SAP sees AI as a central part of its marketing strategy for SuccessFactors, steering its messaging and product development down complementary paths. In fact, a notable chunk of this week’s SuccessConnect conference will focus on how the company has wrapped AI into the entire SuccessFactors HXM suite.
Broadly speaking, more than 26,000 SAP cloud customers have access to SAP Business AI across multiple scenarios and partner solutions, the software provider said. SuccessFactors Chief Marketing & Solutions Officer Aaron Green said the platform’s AI-based capabilities “will help unlock new possibilities for people and for organizations by tapping into new levels of potential, performance and operational efficiency.”
At SuccessConnect, SAP will show off:
- Joule, SAP’s natural-language, generative AI copilot. Within SuccessFactors, Joule will work to improve the employee experience by allowing users to more quickly find information, get answers to questions and complete HR-related tasks such as clocking in and out, viewing pay statements and approving or rejecting requests.
- An AI-based talent intelligence hub that offers greater visibility into skills coverage and gaps to guide workforce planning. Embedded in SuccessFactors HXM Suite, the hub creates a skills portfolio for each employee, inferring skills and attributes based on data from performance feedback and dynamic teams. Managers can view, add and update skills and other attributes for their direct reports, while employees build and store data about themselves including aspirations, motivations, styles and preferences.
- Generative AI use cases that will help HR and recruiters create job descriptions while letting employees find personalized learning recommendations to aid their career development.
Early Steps
Beginning with SuccessFactors, Joule will be integrated into SAP’s cloud enterprise suite to provide contextual insights from SAP solutions and third-party sources. Not only will this help customers make faster and more informed decisions, SAP said, it will transform the user experience across departments.
While all of this is going on, analysts are taking a cautious approach to Joule, reports TechTarget. For one thing, few users have gotten their hands on the product, analysts say. For another, it’s not clear just what’s different about Joule compared to copilots from companies like Microsoft or Salesforce.
Joshua Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, told TechTarget that announcing Joule is more about SAP positioning itself as an industry leader than offering a true AI solution.
“This technology is not available now and the LLMs that it will be built on are still in development,” he said. “The fact that SAP has 20,000 customers who have agreed to give some version of their enterprise data to build the models is muddied by the fact that we don’t know who these companies are, what their business processes are or what corners of the global economy they represent.”
Image: SAP
