SAP SuccessFactors CRO Says AI Agents Will Force HR To Rethink Workforce Management

One of the more provocative questions for HR leaders in technology now is not whether AI agents can do work. It is how companies will manage them once they do. SAP SuccessFactors is preparing for that reality by asking a question most organizations have barely begun to answer: How should an enterprise assign work, permissions, cost, and performance expectations when part of the workforce is no longer human?

In a conversation with SAPinsider at this year’s SAP Sapphire in Orlando, Maryann Abbajay, Chief Revenue Officer at SAP SuccessFactors, said HR has become far more central to enterprise strategy since COVID-19, as companies had to confront skills gaps, workforce planning, compliance risk, and employee experience. Now, with AI agents entering business workflows, SuccessFactors is also becoming part of how organizations define what people do, what agents do, and how both are governed.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Q: How do you frame SAP SuccessFactors in the broader enterprise market, including for companies that may not be SAP customers?

MA: Every ERP system has people, period. That’s a critical part of the system.

Historically, 10 or 20 years ago, HR sometimes got put to the side. The mindset was, “We’ll deal with that later.” That’s not true anymore. Since COVID, there’s been a complete revamp in the way people think about HR. A big part of that is making sure companies have the right people at the right time, with the right skills, to further the strategy and success of the company.

SuccessFactors is critical whether a customer is in an SAP ERP environment or not. We have Oracle ERP customers, we’ve had PeopleSoft environments, and we work in government environments as well. People are part of every enterprise system.

Q: What are customers asking SAP SuccessFactors for right now?

MA: Of course, AI. But outside of AI, skills are a major focus.

For us, that shows up in the growth portfolio. Giving employees the ability to manage their own careers, track their skills, understand what skills they need to get to the next level, and see how to build those skills. That might be through learning, a gig assignment, mentoring, or another experience.

The other major area is workforce planning. Skills are becoming a critical part of that conversation. Many companies want to plan based on skills, but most are not 100% there yet.

Q: Are you seeing workforce planning concerns around succession and aging workforces?

MA: Big time. In technology, there are specialized skills that are not easy to replace. Payroll is a great example. A 20-year-old does not automatically know how to run a complex global payroll system at scale.

At SAP, during our 2024 restructuring, we had a number of payroll people leave. We knew we had to upskill very quickly and take some senior people and add payroll expertise to them. That kind of planning is becoming much more important.

Q: Large enterprises are heavily matrixed. How does SuccessFactors help manage that complexity?

MA: SAP itself is a heavily matrixed organization. I have many people who are dot-lined into me but don’t report to me directly. In SuccessFactors, we call those dynamic teams. You want the ability to show that team because it may be different from the formal reporting line, and you also want the people working together every day to contribute to goals, performance reviews, and compensation discussions.

AI adds another layer to that. If I’m forming a team for a complicated sales pursuit, for example, I can define the criteria I need, such as utility industry expertise or HANA expertise, and SuccessFactors can use Opportunity Marketplace to identify internal candidates based on the skills in their profiles. It can return the top candidates and show how closely they match what I need, whether that’s an 80% match or a 95% match. That’s one way AI can help manage organizational complexity.

Q: Do some industries face more challenges adopting AI in HR than others?

MA: That becomes more of a people question than a technology question.

I participated in a roundtable where several people from utilities said they’re at the very beginning of using AI and asked how to get someone who has been in HR for 30 years to actually use it. One answer is that AI has to become part of the everyday flow of work. It can’t be something people have to leave the application to use. It has to be built into the application, or even better, available through Joule. It can also be available through Microsoft Teams.

But there’s also an enablement issue. If a company wants people to move from level one to level seven in AI usage, there needs to be a plan. In that type of situation, especially with long-tenured employees, enablement may need to be somewhat mandatory. It won’t just happen on its own.

Q: What have you heard from customers about resistance to AI?

MA: There’s still a lot of fear. At a recent CHRO advisory board, one CHRO said she couldn’t get her own direct reports to use AI. They were resistant, even as she was trying to roll it out to the organization.

So, one afternoon, she gave them an assignment that had to be completed using AI and was due the next morning for a team meeting. There was a lot of resistance at first. But once they did it, they were proud of themselves, and it took away some of the fear. What would have taken three or four hours took about 15 minutes. Sometimes people just need to experience how AI helps them.

Q: Where is SuccessFactors going next with AI agents?

MA: We’re moving very quickly. We were told we have 42 agents in May and will have 62 by November. But last October, we were told we were getting one agent a month. The pace has changed so fast that I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with far more.

What I’m looking forward to is actually spending more time with the agents and learning them at a deeper level. When there are technology shifts, you can either run away and hide or dive in. Every time I’ve dived in, it has made me smarter. And when you are smarter, you can help other people and take away some of the fear of the unknown.

Q: What new AI-related challenges are emerging for HR leaders?

MA: One question I heard recently was: How do we determine the cost of an AI agent?

Right now, a lot of work is going into deciding what to give to AI, what to keep with a human, what oversight to provide, and what ROI looks like. But when looking at an AI agent, are companies tracking what it takes to run that agent from an infrastructure, use, and consumption perspective? I would say not yet.

People assume an agent is cheaper than a person. Is it? We’ll see. That level of scrutiny is coming. As companies gain more experience with agents, they will need to understand the cost side more clearly.

Q: How can companies manage AI agents inside the workforce?

MA: SuccessFactors allows a company to create an employee ID for an agent and show the agent in the org chart. A company might have three agents and five people on a team. The reason an agent needs an employee ID is permissions. The agent needs permission to do certain functions, and depending on its role, it may not have permission to do other things.

That means there is organizational modeling that needs to happen around agents. There may also be performance evaluation for AI agents. A manager will need to determine whether the agent is getting it right, whether the answer is correct, and whether it is actually doing the job, just like they would evaluate a human employee.

Q: How does SuccessFactors handle compliance-heavy environments or regulated industries?

MA: We work with a number of government agencies, and security clearances are probably the easier part.

The harder part is infrastructure. In many cases, systems need to run in-country. Outside the US, governments may not want the environment running on a US hyperscaler. The people managing the environment may need to be citizens of that country and may need certain levels of security clearance, depending on the agency.

SAP is there and has been there. We are FedRAMP certified in the US, and we also support federal agencies in Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, the UK, and other countries. India is also moving in that direction, and that’s a major reason we put a data center in India.

Q: Compliance is often about making sure certifications do not lapse. How does SuccessFactors support that?

MA: There are two types of compliance to think about.

One is country-level legal compliance—employment laws, tax laws, time laws, and other regulations. Brazil is a great example of a country with very complicated laws that change regularly. SAP has a globalization team that follows those laws and supports the entire SAP portfolio when changes are needed.

The other type of compliance is HR-specific, such as certifications and training. That’s why our Learning Management System is mission-critical for many organizations. Disney uses our LMS to certify people on rides. If the LMS isn’t available, they can’t put a person on a ride because they can’t verify the certification. In healthcare or manufacturing, that becomes even more critical. If someone is put on a machine they don’t know how to run, it’s a safety issue and a liability issue.

Q: What is one thing ERP audiences should understand about SAP SuccessFactors?

In the last five years, SuccessFactors has become much more mission-critical than HR systems were once perceived to be. That has to do with the mindset shift we discussed around how critical people are. As we move toward agents, and as people worry about jobs changing, SuccessFactors can help clearly show what an agent does and what a person does.

We’re not fully there yet, but I think we’ll see the agent performance and agent cost questions become big parts of the workforce conversation.