AI in the Employee Journey
Transform everyday HR with intelligent automation, personalised insights, and embedded AI.
AI is reshaping how organisations attract, develop, engage, and support people. SAP SuccessFactors combines embedded AI and Joule, its intelligent AI copilot. Enhancing the employee experience across the entire HR lifecycle, from hiring and onboarding through performance, learning, and career decisions, AI drives efficiency, improves decision-making, and creates more meaningful interactions.
Meet Joule
Joule is SAP’s Generative AI Copilot embedded across SAP SuccessFactors. It understands natural language and learns from your HR data and business context. Unlike a typical chatbot, Joule knows your organisation’s rules, policies, and workflows — so its suggestions are accurate, relevant, and actionable.
Transactional
Joule’s transactional capabilities help you complete everyday HR tasks quickly and accurately. From creating or updating business data, retrieving the information you need, guiding you through task steps, to directing you to the right screens for actions that can’t be done in-chat, Joule keeps work moving smoothly and reduces manual effort.
Examples include:
Requesting or approving time off
Updating personal or job information
Initiating promotions or organisational changes
Submitting feedback or performance inputs
Navigational
Joule’s navigational capabilities guide you directly to the HR functions, applications, or screens you need. Instead of clicking through multiple menus or links, Joule helps you reach your destination quickly, saving time and reducing frustration.
Examples include:
“Where do I submit expenses?”
“Take me to my pay history.”
“Show learning courses for my role.”
Informational
Joule’s informational capabilities help you quickly find answers to HR questions. Using conversational search, it retrieves relevant information from SAP Help Portal content, uploaded documents, and its own knowledge base. Joule then summarizes the results, highlights key points, and provides top references, so you get the insights you need — without sifting through multiple documents.
Examples include:
Explaining changes in pay with breakdowns
Clarifying policy rules based on employee context
Displaying salary, role, or cost center details
Showing employee information (with permissions)
Analytical Insights
Joule’s analytical insights capabilities let you explore HR data and uncover trends through natural, conversational questions. Ask about your business using familiar terms, and Joule delivers instant answers in clear charts, metrics, and summaries — making it easy to understand and act on your data.
Skill or learning recommendations
Career growth suggestions for target roles
Compensation or job history insights
Performance summaries and talking points
Transforming Talent Workflows with Embedded AI
AI is no longer a futuristic add‑on, it's embedded into everyday HR work to save time, improve decision‑making, and deliver personalised experiences across hiring, performance, development, and career growth. SAP SuccessFactors uses Embedded AI to “meet people where they work,” reducing manual tasks and helping HR teams focus on what matters most.
AI in the Employee Journey
Embedded AI includes AI-assisted features that boost productivity across SAP SuccessFactors HCM. It works with real HR data and familiar HR processes so the output is relevant, practical, and immediately usable, from content creation to insights and recommendations.
AI‑Assisted Writing
Generate or enhance written content directly in system fields, from job descriptions to onboarding messages and performance feedback notes, saving time and improving consistency.
AI‑Assisted Job Skills & Matching
Automatically suggest skills when posting job openings and highlight how candidate skills align with role requirements, helping recruiters make faster, more informed short‑listing decisions.
AI‑Assisted Goals & Reviews
Create meaningful performance and development goals using relevant keywords and context‑driven suggestions, and summarise 360‑degree feedback into clear, actionable insights for managers and employees.
AI‑Powered Career & Skills Insights
Generate personalised career recommendations, skill development pathways, and assignment ideas based on data in SuccessFactors, helping employees and managers make informed career decisions.
AI-assisted Applicant Screening
Accelerate hiring by intelligently identifying candidate skills from resumes and matching them to open roles.
Personalised Learning Recommendations
Enable users to quickly discover relevant courses from their learning libraries without manually searching.
AI‑Assisted Person Insights
Summarise employee histories or job trends for discussions, helping leaders understand context before important conversations.
Microsoft Copilot integration
SAP and Microsoft are working on a bi‑directional integration between Joule and Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing generative AI into both environments so users can access HR and business information wherever they work, whether that's in SuccessFactors or in Microsoft 365 apps like Teams and Outlook.
Joule Agents
Imagine needing to find the perfect candidate for a role. An AI agent can quickly scan hundreds or thousands of applications, identifying the right skills and experience faster than a human could. At the same time, AI agents can handle routine employee questions, such as, inquiries about benefits, freeing HR teams to focus on higher-value tasks like employee development.
Key characteristics of Joule agents:
Context-aware: They understand your role, data, and workflow to deliver tailored recommendations.
Proactive: Instead of waiting for you to ask, they can trigger insights, alerts, or actions based on business signals.
Integrated: They work seamlessly inside SAP applications as part of users’ everyday screens.
Task-oriented: Each agent is designed to help with specific business scenarios, making managers, employees, and HR teams more efficient.
Performance and Goals Agent
Generate or enhance written content directly in system fields, from job descriptions to onboarding messages and performance feedback notes, saving time and improving consistency.
People Intelligence Agent
* Connects the People Intelligence Insight application in SAP Business Data Cloud with Joule and SuccessFactors, allowing managers and HR teams to ask questions in natural language and receive intuitive workforce analytics.
HR Service Agent
* Acts as a direct point of contact for employees, reducing the time HR staff spend answering routine questions
Payroll Agent
* Helps employees understand their pay by combining pay statement details with time data, supporting intelligent “explain pay” scenarios and suggesting follow-up actions.
Career and Talent Development Agent
* Automates succession planning and helps managers identify and develop future leaders.
Workforce Knowledge Network
SAP is also introducing the Workforce Knowledge Network, which enables agent-to-agent communication. They're collaborating with Josh Bersin (Galileo agent) and Globalization Partners (G-P) (Gia agent). Starting with Joule, users will be able to invoke Galileo directly (using the @Galileo reference) to get insights into an employee's development, drawing from Josh Bersin's extensive knowledge base.
Galileo is a domain-specialised AI assistant for HR and talent. It's intended to serve HR professionals by giving them fast access to best practices, frameworks, vendor info, benchmarks, implementation plans, and more. Galileo is curated to rely on a controlled corpus (the Bersin research library) rather than indiscriminately drawing from the web.
Galileo can answer questions across many HR domains: hiring, onboarding, performance, training, and multi-disciplinary topics like building a skills taxonomy, implementing pay equity, workforce planning, or designing a capability academy.
Let's build the future of HR together
Contact us today to discover how we can help your organisation thrive. Together, we'll create an HR experience that works for you – and your people.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is AI?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is when computers or machines are able to mimic human thinking and decision-making. In simple words, AI is when we enable computers to think and act intelligently.
What is Embedded AI?
Embedded AI refers to artificial intelligence that is built directly into standard software applications, providing intelligent features without requiring users to develop their own models or custom AI code. Customers simply configure and use the AI capabilities as part of the normal product experience.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content; such as artwork, music, text, or realistic images without being explicitly told what to produce. It learns patterns from existing data and uses them to generate original, creative outputs rather than copying what it has seen.
What is AI Copilot?
Think of an AI copilot like a smart helper, just as a copilot supports a pilot, an AI copilot supports you with tasks by understanding what you need and offering useful suggestions. Microsoft Copilot is a good example, as it can chat and assist in a human-like way.
What is Joule?
Joule is SAP's generative AI copilot, an intelligent companion that helps people work smarter using natural language. It's embedded across SAP's entire cloud portfolio and connects with third-party sources to deliver proactive, contextual insights. With Joule, users can ask questions, automate tasks, and surface insights instantly, helping teams move faster and achieve better business outcomes in a secure and compliant way.
What are AI agents?
Joule agents are intelligent, AI-driven assistants within SAP's Joule ecosystem that proactively help users complete tasks, surface insights, and automate actions across SAP applications and data. They act like specialised copilots that understand business context and deliver relevant support where and when it’s needed. Over time, these agents learn and improve, becoming even more effective at understanding needs and delivering meaningful support.
