Research and solutions from SAP SuccessFactors are giving organizations the flexibility and creativity needed to ensure employees thrive alongside AI.
AI is rapidly revolutionizing the nature of work, and organizations and employees are scrambling to keep up. But what does success in this bold AI era actually look like? It isn’t purely a question of adapting to new tools or replacing existing jobs through automation—the real opportunity lies in preparing workers to take part in this transformation so they’re ready to embrace change, rather than just react to it.
“You can’t outrun change, but you can outsmart it,” says Dan Beck, general manager and chief product officer of SAP SuccessFactors, a leading cloud-based system for human capital management. He cites economic volatility, geopolitical tensions, shifting demographics, and evolving employee expectations as some of the immense pressures organizations face. And at a time when trust is eroding, leaders are wondering how to keep their employees engaged, resilient, and continuously developing to meet the changing demands of work. Increasingly, the conversation turns to AI—not just as a tool for efficiency, but as a catalyst to reimagine how work gets done and how workers can thrive alongside it. He believes this is where HR can play a major role.
“The real transformation with AI is redesigning work itself,” Beck says. In his view, humans and AI can work interdependently, with the latter handling precision tasks so the former can focus on creativity and judgment. “Success depends on trust, transparency, and aligning AI adoption within organizational culture. Ultimately, HR has the most critical role to play in this.”
Reshaping roles and tasks—the right way
For many employers and employees, the primary goal of implementing AI is efficiency. SAP’s research indicates efficiency is the highest-ranked desire from AI for the C-suite and workers. “It’s about time savings,” explains Autumn Krauss, chief scientist at SAP SuccessFactors’ future of work research lab. A new study from her team, published in October 2025, showed that employees, on average, are saving 75 minutes a day by using AI. “The open question is whether those time savings will be put back into the system to increase productivity and output. But we see a much more interesting and transformational future if the attention shifts from getting more output out of current workflows to fundamentally redesigning work to get better outcomes.”
Krauss oversees a team of organizational scientists who recently completed a project to predict what the work landscape will look like within a five-year horizon. Their predictions centered on three key aspects: new ways of working, new profiles of a successful workforce, and a new set of work practices.
After identifying multiple potential futures, they expanded upon their predictions by conducting a global workforce survey. “In all cases, the overarching finding is that there’s a possible future where both organizations and workers will gain mutual benefit from AI: a future where humans and AI work interdependently to overcome their individual limitations, capitalize on their unique strengths, and achieve bigger and better goals as a result.” Krauss also notes there are other potential futures that don’t deliver the symbiotic benefits she feels organizations should strive towards, adding, “It’s critical for organizations—and HR particularly—to define what this future looks like, and start intentionally building towards it now.”
Meeting the moment
Ensuring that workers have a seat at the table from the outset in discussions about AI-driven change is vitally important to ushering in the future of work that we desire. “Everyone’s at a different starting point,” Krauss explains. “In our research and through talking to HR leaders, it’s clear that workplace sentiment about AI varies widely.”
For some, that sentiment manifests as high technology-induced job insecurity: the fear that automation will ultimately take away jobs. “Involving employees in AI-driven change not only allays that concern—it also gets them excited about what their future roles are going to look like,” Krauss counters. “That’s more of the top-down approach.”
But Krauss also sees value in the bottom-up approach to getting employees involved in the shift. “Creating space for employees to trial various tools and explore novel ways to use AI, to amplify their work and extend their impact, presents a great opportunity to embed cultural values of experimentation and curiosity in the organization,” she says, noting that SAP’s research shows that 67% of employees want to use AI to do their work more creatively. “That’s where the more interesting outcomes and tangible impact are going to happen, beyond just productivity.”
It also combats the current shortsightedness she’s observing, which has led to a lackluster job market. While “everything is on the table when it comes to role evolution,” Krauss identifies two key segments and roles that are likely to be most affected in the future.
The first group is recent graduates or early career workers, many of whom are getting slighted by prospective employers who assume AI can be applied to complete entry-level tasks. Krauss refutes this assumption and argues that a talent pipeline will still be needed in any given organization, but that the desired candidate will more likely reflect a new profile of a “successful worker”: someone who isn’t just a fit for one specific job, but rather someone who has the potential to thrive in the organization across their career.
This fluidity in fit also applies to the second role AI is likely to disrupt: people managers. Many managers today are completely overburdened and burnt out due to increasing administrative workloads and team sizes, and employees are feeling the strain. According to Krauss’s research, 59% of employees say they would prefer an AI agent to manage them in the future instead of their current manager. “The [manager] role is ripe for reimagining, with the idea being that AI could arguably take over not only operational and administrative responsibilities, but performance coaching as well,” Krauss says. But wouldn’t that leave the current manager with an unknown future? “Perhaps they’re more focused on being a mentor and holder of institutional knowledge, but not necessarily sitting in a hierarchical position on the org chart,” she notes.
And whenever there are changes to the org chart or retooling of roles, HR is a key player.
HR as a driver of business transformation
Given the inherent changes that accompany successful AI adoption—from the new roles that emerge to the people who will succeed within them—HR can play an outsized role in what comes next. SAP’s research within the C-suite reveals that 92% of executives view HR as critical to their company’s adoption of AI. “The key, of course, is how they go about doing this,” Krauss notes.
“We see HR shifting from a support function to a strategic driver of business transformation,” Beck adds. “Their responsibilities should evolve to include rethinking job design, workforce transitions, and embedding AI into people processes.”
To help employees thrive during this shift, Beck and Krauss believe that HR should work with leadership and be intentional and strategic when choosing which AI outcomes to prioritize. There should be clear guidance for employees on how AI should and shouldn’t be used, as well as what the expected outcome of their AI use will be. “For instance, 47% of employees indicated that they haven’t received any specific guidance on how to reallocate their time savings,” Krauss says. She adds that it’s important to measure the intended outcomes of AI, track progress over time, and transparently communicate its impacts (or lack thereof) to workers.
This transparency is also key when it comes to performance management and compensation. Instead of tallying outputs as a measure of performance and basing pay on title and tenure, Krauss suggests that HR can leverage AI to focus on “the ripple effects”: the scale, durability, and impact of an employee’s contributions. “[We need to] reframe success from what was delivered to what difference it made,” she says, noting that SAP’s research indicates employees are yearning for such a shift. “My pay being more directly tied to my work” was one of the top three ways employees envision their work being redesigned in the coming years, according to the SAP SuccessFactors study.
All this may seem daunting, especially as AI technology continues to evolve by the minute, but there are actionable steps HR can take now to prepare its workforce for an AI-driven future. Establish what the profile of a “successful worker” looks like within your organization due to AI advancement: What skills and capabilities should be measured and rewarded against or prioritized during the hiring process? Assess your current bench strength to determine what qualities can be developed internally or require external recruitment, and be transparent with workers about how their roles and needs are shifting.
“While we believe there isn’t only one virtuous path, we feel that HR can proactively guide organizations during this transition,” says Beck “They can be instrumental in building towards futures that are mutually beneficial to both employers and employees.”