Impacting everything from innovation and productivity to customer satisfaction and overall business performance, employee experience is crucial for organizations to thrive in today’s fast-evolving landscape.
As chief marketing officer of SAP SuccessFactors, Lara Albert sees firsthand the strategic impact that HR teams can have on organizations of all shapes and sizes—and the business imperative of optimizing HR touchpoints to foster the kind of welcoming company culture conducive to high performance, growth, and engagement. That’s why, as SAP continues to drive AI-powered innovation, advancing unified HR service delivery has become a strategic focus—supported by the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio, including the new Enterprise Service Management solution unveiled earlier this year.
The evolution of SAP SuccessFactors was on full display at SAP Sapphire this year, where new innovations were announced that leverage the power of the SAP Business Suite, optimizing workflows and making data more widely accessible for improved decision-making across the business.
In conversation with ASUG at the annual conference—as well as subsequently, following SAP's August announcement that it plans to acquire SmartRecruiters, a talent-acquisition software provider—Albert broke down the company’s vision of an AI-powered future for SAP SuccessFactors and shared what she’s been hearing of key challenges for the modern HR leader.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
As today’s businesses navigate a volatile macro-economic environment, evolving technology, and shifting employee expectations, the relevance of the chief human resources officer (CHRO) is undeniable. This role is expanding to address data silos, skills gaps, employee retention, and other key challenges. What can you say about the priorities of modern CHROs?
At a recent advisory meeting where SAP brought together CHROs from various regions and industries to discuss their most pressing issues, three challenges were highlighted.
The first is around AI. CHROs feel the pressure not to be left behind, and they want to unlock the value of this technology. And for the CHRO, it’s not a question of why — they understand the value of AI — so much as a question of, “How do I get started? How do I overcome internal roadblocks or challenges around legal, ethical, and regulatory issues? How do I get buy-in from employees and managers to use AI, not be afraid of it and not feel like it’s a replacement strategy?”
The second issue involves skills. CHROs at every organization we talked with at that recent advisory meeting essentially shared the same sentiment: We need to better understand what skills exist within our organizations and we need to do more with skills intelligence. Deeper discussion then focused on how we get there. Their organizations have skills data that is dispersed across many different systems, with no common language and no framework to draw upon to drive a more effective talent strategy, whether it’s on the recruiting side or related to internal mobility and upskilling.
The third issue is related to analytics, with CHROs at the table being asked questions by business leaders. There’s nothing worse than an “I don’t know” or a “Let me get back to you,” but the task of getting back is so arduous. The notion of having accurate, real-time information provided by turnkey solutions for the CHRO and the HR team has been long promised; but, for many years, it has remained a challenge. The opportunity to be able to do more strategic workforce planning based on that kind of intelligence—to really be able to pinpoint skills development investments in the right areas—has become very interesting to the CHROs we meet with.
Take, for example, tariffs. As organizations think about the redeployment of people across manufacturing plants, or changing locations of employees, other questions emerge for the CHRO. What is the right mix of talent, what is the cost of that mix, and who should I be putting where? Those kinds of answers are not simply “nice to have.” They’re business-critical. The CHRO is responsible for answering those questions and putting talent strategies in place that help drive business outcomes.
Let’s drill in further on the importance of unifying data throughout an organization and how that shared practice can connect the CHRO to other areas of operation.
I’m extremely excited about what SAP is doing in this area, and I believe it will deliver real value and relevancy for the HR audience. When you have these siloed data sources, there is no harmonization in terms of that data. From even a skills standpoint, which is slightly simpler to conceive of, skills languages are vast. For the CHRO to be able to analyze skills and capabilities in a consistent way, to establish a shared nomenclature through unified data, allows you to answer questions that would otherwise be incredibly difficult to answer.
The power of SAP Business Data Cloud is not only bringing together people data, business data, and skills data but also in integrating external data sources. CHROs tell us they want to incorporate industry benchmark information, plus other skills ontologies or libraries, and they must have an easy way to do that. The notion of being able to bring in data not simply from across SAP SuccessFactors and SAP, but also from across external data solutions, is tremendous. This allows for easy answers to questions without outsourcing to a consulting firm.
The power lies in what questions you can answer. Even, sometimes, what you and I might consider a basic question with a basic answer can stump nine out of ten business leaders at the table: something as simple as total headcount, what it is at this minute rather than a month ago, or what today’s total cost of labor is. Are people being paid equitably? What skills exist and where? We take these questions for granted, as if everyone can easily answer them, but the reality is that doing so can be difficult without SAP Business Data Cloud and that unified information for the CHRO.
In meeting with CHROs and analyzing the historical state of their enterprise data, what challenges related to data accuracy, cleaning, and quality do they tend to encounter?
Three concerns come up most frequently. The first is that data is incredibly siloed. The second is that data isn’t clean or accurate. And the third is that CHROs tell us they are unable to gain proactive insights from the data. All this data is sitting in systems, but if they can’t derive valuable information from it, so what? In my opinion, proactive insights will be where the power of AI is particularly game-changing.
When we first started talking to CHROs about SAP Business Data Cloud, they gave us the feedback that we were having a very technical conversation with them—and that wasn’t necessarily a compliment. They said, “You’re not really speaking to us as HR leaders,” even though they were quick to say, “These are all key challenges to address.” Around the room, CHROs would cite data silos, accuracy and governance of data, and the limited availability of proactive insights as challenges — but that wasn’t the conversation they wanted to be having.
The conversation they wanted to have was, “SAP Business Data Cloud can help solve technical issues, but can you also explain how it helps me, as the CHRO, solve real business problems?” The key takeaway was that the technical elements alone aren’t compelling for them and can’t be the primary focus. That stood out to me. We can’t claim to have solved their analytics challenges without offering clear, credible proof of what they can do now that wasn’t possible before. The proof rests in being able to readily access and act on critical insights. Only then can we show how SAP Business Data Cloud optimizes decision making across the entire business.
Let’s talk more specifically about People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud, then. Announced at SAP Sapphire this year, this is a product launch intended to shift organizational people analytics forward by converting data from SAP SuccessFactors, SAP HCM, and other sources into interactive insights.
Exactly — proactive, AI-driven recommendations, not just based on data but on the context around that data. External data sources can’t be lost in the equation here, because that’s a critical value-add in terms of what CHROs are trying to base decisions on. Analytics applications shouldn’t be limited to data sets from a single vendor like SAP — they must be open.
Before the launch of People Intelligence, SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics served as our analytics solution for HR buyers. Customers faced challenges with this solution because it wasn’t necessarily designed for business users.
The problem we wanted to solve with People Intelligence was essentially to develop and deliver a turnkey solution that is business user-friendly and designed for the HR leader. The solution considers hundreds of HR metrics; based on these, you can generate thousands of insights, but the solution will now contextually serve those insights to an end user based on the questions they are looking to answer.
And with SAP Business Data Cloud, which is what People Intelligence is built upon, there’s an underlying data foundation, which allows you to connect and harmonize your HR and business data. The same applies to Finance Intelligence, Spend Intelligence, and similar solutions; these are turnkey and developed for the relevant business users. Now, what’s underlying these solutions? Tons of data products.
People Intelligence is a single application, but, behind the scenes, it pulls from various data products, like compensation insights or finance data related to cost and performance. The point is that a customer doesn’t need to worry about these underlying data products. With People Intelligence, they can run analytics, access out-of-the-box reporting, and leverage AI-driven recommendations to make smarter people and business decisions.
WalkMe, the AI-powered digital-adoption platform that SAP acquired, provides in-app guidance or help to employees as they’re completing various tasks and going through various workflows or processes. How can this empower HR teams, specifically?
That one’s exciting. HR leaders can gain insights and analytics into how employees are faring with processes like onboarding or benefits enrollment, to see if and where there’s fall-off and then use those insights to improve those processes.
When CHROs are making these technology investment decisions in concert with their counterparts across the business, they’re responsible for the success of those decisions, and the business outcomes they drive. So much of that hinges on adoption, usage, and people being able to do what we’ve intended for them to do.
Nestlé is one customer that’s particularly advanced in their digital adoption platform journey, and their usage of WalkMe is sophisticated; it spans 50 applications, including SAP SuccessFactors, and helps them adapt and react to application and process changes. Both their HR and IT departments find tremendous value in WalkMe, from the insights and analytics they derive around completion rates or the fall-off within workflows and processes.
People only interface with HR technology, in many instances, once or twice a year. I only go through benefits enrollment once a year, and I only request an up-to-date headcount once every couple of months. If, each time, I’m struggling to find the pull-down menu, in-app guidance can be helpful to ensure completion rates or to help me see that everyone else is getting stuck on that stage as well, so that I can optimize the workflow.
Another customer, Standard Chartered, also uses WalkMe. When they first turned on AI-assisted goals, there was a button users had to select to take advantage of the feature, which wasn’t obvious. Standard Chartered used WalkMe to create a prompt— “Did you know that you can use this?”— that users can hover over, which makes them aware of the new AI-assisted goals feature. That education was key in helping the bank drive the adoption of AI-assisted goals.
WalkMe can even help with adoption of a process as simple as setting up your employee profile, which allows you to interact with others at work. Every new employee should set that up in their first 30 days, or they become hard to discover. Getting higher completion rates on processes involves figuring out where employees are giving up and where a prompt would be helpful to optimize a process.
Onboarding is one area of HR service delivery that Joule is particularly well-situated to support. How does SAP’s announcement of Joule on SAP SuccessFactors mobile, as well as your first HR agent, help with this?
That’s a huge announcement, because so many of our customers have large percentages of their workforces accessing SAP SuccessFactors via mobile. With this release, Joule is also becoming available in 10 new languages, in addition to English, which will also help our customers support global or multilingual employee bases.
Making Joule available on mobile wasn’t just about providing anywhere access to basic functionality. It meant ensuring that the app could deliver real value, like helping employees create or update time-off requests or helping managers track their team’s required learning, so that customers would find it worthwhile to actually use Joule on mobile.
On the agentic side, introducing the Performance and Goals Agent is only the first step in an additive augmentation strategy that will see SAP SuccessFactors build upon its heritage in various HR areas, like performance and goals, over time. This agent could, for example, alert you to upcoming performance reviews you have with employees and help prepare you for the conversation. Imagine also, as an employee, being able to summarize performance feedback and insights to make available to your manager ahead of your 1:1. There’s massive value in that.
We’re also working on other agents in areas such as recruiting and service delivery. Across the board, from recruiting and onboarding to learning, performance, compensation, service delivery, and payroll, we’ll have respective, complementary agents.
With the recent delivery of SAP SuccessFactors Enterprise Service Management, your team is focused on unifying HR service delivery into a unified cloud platform. What can you say about this recent evolution and how customers—especially those who’ve been using SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and other core HR solutions—stand to benefit?
One of the most critical HR touchpoints in any organization is the HR help desk—and it’s also one of the most overburdened. HR service reps may process hundreds of service requests in a month, each taking 1–3 days to resolve depending on the complexity of the issue, leaving employees waiting for answers and HR teams overwhelmed by volume.
But technology is changing this. The introduction of SAP SuccessFactors Enterprise Service Management is a major step forward in unifying HR service delivery across the cloud, powered by AI. For customers already using SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and other core HR solutions, this means a more streamlined, consistent experience. Instead of relying on disconnected tools or manual processes, they now have a centralized platform to manage service requests, automate workflows, and resolve employee issues more efficiently.
AI is at the heart of this transformation. It delivers proactive, personalized support by recommending relevant resources, generating tailored responses, creating cases when needed, summarizing and categorizing issues, and assisting with email drafting through generative AI—driving faster, smarter service at scale.
In more breaking news for our readers, SAP is set to acquire SmartRecruiters. What does this mean for SAP and SAP SuccessFactors HCM specifically, and what excites you most about the announcement?
This planned acquisition is a bold step forward for SAP and SAP SuccessFactors HCM. It reflects our urgency to meet customer demand for faster, more intelligent recruiting solutions. By combining the power of SmartRecruiters’ high-volume hiring and AI-driven candidate engagement with SAP SuccessFactors once the acquisition has closed, we aim to deliver a truly unified talent acquisition journey—from sourcing to onboarding.
What excites me most is the opportunity to accelerate innovation with SAP Business AI and bring customers smarter, more agile recruiting at a lower total cost of ownership. It’s not just about improving HR—it’s about enabling business success.