In the heart of SoHo, every storefront competes for attention. During New York Fashion Week (NYFW), SAP is helping bring a fashion retail store to life.

At first glance, the space looks like a curated boutique. Clothing racks, soft lighting, and attentive staff set the scene. Pick up an item, and nearby displays can respond. Teams can also follow fitting-room activity and the sales floor in real time.

At the center is the Retail Innovation Lab by NYFW Collections and SAP, featuring fashion label RE/DONE. SAP and N4XT Experiences, which operates NYFW Collections, built the lab as part of our multi-season partnership. The store is open from September 11-30. For three weeks, visitors can experience connected retail in SoHo.

The new store is a progression of a three-day pop-up developed with fashion brand Public School New York in February. This season we are expanding the Retail Innovation Lab format to a full-fledged RE/DONE store, open to the public for three weeks. At the heart of it is a private “Command Center,” connecting the sales floor with the operations behind it. The Retail Innovation Lab doubles as an expansion of our SAP Experience Centers, offering SAP customers and prospects the chance to explore SAP software and partner solutions in a real-life setting.

This approach reflects our co-innovation model, which aims to turn collaborative ideas into customer-facing experiences faster so visitors can experience the technology in action and understand its value firsthand. SAP, N4XT Experiences, and participating fashion brands contribute with their respective expertise. Together, we are developing a store concept that serves as a test bed for retail brands of various sizes.

From display to decision

Start your visit with a scan and opt in to a digital profile. As you browse, nearby displays can update with product details. A styling surface suggests complete looks and complementary pieces. Together, these features connect product discovery and styling in one experience.

In the fitting room, connected technology recognizes each item and size. An associate can respond quickly with another size or suggestion. When you’re ready, choose how to buy. Use your phone, ask an associate, or visit a traditional point of sale. Afterward, a personal digital wardrobe saves looks and keeps the experience going.

Behind the sales floor, the Command Center gathers movement, fitting-room, size, and sales signals. Teams gain a real-time view of customer activity and store performance.

Consider unexpected interest in one size: combined with inventory, merchandising, and replenishment information, that signal can reveal demand earlier. Teams can respond with greater precision. The store becomes a richer source of insight for assortment, inventory, and demand planning.

Co-innovation at the heart of industry

The lab also shows how our approach to co-innovation works. Customers and industry experts contribute their knowledge of operations, markets, and opportunities. SAP brings more than 50 years of experience in business processes. It also brings the data, applications, and technology that connect them. Together, they ground innovation in the realities of retail and fashion.

In retail, that collaboration points toward autonomous commerce. Connected customer journeys and intelligent operations can work together within human-defined guardrails. The lab makes this direction tangible on the sales floor.

The same principle guides SAP’s approach to Industry AI, co-innovated with customers and industry experts. Their real-world knowledge gives AI context for industry processes and business decisions. AI can then understand what a signal means inside a business. It can also connect that signal to the surrounding processes.

That context differs by industry. In fashion retail, customer interactions can guide merchandising and demand. On a factory floor, production data can help teams improve operations. In consumer products, changing demand can inform planning and supply decisions. Each industry helps shape the AI built for it.

That’s the power of Industry AI. It brings an industry’s own knowledge into AI.

From industry expertise to intelligent action

Industry knowledge becomes more valuable when it moves businesses from insight to action. Companies can decide faster and orchestrate more processes across their operations.

That creates a path toward the Autonomous Enterprise. People define ambitions and guardrails; intelligent systems support them and execute more processes with speed, context, and precision. Human expertise stays central. It shapes the decisions and boundaries that move industries forward.

NYFW gives this collaboration a compelling stage. The lab shows how customer experiences and operations can connect in real time. Autonomous commerce brings that connection into focus for retail. Industry AI carries the same principle across industries.

Together, business knowledge, data, and AI create new ways for customers to act on insight.

Andre Bechtold is president of SAP Industries & Experiences and chief revenue officer of Industry AI at SAP.

Earlier this year, we emphasized that business transformation is a continuous journey, not a static destination. It consistently translates innovation into tangible daily results. Today, we’re thrilled to highlight significant progress in the SAP Services and Support portfolio.

To better drive success, our unified service release model will continue to deliver expanded capabilities seamlessly. This update demonstrates the real-world impact of our strategy, especially as businesses increasingly embed AI into their core operations.

Realizing value: documented progress and strong customer adoption

Our core mission remains to provide guidance that is simple, predictable, and directly connected to measurable business outcomes. We are delighted to see this approach gain substantial momentum. Hundreds of organizations have adopted our Advanced Success Plan and Max Success Plan, validating that deeper engagement leads to stronger, long-term results. Our customers’ success is our priority. We bring our entire portfolio together to help create a seamless experience, custom-fit to customer needs.

Empowering businesses with next-generation capabilities

To help organizations navigate in today’s dynamic market, we’ve focused our services on three strategic growth drivers:

• Powering the Autonomous Enterprise: We help streamline processes and boost efficiency by pairing intelligent tools with expert guidance. This includes AI-powered capabilities like Joule for SAP for Me for proactive insights and agentic case resolution to help deliver faster, more intelligent support.
• Enabling targeted business transitions: We deliver clear, structured pathways that help businesses confidently unlock SAP’s newest AI capabilities and innovations across specific lines of business. These tailored migration paths can simplify transition and integration processes.
• Driving front-office impact with productivity AI: Our focus can deliver measurable productivity gains for front-office teams through deeply embedded AI capabilities, enhanced release guidance, and strategic engagement planning aligned with business outcomes.

Expanding and integrating support for every stage of the SAP journey

Our SAP Services and Support portfolio is streamlined into three success plans (Foundational, Advanced, and Max) with three supplemental offerings (development services, application management, and professional services), all designed to complement each other to support continuous adoption, innovation, and transformation at every stage of the journey. The focus is on clearly defining what each offering provides, when to use it, and the specific outcomes it can deliver.

Success plans: evolving as the primary engagement model

Our success plans continue to strengthen their position as they offer expanded solution area coverage and AI-powered capabilities. The Foundational Success Plan has full SAP solution area coverage, providing clearer pathways to Advanced Success Plan and Max Success Plan engagements. New expert-led AI services are now available, with enhanced SAP Build coverage to support AI maturity journeys. Furthermore, upgraded release guidance tooling helps improve planning consistency, and automated provisioning for Max Success Plan customers can streamline the engagement process.

The tangible impact of these integrated AI capabilities is already evident, with Joule for SAP for Me seeing strong adoption with nearly 200,000 users year-to-date, while agentic case resolution uses AI agents to help automatically handle and resolve support cases, working to reduce resolution times and minimize the need for manual escalation.

Development services: unlocking the full potential of SAP BTP

In the current release, our development services have been expanded to help unlock the full potential of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).

New extensibility packages offer structured guidance and best practice frameworks for custom applications and integrations to enable faster delivery and consistent quality. Furthermore, all managed development engagements formally embed clean core principles, which help make custom solutions upgrade-safe and future-proof. In addition, AI-assisted tooling is now standard in eligible engagements, working to further reduce timelines and improve code quality.

Application management: sustaining continuity and performance

Application management, which handles the day-to-day operations and ongoing optimization of a customer’s live SAP environment, continues to evolve as a critical pillar to help ensure continuity and performance across SAP environments.

SAP enables customers to operate the Autonomous Enterprise with confidence by continuously governing, securing, and optimizing autonomous applications and platform services. AI-assisted monitoring and intelligent incident remediation help proactively identify risks, reduce resolution times, and improve operational resilience. Through an integrated adopt-to-operate approach, SAP can connect adoption, success planning, and application management into a seamless lifecycle experience, helping customers accelerate value realization, maximize business outcomes, and sustain transformation success.

Professional services: structured implementation and transformation

Our professional services can deliver targeted, one-time project expertise, including end-to-end implementations, complex migrations, upgrades, and system optimizations.

With the new release, SAP is simplifying its professional services portfolio to support transformation journeys by aligning with success plans and integrating proven expertise into scalable engagement models. Refreshed outcome-based services help expand coverage across SAP solutions and are designed to align with the Advanced Success Plan and Max Success Plan. Furthermore, formalized handoff protocols between success plans and professional services help foster seamless continuity of project context.

A partnership for continuous success

This unified portfolio release underscores SAP’s collective strength and shared commitment to help transform customers’ SAP experience with a streamlined support portfolio built for impact:

• Modular choice: Easily scale services to match exact goals.
• Ongoing optimization: Continuously unlock software potential with proactive guidance.
• One connected system: Enjoy a frictionless, cohesive experience across the full suite.

Transforming your business shouldn’t be complicated. At SAP, we partner with you to turn complex transformation into measurable, lasting business results. Explore our newly evolved SAP Services and Support portfolio to see how it can help maximize value and drive your strategic goals forward.

Dr. Uwe Grigoleit is senior vice president of Customer Evolution & Portfolio at SAP.

BETHESDA — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Lockheed Martin has successfully gone live with SAP SuccessFactors solutions, including SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding, marking a significant milestone in the company’s workforce transformation journey.

The deployment brings together core human resources (HR) processes on a flexible cloud foundation designed to simplify HR operations, enhance employee experience and support a global workforce. 

A leader in aerospace, defense and advanced technology solutions, Lockheed Martin is modernizing its HR landscape by moving from legacy systems to a unified platform. The new environment provides a more connected experience for employees and managers while supporting greater consistency and operational efficiency across the enterprise.  

With almost 60% of its 123,000 employees being engineers, scientists and technologists, attracting, developing and retaining highly skilled talent at scale is critical to Lockheed Martin’s continued success. By creating a single source of truth for workforce data, Lockheed Martin is gaining clearer insight into its workforce, enabling more informed talent decisions. 

This transformation allows Lockheed Martin to accelerate its robust applied AI strategy across the workforce to help employees and managers access information more efficiently and unlock new insights across the employee life cycle. 

“Lockheed Martin is advancing an enterprise-wide transformation of exceptional scale and complexity, while meeting the rigorous demands of a highly regulated industry,” said Thomas Saueressig, Member of the Executive Board and Chief Customer Officer of SAP SE. “This milestone reflects Lockheed Martin’s commitment to modernizing workforce operations and investing in technologies that support employees, strengthen organizational agility and position the company for future innovation.”

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Media Contact:
Victoria Dixon, +1 (703) 288-6020, victoria.dixon@sap.com, ET
SAP Press Room; press@sap.com

Top image courtesy Lockheed Martin

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As AI becomes more deeply embedded across HR and business operations, one question continues to surface: how can organizations maintain employee trust while increasing automation? For payroll leaders, it’s an especially important question.

Payroll presents a unique paradox. It’s one of the business functions most suited to AI and automation because it’s highly structured, data-intensive, and compliance-driven. At the same time, it’s one of the most trust-sensitive functions in the enterprise because even small errors can have immediate consequences for employees’ financial well-being and confidence in their employer.

Payroll professionals often joke that nobody notices payroll when it goes right, and everyone notices when it goes wrong. Behind that observation is an important reality: every payroll run becomes a moment of trust between employer and employee. That trust has measurable consequences. According to new research* by SAP’s Future of Work Research Lab, 38% of employees worldwide have experienced a payroll error. These employees are significantly less likely to trust both their organization (13% lower trust) and their payroll function (17% lower trust). Trust declines even further with each additional payroll error experienced.

As National Payroll Week takes place across both the U.S. and the UK, we have an opportunity to recognize the payroll professionals who earn and maintain that trust every day, while reflecting on the transformation taking place across the payroll function itself.

As payroll teams navigate growing complexity, they’re being asked to do more with less while maintaining the accuracy, compliance, and reliability employees depend on. Employees increasingly expect faster, more flexible payroll experiences, including more frequent pay cycles and greater visibility into earnings and deductions, while tax laws, wage rules, leave requirements, and reporting obligations continue to evolve across countries, states, and local jurisdictions. At the same time, today’s workforce is more dynamic than ever, with employees changing roles, locations, schedules, and compensation arrangements in ways that can create downstream payroll impacts. Managing these changes manually is becoming increasingly difficult and raising the risk of errors, delays, and compliance gaps, positioning payroll not simply as an administrative process, but as strategic infrastructure supporting employee experience, compliance, finance, and business operations.

This combination of rising complexity and rising expectations is driving the next evolution of payroll: autonomous payroll.

Scaling trust in an era of complexity

Autonomous payroll is designed to help organizations navigate growing payroll complexity while maintaining accuracy, compliance, and confidence at scale. By combining AI, intelligent automation, integrated data, and real-time payroll monitoring, organizations can move beyond reactive payroll operations and proactively identify issues before they affect employees.

The goal isn’t to remove people from payroll, but to enable them to focus on higher-value activities by reducing manual effort and increasing visibility. Our global research suggests that employees do not see AI and human involvement as mutually exclusive. In fact, nearly half (49%) say they would trust AI in payroll more if they still had access to a human when AI fails. Additionally, 43% of employees say that the ability to request a human review of AI-generated outcomes would increase their trust in the use of AI in payroll. Trust is built not only through accuracy and efficiency, but also through the confidence that employees can escalate concerns, seek clarification, and access human support when needed.

Emerging capabilities such as AI-powered payroll agents and continuous payroll are helping organizations move from processing payroll to actively managing it. These capabilities can assess payroll readiness, detect anomalies, validate changes, and monitor workforce events across HR, payroll, and time data. By identifying how changes in roles, locations, schedules, compensation, or leave may affect payroll outcomes, organizations can anticipate impacts and resolve exceptions before they become costly errors. The result is improved reliability, stronger compliance, and greater trust across the workforce.

The shift is significant. Rather than finding errors at the end of a payroll cycle, organizations can increasingly investigate and resolve them throughout the cycle. But technology alone isn’t enough. As payroll becomes more autonomous, organizations must ensure intelligent systems operate with appropriate oversight, transparency, and accountability.

Automation requires accountability

As AI becomes more embedded in payroll operations, the conversation shifts from adoption to accountability. Trust becomes paramount, raising important questions about where AI can operate autonomously, where human review adds value, and where human accountability must remain visible.

Our global research shows that employee comfort with AI varies by payroll task. Employees are most comfortable with AI supporting calculation-heavy activities such as payroll calculations and anomaly detection, while they prefer human involvement for tasks requiring judgment, investigation, or employee interaction. Final decisions on payroll disputes remain the area where employees most strongly prefer a human. These findings reinforce an important point: the goal is not to replace human expertise, but to apply AI where it adds the most value while preserving human oversight where trust and judgment matter most.

The most successful applications of AI in payroll won’t simply automate tasks. They’ll strengthen trust by improving consistency, reliability, transparency, and the overall payroll experience employees depend on.

In other words, the future of payroll isn’t human or AI. It’s human expertise amplified by AI.

Building the foundation for Autonomous HCM

The implications of autonomous payroll extend well beyond payroll operations.

At SAP, we believe autonomous payroll is a key enabler of Autonomous HCM. Trusted AI experiences depend on trusted data, connected processes, and embedded intelligence, and payroll plays a critical role in making that vision possible.

Every hiring decision, compensation adjustment, promotion, workforce change, or organizational initiative ultimately affects payroll. As a result, payroll remains one of the most trusted and comprehensive sources of workforce data across the enterprise.

Realizing the full potential of autonomous payroll requires a unified foundation across HR, payroll, and time data. When organizations establish a single source of truth, they can reduce complexity, improve payroll accuracy, strengthen compliance, and enable AI to deliver more meaningful insights and recommendations.

This foundation is essential because AI cannot solve payroll challenges if it’s simply layered on top of fragmented systems and disconnected processes. Instead, organizations need connected data and integrated workflows that allow intelligence to operate across the entire workforce lifecycle.

When payroll, HR, and time data come together on that foundation, organizations can create more intelligent workforce experiences, make better decisions, and increase organizational agility.

Looking ahead

National Payroll Week is an opportunity to celebrate the professionals who keep one of the most important business functions running every day. It’s also an opportunity to recognize how dramatically that function is evolving.

For decades, payroll was viewed primarily as an administrative necessity. Today, it is increasingly recognized as a strategic capability that influences employee experience, compliance, operational resilience, and organizational trust.

The organizations that lead in the years ahead won’t simply process payroll more efficiently. They’ll create payroll operations that are more intelligent, more connected, and better positioned to support both employees and the business.

As payroll continues its evolution from a transactional function to a strategic business capability, the opportunity is not simply to automate existing processes. It’s to build payroll operations that can scale trust, resilience, and confidence in an increasingly complex world.

Because when payroll works, it does more than deliver pay. It helps build confidence in the organization behind it.

Discover how SAP SuccessFactors helps organizations simplify payroll, reduce complexity, and accelerate their journey to autonomous payroll.

*Data from a global survey of 1,576 full-time employees in July 2026.