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.

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.

SAP has opened its newest data center in Mumbai. The data center reflects the company’s deepening commitment to India, the world’s fastest-growing large economy and home to more than 15,000 employees of the Germany-based enterprise software provider.

With the new data center in India complementing existing ones in Europe, the U.S., and Saudi Arabia, SAP has dramatically strengthened the data federation capabilities of SAP Business Network Commerce Automation, linking together the procurement processes of businesses and their trading partners across the globe.

With this milestone, SAP has delivered on a crucial promise made to a highly consequential set of customers in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. Later this year, the India data center will extend data federation capabilities for SAP Business Network Supply Chain Collaboration as well.

But what is data federation? And why is it so consequential for organizations in India and elsewhere?

Data federation assembles a unified view of data from disparate sources without physically moving or copying it. Trading partners can thus exchange goods and services across international borders while the data underlying those transactions remains stationary. By preserving the integrity of data where it resides, federation facilitates mission-critical operational processes on a global scale while achieving regulatory consistency with compliance requirements that arise at a national level. For example, if a buyer’s data resides in SAP Business Network’s India data center but its supplier’s data sits in the U.S. data center, federation provides both parties with access to each other’s data without impinging on either nation’s policies governing the residency of that data. This becomes especially important as new legislation gathers pace around the world in response to rising concerns over individual privacy, national security and commercial sectors considered sensitive.

Enabled by SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Network and its data federation capabilities are now built on the kind of modern, connected foundation required for the next era of cloud-based commerce. Beyond improved scale, resilience, and regional compliance, SAP Business Technology Platform helps create the basis for agentic artificial intelligence, automation, richer analytics, stronger security, open extensibility, and seamless cross-SAP workflows and processes. The result is a network that can not only connect partners globally but also help customers to conduct business more intelligently, respond faster to change, and drive greater value from every interaction across procurement, supply chain, logistics, asset collaboration, and working capital management.

To collaborate with their trading partners on these and other core business processes, companies conducting business in India require a cloud-based platform that provides secure infrastructure for building resilient domestic supply chains while maintaining global connectivity, thus maintaining sensitive procurement, supplier, and manufacturing data within Indian jurisdiction. SAP Business Network furthers these objectives with our newly launched data center in Mumbai, where data is localized in a manner compliant with Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) guidelines, with a MeitY-empaneled cloud service provider.

While supporting compliance within an increasingly complex regulatory environment, data federation offers numerous technical advantages as well, especially in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. These benefits include cost efficiency, unified governance and security, and faster response times compared to accessing servers in distant regions. Yet the most valuable competitive advantage provided by data federation may be the most elusive: peace of mind for business leaders amid the ever-looming threat to supply chains posed by disruption.

To counter that threat—whether arising from geopolitical conflict, labor unrest, financial shock, natural disaster, or other upheaval—businesses are turning increasingly to data federation and other cloud-based solutions to extend visibility and instill resilience across their operations and those of their trading partners. With the opening of our new data center in Mumbai, we are incredibly excited to strengthen our relationships with customers throughout India and accelerate the value available to them from SAP Business Network.

For information on SAP Supply Chain Management and how SAP solutions are equipping enterprises with the AI capabilities needed to instill resilience, counter disruption, and foster collaboration, visit sap.com/scm and sap.com/ai.

Jörn Keller is executive vice president and chief product officer of SAP Business Network.