workforce, improve productivity, and deliver greater efficiency. Some organizations are accelerating outcomes from HR transformations by implementing AI-based capabilities in SAP SuccessFactors HCM to gain an edge over the competition.
“We are on the brink of a revolution in HR technology,” SuccessFactors Chief Revenue Officer Maryann Abbajay said, speaking to customers recently at SuccessConnect. “AI and other new intelligent technologies are transforming the way we work. Organizations are acutely aware that having the right skills today and cultivating these skills for the future is crucial to stay ahead. So, we must focus on our people – and the technologies that enable them to bring out the best in themselves.”
SAP research found that the top three reasons why HR leaders want to use skills data across their people practices are to match people to opportunities, develop members of their organizations, and have workforce planning that makes sense based on skills. Additionally, a sample of more than 4,000 employees revealed that time savings, quality, and efficiency are the top three most desired outcomes when it comes to AI at work.
Speaking at SuccessConnect, HR leaders from five forward-thinking organizations – L’Oréal, Eurobank, BT Group, American Honda, and SAP – shared insights from their HR journeys and how new advancements in HR tech are putting people at the center of business.
L’Oréal Creates a Future-Fit Organization with Skills and Learning
Global beauty brand L’Oréal keeps its people strategy as forward-thinking as its brand. “This People Vision is to be the most inclusive, innovative, and inspiring people company,” said L’Oréal Deputy Chief Human Relations Officer Isabelle Minneci. “To remain forward-thinking, we leverage this unique people culture, which cares for each individual, and we embed diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of our HR fundamentals.”
L’Oreal’s HR community drives three actions to advance a challenger mindset within the workforce. It builds a skills-driven organization to foster people and business growth. It invents new ways of working and harnesses the best of tech to deliver inspiring people experiences. And it leads transformation for HR and rest of the organization to remain agile.
L’Oréal uses cloud-based solutions from SAP SuccessFactors – including SAP SuccessFactors Learning – to inspire amazing people experiences. For a future-fit workforce, L’Oréal invests €120 million each year in learning as it continually reskills its employees to boost agility and innovation. “Thanks to SAP SuccessFactors,” Minneci said, “we have linked the skills with the jobs and with our learning program, which enables us to really offer personalized learning journeys for our employees and to make sure that we prepare the future.”
Eurobank Ensures Compliance and Empowers the Workforce
Eurobank is one of Greece’s largest employers, with about 6,500 employees and €81.5 billion in total assets under management. It uses cloud-based solutions from SAP SuccessFactors HCM to help ensure compliance with local labor legislation, support more strategic decision-making, and deliver on its promise of a great employee experience.
Eurobank began its journey with SAP SuccessFactors over six years ago, said Maria Tachataki, head of People Technology and Internal Communications, Eurobank SA. “We have increased efficiency and eliminated paper usage,” she said. “Most of all, we have enhanced our people empowerment by providing more accountability, responsibility, and work mobility. SAP SuccessFactors has been our ally and our companion in an ongoing journey of growth and transformation.”
In April 2022, a new Greek labor law required local banks to implement a digital work card that integrated with the Ministry of Labor’s platform for real-time monitoring of work schedules, shift planning, and overtime. Effectively, it meant Eurobank’s employees needed to clock in and out at their specific work times – or the bank would incur steep penalties. The company needed a digital solution that was accurate, reliable, efficient, and scalable. It had to have seamless integration with the SAP SuccessFactors platform, payroll, and the Ministry of Labor’s platform. And it needed to have very detailed monitoring and audit trails. Eurobank chose SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking and leveraged SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) for flexibility and connectivity. As a result, it now reports 99% performance (an improvement of 75%) and 45% reduction in instances when employees forget to clock out. Read more here.
“For us the next move is AI and skills, in terms of more strategic workforce planning,” Tachataki said. “We aim to transition from merely filling positions with people to focusing on talent and strategic workforce planning based on upskilling, and skills taxonomy. This is our next big challenge.”
BT Group Builds the Digital Colleague Experience
Global telecommunications company BT Group is accelerating its HR transformation with the infusion of AI to build its Digital Colleague Experience. Recently, the organization unified core HR by moving its UK payroll of 80,000 colleagues to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, using SAP BTP for extensibility and innovation. The launch of the AI copilot Joule and generative AI early adopt program is another highlight in what the company’s HR Technology Director Nick Hawkes described as an “incredibly busy 12 months.” As he noted, “This is an exciting phase for us. Those digital foundations within HR were really important. We’ve gone from four HR systems, three payroll systems, down to one, which was an important milestone.”
“We’ve been on the AI journey a little while now,” he continued, underscoring BT’s commitment to security through the establishment of a responsible AI team and guardrails to evaluate and implement acceptable AI use cases. Working collaboratively with BT’s legal teams, data governance, and SAP has given the company’s HR team an edge for advancing AI use cases that elevate the employee experience. “Having those levers to pull really allowed us to achieve a quick rollout,” he said, referencing SAP Business AI.
In the shift to becoming a skills-based organization, BT aims to implement the talent intelligence hub, which can provide organizations a centralized system for skills for SAP SuccessFactors solutions, to help drive better planning and strategic workforce planning across the organization. Hawkes is optimistic about how AI will enhance the BT’s Digital Colleague Experience: “We can see in the data a 40% increase in efficiency in terms of what Joule brings to the organization, so we’ll double down on that.”
American Honda Charts Digital Journey with People-Centric Focus
American Honda is on a journey to become a carbon-zero company by 2050 – in effect, evolving from a hardware-defined company to a software-defined company. “It’s a transformation we view internally as the second founding of Honda. That means digital experience is very important,” said Rich Richardson, senior vice president, Human Resources, American Honda, describing how the new strategic direction is leading to increased focus on the employee experience. “We have developed a plan to engage our associates on a digital journey that has a number of tenets critical to making sure our associates are at the center.”
In January 2023, American Honda went live with SAP SuccessFactors HCM to provide seamless access to HR information and opportunities for upskilling. To ensure the best outcomes for its AI journey, American Honda established a Responsible AI Council to govern AI usage, evaluate use cases, maintain standards, and foster communication and transparency across the organization.
This year, the company joined an SAP early adopter program to learn how AI can accelerate its vision for a future-ready workforce. “We have four use cases that we’re piloting right now with 850 associates. They’re around Joule, compensation insights, enhanced writing, and goal creation. We’ve been getting feedback along the way with those pilots, and we’ve seen some really good results,” Richardson said.
Employees in the pilot share overwhelming positive feedback on the AI-based innovations, reporting 80% favorable feedback overall. To ensure a great employee experience that benefits all employees, Richardson wants to further understand why employees might be hesitant to fully embrace the new AI-led tools: “When we can uncover that – whether its communication, change management, or on the technical side – we think we can have a really positive rollout of these use cases to our associate population and, ultimately, save time and energy and effort.”
SAP Accelerates a Skills-First Workforce with AI
For SAP, a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, a strong people culture is integral to its mission to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. “At SAP, people are very close to our heart. And that goes back to our founder, Hasso Plattner,” said SAP Chief People Officer Gina Vargiu-Breuer, recalling Plattner’s observation that “we can be proud of our culture because our culture is very much one of customer-centricity, innovation, and people.”
SAP’s People Agenda, essential to its transformation to a cloud-first company, comprises three pillars: SAP’s growth culture, a skills-led people ecosystem, and game-changing people technology. The People Agenda is underpinned by a strong foundation: a people-centric work environment that is nurtured by employee well-being, safety, and health as well as diversity and inclusion to create a feeling of belonging at SAP.
To build a skills-led people ecosystem, SAP is using the AI capabilities of the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite to gain visibility into the skills of the workforce and improve the employee experience. With the AI-powered growth portfolio in SAP SuccessFactors talent and learning solutions, SAP is currently focused on increasing skills transparency to help employees focus on growth and career opportunities.
“In the growth portfolio, we are relying on AI,” Vargiu-Breuer said. “Without having a market-centric skills taxonomy and without having skills transparency across the entire workforce, it’s very difficult to have, for example, personalized learning and career development opportunities. So, AI is absolutely essential.”
Making Every Employee a Success Story
As these inspiring stories show, SAP customers are using HR technology to support their people agendas and drive HR transformation in their organizations. By advancing productivity and the employee experience, customers are harnessing the power of SAP SuccessFactors solutions to make every employee a success story.
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