Our Future of Work Research Lab at SAP SuccessFactors studies how jobs, organizations, leadership, and HR are changing and what those changes could mean for the future of work.
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Many of the futures we have explored are no longer hypothetical. They are showing up in how work is organized and experienced today. The fundamental question now is whether organizations are shaping those changes deliberately or simply reacting as they unfold.
Our latest research combines monitoring of more than 500 business, academic, government, and economic resources with original global mixed methods research involving 2,718 employees, 500 C-suite leaders, 60 HR executives, and founders of AI-native companies. It points to a fundamental concern: organizations may be optimizing the future of work for efficiency when they should be designing it for value.
The productivity trap
In October 2025, we explored 10 predictions for work, workforces, and work practices, each with two possible futures. A year later, the evidence is strongest for what we call the “AI Upgrade” future, in which AI’s value is measured through efficiency, productivity gains, and time savings. Signals of broader work transformation are emerging, but they remain less established.
The emphasis on productivity is understandable because time savings, output, and cost reductions are relatively easy to measure. The harder question is what organizations do with the capacity AI can create. They can ask employees to produce more of the same work, or they can redesign work, roles, teams, and talent systems around what people and AI can achieve together.
Work transformation needs a north star
Related research from our strategic work redesign program found that 88% of employees said their jobs have changed because of AI, yet half of those changes occurred without meaningful guidance from managers or their organizations. Employees are using AI to simultaneously offload tasks and expand the scope of their work, often without a shared playbook or a clear view of the intended outcome.
Before organizations can transform work intentionally, they need a clear north star for what work should become. Yet between 55% and 70% of employees said they had received no clear organizational guidance on the work shifts they are expected to navigate. At the same time, 72% of C-suite leaders said that most organizations claiming to transform work with AI are really automating existing jobs faster. Without a shared vision for work transformation, organizations risk defaulting to isolated experimentation and efficiency-first use cases, creating uneven outcomes and limiting the combined potential of people and AI.
Six shifts to guide better work design
We endorse six shifts in work and organizational design that are both enabled by AI and associated with work-enriching characteristics well established in organizational psychology as leading to increased employee motivation, effort, performance, and retention:
- From specialist to generalist: Apply core expertise across a broader range of problems and tasks.
- From static jobs to dynamic roles: Organize work around flexible responsibilities and outcomes that evolve with business needs.
- From pyramid to diamond organizational design: Reduce coordination layers and concentrate more people closer to where core work happens, enabling them to own end-to-end delivery.
- From output to impact: Evaluate work by the value it creates, not simply by activity or deliverables.
- From centralized authority to decentralized decision-making: Move decisions closer to the people and teams with the context to act.
- From people management to self-leadership: Give employees greater ownership of their direction, performance, and growth.
Through an experimental study, we validated how all six shifts can enrich work. For example, employees perceived 77% greater autonomy under decentralized decision-making, while dynamic roles were perceived as 49% more challenging than static jobs. The full report examines these effects across all six shifts, compares where organizations are today with where employees believe they need to be, and offers a prioritized path for leaders to get started.
Work transformation requires HR transformation
If work shifts this substantially, the function responsible for the people agenda cannot assume its own role and structure will remain the same. HR was built for fixed jobs, predictable career paths, established hierarchies, and talent systems designed for consistency. AI challenges each assumption.
With this context, we see HR’s new mandate as focused on three interconnected pillars:
- Automate: Use automation and intelligent systems to release capacity from administrative work and create space for more strategic contribution. C-suite leaders estimate that 49% of HR work will be fully automated within five years, compared with 35% of enterprise work overall.
- Redesign: Lead enterprise work redesign by determining how tasks, workflows, roles, and teams are structured across people and AI. Executives ranked work redesign as the transformation pillar that will create the greatest enterprise value over the next five years and identified HR as its leading owner.
- Reinvent: Overhaul recruitment, development, mobility, performance, and rewards to support how work now gets done and who succeeds in the new way of working. Seventy-five percent of executives agree that organizations can succeed in the AI era only if they reinvent how they measure, reward, and grow people.
In the full report, we also explore four plausible futures for how these pillars might come together to shape HR’s strategic contribution, depending on where leaders believe the people agenda can create the greatest value.
The future of work is a choice
The future of work is already being built. The opportunity now is to build it intentionally, creating better work for people and greater value for organizations.
Explore how our 10 predictions from 2025 are tracking, the evidence behind six work shifts for better employee and business outcomes, and four possible futures for how HR can create strategic value in an AI-enabled enterprise. Read the full report.
Dr. Autumn D. Krauss is chief scientist of the Future of Work Research Lab for SAP SuccessFactors.
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