According to research from the , 72% of executives believe organizations claiming to transform work with AI are primarily automating existing processes rather than fundamentally redesigning how work gets done. Yet, 88% say redesigning work and roles creates significant enterprise value. And HR is ranked as the No. 1 owner of that work. As a result, HR and business leaders are looking at how technology can support their need to continuously align people, skills, and work with evolving business priorities.

This is the journey to . Autonomous HCM is the future of human capital management, where AI automates end-to-end processes, drives context-aware decisions, and optimizes workforce operations at scale.

As we think about Autonomous HCM, we have defined three pillars:

1. Automate the HR function to release capacity from administrative work: HR teams currently spend a significant share of their time on operational activities such as payroll, service delivery, recruiting administration, and workforce management. AI can reduce much of that burden, creating capacity for more strategic work. But automation is not the destination. It’s the foundation. The true value comes from what organizations do with the time and resources they regain.
2. Redesign how tasks, workflows, roles, and teams are structured throughout the enterprise, across both people and AI: For decades, companies optimized around jobs, functions, and fixed processes. AI challenges many of those assumptions. The opportunity is no longer simply to make existing work more efficient. It is to rethink work itself. This is not just a technology initiative. It is one of the most important business transformation challenges organizations face today.
3. Reinvent how organizations recruit, develop, move, and reward their people: Most talent processes were built for a world characterized by stable jobs and predictable career paths, but that world is rapidly changing. Organizations that succeed will create talent ecosystems that can adapt as quickly as the business itself.

These three pillars are all interconnected: automation releases capacity, work redesign determines how value is created, and talent-system reinvention makes the new model sustainable.

What makes this possible is Â鶹ԭ´´â€™s unique ability to bring together trusted workforce data, connected business processes, ontology, and AI within a single business context. Together, this context enables organizations to move beyond isolated HR activities and make strategic workforce decisions that drive the most urgent business outcomes. This context is what matters.

During Â鶹ԭ´´ Connect, Â鶹ԭ´´ announced that it has entered into an agreement for Â鶹ԭ´´ to acquire TechWolf. TechWolf provides a leading AI work intelligence platform, which helps organizations understand the work their people do and the skills they have, giving them the right context and the right grounding. Once the transaction closes, TechWolf is expected to power workforce and talent strategies across the Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors portfolio, bringing skills mapping, workforce planning, and organizational redesign informed by context from across the Autonomous Enterprise to guide decisions about development, deployment, and workforce transformation.

New Innovations to Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HCM Suite

While Autonomous HCM is our vision for the future, we have several new innovations spanning the entire Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HCM suite, available this month, including:

A growing portfolio of AI assistants

New AI assistants orchestrate work end-to-end and support decisions in real time. Many of the agents that we announced at Â鶹ԭ´´ Sapphire are available this month, including assistants for payroll, HR service, learning, recruiting, onboarding, and career and development. We have more agents coming soon, including the new Workforce Planning Assistant to support customers using . It is powered by connected workforce, contingent labor, and financial data from Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors, , and , to help business and HR leaders forecast workforce needs and create plans for the most effective mix of hiring, reskilling, redeployment, and external talent to address changing workforce demands.

Significant updates to our global benefits solutions

Benefits are among the most important decisions employees make, and they can also be some of the most complex for HR teams to support. To help make benefits administration more efficient for HR and benefits decisions more personalized for employees, Â鶹ԭ´´ announced two new innovations built natively into Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors Employee Central. The new agentic admin console for U.S. benefits provides HR administrators with a centralized view of benefits enrollment activity and exceptions, helping them quickly identify and resolve issues with built-in monitoring and natural language support. By reducing time investigating enrollment issues and navigating reports, organizations can improve oversight and manage complex enrollment periods more efficiently. Additionally, the new benefits decision support tool uses employee data already in the system to recommend coverage aligned to individual needs and budgets, resulting in a more personalized and intelligent enrollment experience for employees. 

New integration of WalkMe Learning Arc with

Creating and deploying learning content can often take weeks, making it difficult for organizations to respond quickly to changing business needs. With this new integration, learning teams can describe learning requirements in natural language, and AI generates courses and quizzes while maintaining author control. Learning experiences can then be created and deployed directly within Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors Learning in hours rather than weeks.

Shaping Autonomous HCM with our customers

As we look forward, we know that what has worked in the past will not take us to the future. The goal is not simply to showcase technology, but to prove how connected AI can help organizations translate strategic decisions into measurable workforce and business results faster and more effectively. Rather than organizing our innovation around individual products or modules, we are focusing our innovation around the most important outcomes our customers are trying to achieve—and in doing so, leaning into Â鶹ԭ´´â€™s strength in connecting data, workflows, and processes across the entire Â鶹ԭ´´ portfolio. We will co-innovate with select customers to define, validate, and measure outcome-driven approaches that connect workforce decisions directly to business value, proving the value of our innovations in real time.

The journey starts now

We are at a defining moment for HR leaders. The future of work will not be shaped solely by technology. It will be shaped by the leaders who can translate transformation into meaningful outcomes for their organizations and their people.

Autonomous HCM is the future of HCM. But it does not start tomorrow. The journey starts today.

To learn more about the latest Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors innovations and how Â鶹ԭ´´ is helping organizations advance their journey toward Autonomous HCM, .

Siva Sundaresan is general manager and chief product officer for Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors.

Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors solutions help people be as productive as possible at work and can maximize the potential of any workforce. At the heart of our UX innovation strategy is a . We have an in-house team of behavioral scientists who work in partnership with our product research team, design experts, and our customers. Together, they bring a unique – and proprietary – perspective to designing solutions based on how people behave and what they need to be productive at work.

That research has driven our recent major investments in UX. The past few years, the focus of our innovation has been to pair modern design elements with intelligent technologies, so people can quickly complete everyday tasks and feel more accomplished, supported, and engaged. This has created a new and wholly improved suite experience for our customers – and the work is only just beginning. The journey we’re on to deliver a people-centric user experience for our customers is realized through three key objectives: simplifying HR tasks, driving employee adoption and engagement, and delivering connected service experiences to meet the needs of today’s diverse and dispersed workforce.

Simplifying Everyday Tasks

One overarching mission of ours is to simplify everyday HR tasks and increase productivity with high-impact, intuitive functionality. Continuous modernization with refreshed colors and information hierarchy creates a seamless, delightful user interface and enhanced accessibility that your workforce can confidently and efficiently navigate and interact with.

And simplification extends even beyond our own solutions – a modern approach means we’re continuously embedding high-value, critical HR processes directly into partner applications that employees use frequently. We integrate Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors solutions with other workplace technology solutions to help keep users productive, what we call meeting people in the flow of work. For example, integrations allow people to perform HR tasks within Microsoft Teams, including asking for and receiving feedback from their managers.

All of which leads to the greatest evolution in UX we can expect in the coming years: . Â鶹ԭ´´ has the broadest suite of business applications on the planet, positioning us to be able to deliver the first true system of intelligence and fundamentally change the way in which companies operate. At Â鶹ԭ´´, we are embedding multiple types of AI – predictive, generative, and conversational, which are each uniquely targeted to improving experiences across the entire Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HXM Suite, including talent acquisition, talent management, and core HR.

We’re already delivering on this vision with new innovations, such as using generative AI to help build compelling job descriptions and predictive AI to help employees find personalized learning opportunities.

Driving User Adoption and Engagement

We strive to create delightful and intuitive experiences that leave people with a sense of accomplishment and support. That means enabling inclusive experiences that empower all employees to operate in an application with meaningful content, functionality, and efficiency. This guides our design decisions and how we deliver innovative ways that address the unique requirements of each and every individual. Personalization is a must with today’s digital expectations, which is why we use data and insights to help anticipate and act on employee needs and expectations by empowering them with meaningful and individualized experiences. 

To that end, our modern Horizon visual theme for Â鶹ԭ´´ Fiori helps provide a consistent UX. With intuitive experiences across the entire Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HXM Suite, this helps to accelerate adoption of our software and accelerate learning curves. We delivered the Horizon visual theme to customers with our 1H 2023 release, and with the 2H 2023 release the vast majority of experiences in our products will be standardized in the Horizon visual theme.

Another example of how we are improving engagement is with dynamic engagement cards in Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors Work Zone, delivered earlier this year. These cards can deliver personalized, relevant, and timely news, announcements, and learning opportunities directly to employees’ Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors Work Zone dashboards.

Of course, UX extends past the look and feel of our products and into overarching career experiences as well. The whole-self model, which takes into account each individual’s unique collection of interests, motivations, and preferences, forms the foundation for some of our most exciting capabilities and products, like dynamic teams, Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace, and the talent intelligence hub. These can enable organizations to become skills-based and future-ready enterprises. For example, our new learning home page can surface learning recommendations to employees based on their interests, passions, and skills – so they can create a career and development path based on what’s best for them.

Delivering Connected HR Service Experiences

The third pillar driving our UX strategy is all about efficiency and improving service delivery for HR and beyond. Instead of forcing employees to guess where to find things with endless clicks and links or awaiting responses from a support specialist, employees can expect an experience that is intuitive, responsive, and connected across different services.

With guided experiences within Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors Work Zone, for example, HR leaders can create workflow-based, personalized journeys for employees that take them through a multi-step process possibly spanning multiple systems. This can make the onboarding journey, for example, frictionless and delightful for new workers – a critical time to make a good first impression. We are especially focused on the experience of deskless workers in 2024. Furthermore, our integrated knowledge base helps reduce HR tickets and can provide employees with quick answers, promoting the shared knowledge and fostering a more informed team.

Looking Ahead

With each release, we are continuously evolving Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HXM Suite and redefining what’s possible for HR solutions. Our vision is to continuously create a seamless, intelligent, and integrated user experience that reflects modern employee preferences and workplace realities. As we look ahead, we will continue to invest and improve on our UX with new and emerging tech, like AI, to deliver the experiences workers need – and deserve.

about how Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors solutions and human experience management can power your people-centered UX transformation. Existing customers can learn more about ensuring they’ve implemented our most up-to-date UX innovations.

To learn more about the second half 2023 release, visit the .

Siva Sundaresan is SVP of Applications Engineering at Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors.