New Joule Agents Coming to Bolster AI in SAP SuccessFactors

SAP announced it would be releasing Joule AI Agents for its cloud offerings, including SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, and SAP Concur, at Sapphire Now 2025. In the last quarter of 2025 and the first half of 2026, many of those Joule Agents are gaining general availability.

Joule Agents, which are part of the broader SAP Business AI strategy, are SAP-built AI agents that reason and act on behalf of users inside SAP applications. New agents are being made available for finance and supply chain functions, but for now, we’ll focus on those coming soon for Human Capital Management (HCM) purposes.

Joule Agents with HCM capabilities can sit inside SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), use enterprise HR and business data, and then take actions such as recommending successors, answering HR questions, or explaining pay. Unlike standalone generative AI tools, these agents are embedded in SAP workflows, governed by enterprise policies, and designed to drive measurable productivity and experience
improvements for HR, managers, and employees.

The New SAP SuccessFactors Joule Agents

SAP has introduced four new Joule Agents for SAP SuccessFactors that target some of HR’s most time-consuming processes, including succession planning, HR case handling, workforce analytics, and payroll questions. All newly announced SAP SuccessFactors Joule Agents are expected to be generally available in May 2026.

The Career and Talent Development Agent aims to automate succession planning and the development of future leaders. The goal is to reduce time spent on these tasks, identify leadership potential, and ensure succession plans don’t get forgotten as HR teams deal with a growing pile of work.

Likewise, the HR Service Agent aims to reclaim some of the time HR professionals spend answering employees’ questions about company policies, which are often listed in company materials. It will act before the question reaches the human, striving to find an answer or raise a ticket if none can be found. This scenario is a win for both sides as employees get faster answers, and HR avoids copying and pasting the same lines about paid time off policies from the employee handbook over and over again.

Beyond answering questions for employeees, and moving to answering questions that HR is asking, the People Intelligent Agent is where SAP SuccessFactors and SAP BDC join forces. The People Intelligence application sits in SAP BDC, but a Joule-powered connected to SAP SuccessFactors allows HR practitioners to prompt in natural language to receive relevant workforce analytics reports along with recommendations.

This cuts down time spent going through data on a case-by-case basis to identify issues in retention, compensation, and skills distribution. The latter is especially important for companies undergoing major changes and upgrades, as a lack of proper skillsets was cited as the No. 1 challenge holding back transformation projects in SAPinsider’s recent Technology Leaders’ Transformation 2025 Report Card, SAPinsider research.

Finally, the Payroll Agent supports both employees and HR staff. On the employee side, they can have their payroll questions explained clearly without human intervention. On the payroll side, the agent works to detect issues before payroll runs, potentially saving many hours fixing paychecks after the fact and avoiding the employee dissatisfaction that comes with inaccurate compensation.

These build on the first SuccessFactors Joule Agent, the Performance and Goals Agent, which became generally available in November 2025. Together, they move Joule from a single-use copilot to a broader agentic layer across HR processes.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

For SAP professionals working with HR and talent, these new SAP SuccessFactors Joule Agents signal that AI is moving from pilots to the HR production stack, and HR can no longer be treated as a later phase for AI adoption. They also show that SAP intends to anchor people analytics and decision making in SAP BDC, not just in transactional HR systems.

Prioritize clean HR and time data now. The Career and Talent Development, People Intelligence, Payroll, and Explain Pay–related agents will only be as effective as the underlying SuccessFactors and time tracking data they rely on. HR and IT teams should use the 2025–2026 GA window to tighten data quality, job and position structures, and time configurations so the agents deliver trustworthy recommendations and explanations.

Plan HR processes around agents, not just features. Instead of treating each agent as an isolated add-on, map how the Performance and Goals, Career and Talent Development, HR Service, People Intelligence, and Payroll Agents can be woven into end-to-end HR journeys like performance cycles, promotions, and case management. This will help justify investment, clarify change management needs, and align AI usage with measurable HR KPIs such as time-to-fill, retention, and ticket volume.

Align HR, finance, and data teams on People Intelligence and Business Data Cloud. With the People Intelligence Agent and related insights living on SAP BDC, HR will increasingly share a data platform with finance, supply chain, and CX teams. SAPinsiders should use this moment to bring HR into enterprise data and AI governance discussions, ensuring that workforce data models, access controls, and analytics standards are jointly defined rather than kept in a separate HR silo.