Innovation Guide: Delivering on the Promise of Business AI
Innovations boost business productivity while partnerships bring out our customers’ best
Innovations boost business productivity while partnerships bring out our customers’ best
NEW YORK and ORLANDO — Through a strategic expansion of their longstanding partnership, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) have launched ADVANCE.
For the first time, the two companies have worked together to create a pathway to the cloud for organizations pursuing high growth with annual revenue of up to US$5 billion to help create more connected, intelligent and responsive enterprises.
Drawing on more than four decades of learnings from working with the world’s largest organizations, Accenture and SAP are applying their expertise and breakthrough innovations to help fast-track business transformation with streamlined finance, procurement, supply chain and workforce management, delivered through preconfigured services. The ADVANCE offerings leverage the power of SAP Business Suite — which brings together business applications, data and AI capabilities — combined with Accenture’s industry, innovation, implementation, delivery and operations expertise to provide connected experiences across the enterprise while building resilience and enabling sustainable, top-line growth.
Available in ready-to-consume, rightsized packages, the solutions leverage AI to help companies modernize faster, in as few as six to twelve months, while providing contextual data insights and achieving predictable outcomes. Tailored by industry and function, they provide a smooth service experience, from contracting to continuous innovation.
“This expansion of our longstanding partnership with SAP will tailor leading technologies, industry insights and innovation to meet the specific demands of high-growth companies to help them reinvent, thrive and grow,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture. “By bringing together the very best of Accenture and SAP, ADVANCE can help growing companies gain the speed, agility and resilience they need to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of today’s dynamic business environment.”
“To drive real transformation, companies need technology and services that help them move faster, operate more efficiently and scale with confidence,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “ADVANCE brings the full strength of SAP Business Suite with Accenture’s business transformation services to a new generation of businesses, helping them grow quickly and respond with agility to new opportunities and challenges.”
To support the unique needs of this customer segment, Accenture will invest in a dedicated practice of go-to-market and SAP-certified SaaS professionals, who will collaborate closely with SAP product specialists to deliver these packages. The purpose-built packages are focused on the following principles:
Additional SAP Business Suite offerings and Accenture services are also available, including change readiness, business process management, cybersecurity, AI agents and more.
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About Accenture
Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 801,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at accenture.com.
About SAP
As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.
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Today at SAP Sapphire, Amazon Web Services, Inc. and SAP announced the launch of a new AI Co-Innovation Program to help partners build generative artificial intelligence applications and agents that help customers rapidly solve real-time business challenges.
Many organizations recognize generative AI’s potential to transform their business, but don’t know where to start. By combining advanced generative AI technologies with enterprise resource planning (ERP) data from critical systems, companies can unlock significant enterprise value: for example, optimizing delivery routes, anticipating potential impacts to supply chain operations, or developing precise financial outlooks.
The AI Co-Innovation Program represents the two companies’ shared vision to help partners define, build, and deploy generative AI applications tailored to their ERP workloads. The program brings together enterprise technology from SAP and generative AI services from AWS with professional expertise from both parties — including teams of AI experts, professional services consultants, and solutions architects — to help support customers in their implementation journeys.
The program will include dedicated technical resources, cloud credits, and more to support the development, testing, and deployment of industry-specific applications.
“AWS and SAP’s long-standing partnership has helped customers accelerate their cloud journey and unlock more value from their business data,” said Ruba Borno, vice president of Specialists and Partners at AWS. “Our AI Co-Innovation Program is a significant next step that will give organizations the security and flexibility to build generative AI applications with Amazon Bedrock that can analyze and act on their most critical SAP data. This will help customers transform decades of business information into actionable insights while accelerating their path to becoming more agile, data-driven organizations.”
“Through the AI Co-Innovation Program with AWS, we’re enabling businesses to solve their most complex operational challenges with precision and speed,” said Philipp Herzig, CTO and chief AI officer at SAP. “By combining the power of our fully integrated platform with SAP BTP and our deep business process expertise with AWS’s comprehensive generative AI capabilities, partners can now create purpose-built AI agents that solve their most pressing challenges — identifying financial anomalies in real time to automatically optimizing supply chains during disruptions.”
The program also allows partners to rapidly build and scale generative AI applications using the latest generative AI tools and services from Amazon Bedrock, including large language models (LLMs) such as Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude in AI Foundation on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
This announcement expands on the work AWS and SAP are doing to help customers — including Hyundai Motor Group, Moderna, and Zurich Insurance Group — modernize and move SAP workloads to AWS, realizing the availability, flexibility, and scalability of the cloud. Running SAP workloads on AWS allows customers to then combine their data with generative AI solutions. Partners including Accenture and Deloitte are among the first to work with AWS and SAP through the program, helping them accelerate the development and deployment of generative AI solutions to solve complex challenges.
“The AWS and SAP AI Co-Innovation Program brings together AWS cloud infrastructure and SAP enterprise software experience. Combined with Accenture’s AI transformation expertise and industry knowledge, we can show companies exactly how to integrate generative AI services with their most critical business workloads,” said Caspar Borggreve, senior managing director and SAP Business Group lead at Accenture. “For example, together with AWS and SAP, we are working with a utilities client to build a natural disaster asset resiliency capability to anticipate and respond to environmental challenges, protecting asset-intensive landscapes and maintaining service continuity for its customers.”
“This AI Co-Innovation Program combines cutting-edge generative AI capabilities from AWS and SAP with Deloitte’s deep industry experience and technology capabilities to deliver transformative solutions for our customers,” said Nishita Henry, AWS global chief commercial officer at Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Through the program, we are building a finance solution powered by Amazon Bedrock to help healthcare and life sciences companies optimize their product mix, improve forecast accuracy, and maintain competitive pricing, even during uncertain market conditions.”
For more details on the AWS SAP AI Co-Innovation Program, visit aws.amazon.com/sap/ai.
Kai Muehlbauer is head of AI Product and Partner Management at SAP.
Sara Alligood is global AWS head of SAP at Amazon Web Services.
Generative AI is reshaping the enterprise: transforming how work gets done, how decisions are made, and how value is created. But as businesses move beyond experimentation, the stakes increase. Enterprise adoption requires more than powerful models; it demands trust, scale, and real-world applicability.
That is why SAP is excited to announce our expanded partnership with Cohere, a leader in secure, enterprise-grade AI.
Together, we plan to bring Cohere’s powerful generative and advanced retrieval models to the SAP ecosystem, starting with its Rerank model, and extending evaluations with Command, Embed to enrich our product suite, playing an important role in powering agentic AI experiences.
These models are planned to be available alongside other leading AI models from SAP as well as third parties in the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core, with the intent to give customers more choice to build AI-powered solutions that meet their unique business needs.
SAP Business AI is rooted in trust. Our customers expect and deserve AI that respects their data privacy, that it fits within their operational workflows, and that it understands the context and complexity of their industries. Cohere’s focus on security, efficiency, and enterprise applicability aligns perfectly with SAP’s approach to business AI and our generative AI hub.
Cohere Command models are lightweight, high-performing language models tailored for complex business tasks, with support for agentic workflows and multilingual operations. The Embed and Rerank models enable powerful enterprise search and retrieval capabilities, helping customers build accurate, context-aware RAG pipelines across structured and unstructured data.
Cohere models are designed to perform in production environments while respecting enterprise privacy requirements and compute constraints. And because Cohere shares our commitment to privacy-first design, these capabilities are built to serve even the most regulated industries, such as finance, healthcare, and the public sector.
As part of the partnership, SAP plans to be one of the first partners to offer Cohere’s upcoming reasoning model, a purpose-built, high-efficiency model designed to power agentic use cases.
We see enormous potential here. SAP’s vision for collaborative AI agents — capable of automating complex, multi-step tasks across systems — requires not just scale, but reasoning. Whether it’s helping consultants configure a system or enabling customer service to resolve cross-system issues, this next generation of AI requires models that can reason, plan, and act securely. Cohere’s reasoning model is built for exactly that.
We’re excited to partner with SAP and bring its enterprise customers the latest security-first models and solutions from Cohere. We’re especially excited that SAP will be one of the first partners to offer our upcoming reasoning model. SAP and Cohere share a vision for practical AI innovation, and our collaboration marks an exciting milestone as we unlock new efficiencies and growth for global enterprises.
Martin Kon, President and COO, Cohere
With this collaboration, SAP customers will be able to use Cohere models to solve pressing business challenges across industries, such as:
Customers will be able to easily access, test, and scale these models in production within SAP’s generative AI hub.
With our partnership with Cohere, we are continuing to expand a growing ecosystem of AI capabilities that are open, secure, and business-ready. This partnership helps ensure that customers can choose the right model for their use case, while trusting that it meets SAP’s standards for quality, reliability, and compliance.
Together, SAP and Cohere are enabling enterprises to harness generative AI with confidence, whether they’re building knowledge assistants, automating processes, or delivering new intelligent services to users.
To learn more about our approach to enterprise-ready AI, visit sap.com/ai.
Walter Sun is senior vice president and head of AI at SAP.
WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that it has adjusted the company’s non-financial key performance indicators (KPIs), which are a component of the Executive Board’s compensation.
With this, SAP also adjusts its non-financial guidance. The guidance for Women in Executive Roles will be replaced with the Business Health Culture Index (BHCI). SAP has measured and reported the BHCI, which is based on the results of the company’s employee engagement surveys, since 2009. In 2025, SAP expects a BHCI score in the range of 80% to 82%.
The other non-financial KPIs remain unchanged. In 2025, SAP continues to expect:
SAP remains committed to creating an inclusive workplace where all employees have equal opportunities, so that the company fully complies with the legal requirements in every country in which it operates.
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This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of SAP’s 2024 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
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For the 12th consecutive year, SAP has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Warehouse Management Systems (WMS). WMS vendors compete to address market demands like cost reduction, automation and robotics support, and cloud deployment. Gartner says that Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow. A Gartner Magic Quadrant is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors.
SAP’s positioning as a Leader is based on our ability to execute and the completeness of our supply chain vision. We believe this recognition represents our ongoing commitment to developing best-in-class warehouse management technology that can help organizations withstand the ever-shifting landscape of logistics operations.
Every day, supply chain managers are tasked with adapting to rapidly evolving technology, unprecedented disruptions, and increasing demand for faster delivery. These challenges are driving shippers toward implementing intelligent and agile technologies that make them more flexible and responsive.
However, that’s not enough. Now, integrated logistics processes are the new standard—allowing businesses to automate, optimize, and improve productivity across their entire warehouse and logistics operation.
SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) is a flexible, modern application that helps businesses manage a high volume of goods and run sustainable, digitalized, and risk-resilient operations with cloud-based warehouse processes. From simple warehouses to high-volume and automated distribution facilities, SAP EWM can integrate supply chain logistics with warehouse and distribution processes, helping to deliver the visibility and control organizations need.
Companies worldwide, across diverse industries, rely on SAP Extended Warehouse Management to help optimize their warehouse operations and enhance supply chain efficiency.
The latest releases of SAP Extended Warehouse Management include several key benefits:
These innovations can provide a comprehensive approach to modern warehouse management, combining advanced technology with practical operational improvements.
Read the full Magic Quadrant report from Gartner and learn more about the capabilities of SAP Extended Warehouse Management.
Till Dengel is global head of Product Marketing for Logistics and Asset & Service Management at SAP.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Today we can finally see the consumer version of what futurists, writers, and filmmakers have been conceptualizing for long: AI that can predict events and outcomes even before they happen. When Isaac Asimov foresaw cars with “robot brains,” he described a fictional technology that would fuel such an invention. Seven decades later, autonomous cars are a reality because of AI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of data from sensors, cameras, and other sources. And these proactive, predictive, and preventative capabilities of AI are equally applicable in almost any industry today, for example in healthcare with AI-powered wearables, retail with optimization of inventory for high-volume sales, or manufacturing with maintenance through anomaly detection.
When it comes to customer support, these capabilities are game-changing not only for current applications but also for future implications. The way businesses deliver support is improving every day, thanks to the rapidly evolving framework: technological breakthroughs, business innovations, and process agility. Here are six key methods that can transform the delivery of customer support.
With AI-infused features in diagnostics, an electric car can detect potential malfunctions and schedule its own service appointment automatically, preventing issues like battery depletion or tire pressure drops before they become critical.
How does real-time monitoring play out in the world of business software? SAP Cloud ALM provides a feature-rich observability platform that can collect telemetry data, like metrics, logs, and traces, from applications and their supporting infrastructure, allowing support teams to review the health of these systems. By providing real-time analytics and a centralized dashboard, SAP Cloud ALM helps empower IT teams to quickly respond and fix issues, so the business remains operational with minimal interruptions. Additionally, the use of OpenTelemetry standardizes observability within a modern customer landscape.
“The SAP Cloud ALM solution has been instrumental for our IT operations. It offers real-time insights and seamless integration across all our enterprise applications, making everything run more smoothly. It’s like having a bird’s-eye view of our operations, ensuring efficiency and helping us stay proactive rather than reactive.”
Omprakash H, Senior Director, Blueprint Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Customer feedback loops play an important role in improving products and services and refining customer relationships. Repeat requests, in customer and user feedback, help service providers identify critical needs and also prioritize features to be delivered.
For example, users within SAP Business Network and SAP Ariba solutions go to the help center for self-service or case assistance 10.8 times less than they did years ago. These drop-in, end-user support sessions are the result of features that have been built into the product, based on customer feedback.
AI-enabled outbreak detection is another significant process in proactive resolution that allows support teams to address unexpected increases in anomalies, customer complaints, or issues.
“We continuously identify the reasons for frequent customer demands and challenges from inquiries raised to SAP support. This allows SAP to proactively deliver the most impactful product changes before they become a challenge for more customers. This way, we improve our products while also focusing on key product capabilities used by our customers today.”
Alexey Ukrainsky, Solution Support Architect, SAP MCC
In the retail industry, predictive analytics is used effectively for proactive and preventative support. One prominent example is SAP’s holiday season readiness program, which helps position SAP as a front-runner in AI-driven, predictive, and proactive support solutions. With the goal of issue prevention at its core, the program can provide a comprehensive, 360-degree customer support profile, helping to accelerate issue detection and anticipate potential problems with AI-driven features like a virtual support assistant, resource prediction, web traffic prediction, a recommendation engine, case history analysis, issue correlation, and pattern recognition.
“During Cyber Week 2024, SAP’s holiday reason readiness program equipped our support and ops teams to achieve 100% uptime for our customers with the predictive, proactive, and bi-directional support model implemented by the program.”
Tarun Luthra, Head of Support, I&CX Solutions
SAP Signavio solutions can help businesses visualize the end-to-end customer journey, tracking interactions across different touchpoints. This enables companies to identify areas of improvement in their customer support processes, leading to more personalized and effective interactions.
With the help of SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, SAP can successfully map support processes to help implement AI improvements for optimizing our services. The result: a 100% increase reported in customer value.
For example, a business that struggles with connecting customer experience data and operational data can take advantage of the SAP Signavio Journey-to-Process Analytics solution to help reduce time to insight and uncover anomalies and trends.
“The challenge in increasing our customer experience lies in the direct link between process and journey activities. I see SAP Signavio solutions as the perfect tools for consolidating these two perspectives to develop operational excellence in step with customer experience.”
Stefan Gammel, Business Process Consultant, Hilti Group
Seamlessly integrating support features in a product, service, or system gives users easy access to directly request assistance within the interface, without needing to contact a support team or leave the platform. Built-In Support can include contextual, AI-assisted, self-service options like help application-specific documentation, troubleshooting tools, knowledge bases, and FAQs or real-time options like live chats with support engineers.
For example, WalkMe solutions and Built-In Support—layered over multiple applications in a business workflow—can provide real-time, proactive, in-app guidance to users, helping to significantly reduce the need for live assistance or support tickets.
“Context significantly enhances the quality of support. Built-In Support works like a pit stop at a racetrack. The repair crew is right where the action is. The interruption is brief and far less disruptive than taking your car to the workshop, ensuring a smoother return to your activities. In the context of your company, this helps you win your business race.”
Wilhelm Jütte, Chief Product Owner, Customer Support, SAP
None of the tools and processes that we deploy to implement a proactive and preventative support strategy are sustainable if our teams are not tuned to a proactive mindset. I believe high-performing support teams deliver the best results with a combination of human-machine collaboration, in a culture that promotes a forward-thinking, outcome-driven, service-oriented, and data-driven mindset.
At the end of the day, the best issue is the issue that we can prevent. Proactive and preventative support is not just about solving problems, but about creating peace of mind for end users, customers, partners, and support engineers so every customer receives custom care, even before they need help.
“Knowledge management within support is not just about enabling self-service through portals to deflect incoming tickets, but about eliminating the need to come to the support portal in the first place.”
Derek Matthews, Technical Support – Procurement Chief Innovation Officer, SAP
Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management at SAP.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the new catalyst of enterprise innovation. Yet, as AI becomes more embedded in core business processes, one thing is becoming clear: generic, out-of-the-box solutions alone cannot meet the complex, evolving demands of modern enterprises.
Customers don’t seek off-the-shelf AI, they seek outcomes. They demand solutions tailored to their industry, aligned with strategic goals, and built to drive real results.
That is where customer-specific AI solutions add depth — not just as a technical enhancement, but as a strategic lever to unlock transformative business value.
According to McKinsey’s State of AI 2024, 72 percent of companies use AI in at least one business function, but only 23 percent report a significant impact on their bottom line. Why? Because many AI projects lack the contextual depth to solve the real industry-specific challenges businesses face.
Similarly, a 2024 IDC study shows that while 80 percent of enterprise leaders plan to increase AI investments, nearly half say the absence of domain-tailored solutions is a barrier to ROI. While foundational AI models provide broad capabilities, true business value comes from solutions tailored to each customer. These targeted applications ensure that innovation aligns with specific regulatory demands, operational realities, and customer requirements.
These custom solutions leverage proprietary data; they are designed for specific business processes and are co-developed with stakeholders who understand the operational heartbeat of the enterprise. The result is measurable business impact, as well as faster deployment and better performance.
At SAP, we see AI’s true potential in enhancing human decisions, simplifying complexity, and transforming customer experiences. But this potential is only realized when AI is deeply grounded in each customer’s business context. That is why our approach to customer-specific AI is built on three core principles:
To address the complexity of managing nearly a million annual invoices across more than 40,000 contracts, Accenture partnered with SAP to simplify its fragmented, manual billing process. Using SAP Business Technology Platform and generative AI, the company built an intuitive, compliant application that empowers account executives to use AI for specific rate cards and contract terms, managing invoicing independently, and reducing reliance on specialist teams. The result was faster, more accurate billing, a better user experience, and major time savings, freeing commercial teams to focus on clients. By year-end, billing efficiency is expected to improve by 32 percent, with setup times cut in half and manual work replaced by an intuitive, automated platform.
Similarly, a global chemical and consumer goods company recently partnered with SAP to embed AI into its dispute management process, automating document indexing and classification. This customer-specific AI solution reduced manual effort, sped up resolution times, and boosted user productivity, showing how business-specific AI can streamline workflows and elevate customer experience at scale. The result was efficiency gains of up to 1,000 hours a month, reduced manual effort by over 500 hours/month, and improved accuracy and faster turnaround time for document-driven workflows.
These examples highlight a clear trend: customers want to co-create AI tailored to their needs, not just adopt a one-size-fits-all solution. Customer-specific AI solutions empower them to embed intelligence into the very workflows that define their competitive advantage, whether it’s last-mile logistics in retail, claims processing in insurance, or energy optimization in utilities.
In the coming years, enterprises will not differentiate by whether they use AI, but by how effectively they align AI to their business. Customer-specific AI solutions make this alignment possible. They bridge the gap between technology potential and business reality. They transform AI from a generic tool into a strategic advantage, enabling businesses to move faster, think smarter, and lead with purpose.
As more organizations navigate the complexities of digital transformation, those that embed AI into the heart of their unique processes will be the ones to redefine what is possible.
The future belongs to businesses that don’t just adopt AI, but shape it to fit their vision, values, and velocity.
Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Customer Services & Delivery.
Sindhu Gangadharan is head of Customer Innovation Services at SAP and managing director of SAP Labs India.
SAP SuccessFactors has once again been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Talent Acquisition 2025 Vendor Assessment (doc #US53236625, March 2025). SAP SuccessFactors was previously named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Modern Talent Acquisition Suites 2022 Vendor Assessment (doc #US48357022, June 2022).
In today’s fast-changing world of work, hiring the right talent has never been more critical—or complex. HR and talent acquisition leaders are under growing pressure to deliver fast results, navigate rising uncertainty, and keep up with rapidly evolving skills needs in their business.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, 63% of employers cite skills gaps in the labor market as the primary barrier to business transformation, while 86% expect AI to significantly transform their business over the next five years. The study also reports that talent availability is declining, making it harder for organizations to find the right talent with the right capabilities needed for the future. At the same time, organizations are rethinking their approaches to hiring, embracing AI and moving toward more agile, skills-based strategies to compete for talent in a dynamic and evolving job market.
That’s why selecting the right technology partner matters now more than ever. Organizations need a solution that can help them stay ahead of change, drive smarter hiring, and fuel growth and long-term business success. “Talent acquisition priorities are changing, leading to evolving concentrations and points of entry in an increasingly diversifying vendor space in the market,” says Zachary Chertok, senior research manager, Employee Experience at IDC. “Increased pressures to reduce the time to place qualified talent in roles that fill persistent and evolving skills gaps are leading talent acquisition buyers to rethink their approaches to hiring and the tools that support them.”
SAP SuccessFactors is proud to be named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Talent Acquisition 2025 Vendor Assessment. SAP SuccessFactors solutions can empower organizations of all sizes to address the ever-changing challenges of hiring in today’s complex, skills-driven world of work.

IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market, and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-to-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral, or minus next to the vendor name.
The report analyzes the expansive talent acquisition ecosystem, evaluating 22 vendors for user experience, native solution capabilities, future development pipelines, and company criteria, including size, scope, geographic reach, and future growth targets. We believe SAP SuccessFactors’ position as a Leader reflects visionary product strategy, continuous innovation, comprehensive solution functionality, and demonstrated customer value and satisfaction. The IDC MarketScape states, “SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting is part of the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite and provides AI-enabled tools, resources, and services to support recruiters and talent teams to source and align talent to their best-fit connection points within the organization.” Highlighting SAP SuccessFactors’ strengths, the report mentions, “SAP SuccessFactors customers find that the solution provides them with deep insights drawn from across the existing and modeled workforce. SAP SuccessFactors’ AI and analytical capabilities support clients to tie candidate-centric hiring practices into the evolving and modeled skilling and position needs of the organization.”
Hiring today isn’t just about filling open roles. It’s about building strong talent pipelines, finding people with the right skills and potential, creating exceptional candidate experiences, and aligning every hire to overall HR and business goals. SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding offer comprehensive, AI-enabled solutions that can simplify global hiring to help organizations attract, engage, and hire top talent with the right skills needed today and in the future.
The IDC MarketScape notes, “SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting helps recruiters maintain fluid and flexible organizational talent pipelines that retain and progressively match high-performing talent to where they are best fit within the evolving organization.” The report continues, “Overall, recruiters and talent acquisition teams find that SAP SuccessFactors’ recruiting and talent acquisition capabilities are feature rich, support dynamic and evolving compliance and sourcing needs, and support custom and AI-informed workflows and candidate progression.” SAP SuccessFactors solutions can enable organizations to accelerate hiring with AI-enabled talent acquisition capabilities, including AI-enhanced job descriptions, AI-assisted applicant screening, AI-recommended interview questions, AI-driven skills-based job recommendations, AI-assisted onboarding and offboarding, AI-assisted writing, and AI-driven interview summarization.
Adopting the right AI-enabled talent acquisition strategy is what puts innovative businesses ahead. Darussalam Assets, a large and diversified holding company in Brunei turned to SAP SuccessFactors solutions to transform HR’s impact on its business, increasing productivity and efficiency to over 30 subsidiaries across 14 industries. “With SAP Business AI technology embedded in SAP SuccessFactors solutions, we’ve seen significant benefits such as reducing our overall recruitment time from months to weeks. The AI features have streamlined processes for generating and updating job descriptions and creating competency-based interview questions, making our recruitment process more efficient and standardized,” shares Salehin Basir, human capital development manager at Darussalam Assets. The company has seen significant benefits, such as four-times more efficient hiring processes, a 75% reduction in recruitment time, and deeper insights into important HR metrics that improve data-driven decision-making and reduce bottlenecks.
With a talent landscape defined by continuous change, the future of hiring relies on taking a skills-based approach to identifying, securing, and growing the right talent. The World Economic Forum reports that 70% of organizations plan to hire for emerging, in-demand skills, while 51% intend to reskill or upskill existing employees to fill growing skills needs. Whether an organization is focused on developing talent from within or bringing in new capabilities to keep their business ahead, SAP SuccessFactors solutions can help talent teams stay agile, efficient, and aligned to business needs.
According to trusted HCM Industry Analyst Josh Bersin’s Emerging Trends in Talent Acquisition for 2025 factbook, talent acquisition leaders state a growing priority to implement skills throughout their talent functions and strategies—for both hiring and internal mobility. The factbook shares, “AI plays a key role in deploying skills in a scalable and sustainable way, particularly as in-demand and job-specific skills are constantly changing. It can help match skills to jobs, identify skill adjacencies, pinpoint where talent with specific skills is located, uncover learning opportunities, and more.”
Our latest HR trends research finds growing workforce confidence around the potential value of AI, with 70% of managers agreeing that using AI technology for skills-based decision-making would be somewhat or very valuable, and an overwhelming majority of employees (88%) feeling positively about skills-based decision-making. The IDC MarketScape highlights how SAP SuccessFactors users can quickly see value from implementing skills-based hiring strategies, noting: “Simplified application processes help candidates apply from any device and leverage AI to parse skills from their resumes to match those with the company’s evolving skills architecture and talent intelligence.”
Bringing these insights to life, Capgemini is a powerful example of how leading organizations are building skills-based talent strategies ready for the future. Capgemini, a global business and technology partner with 340,000 employees across more than 50 countries turned to SAP SuccessFactors solutions when looking for an HR infrastructure that would allow it to attract, retain, and grow market-leading skills. Capgemini built a skills engine to support the moments that matter across the employee lifecycle, including recruitment, onboarding, talent management, compensation and rewards, learning, and succession management. The company is implementing SAP SuccessFactors HCM to enable skills-based people management and deliver a highly engaging people experience.
Going beyond talent acquisition, SAP SuccessFactors solutions help align hiring to overall HR strategies, with connected, unified learning and talent solutions; a single skills foundation; AI-enabled talent intelligence; and advanced, cross-suite capabilities. The IDC MarketScape notes, “SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting is a natural extension of the SAP SuccessFactors environment that gives companies a fully integrated platform for insights-driven, end-to-end candidate and employee lifecycle management.” The assessment further notes, “Talent acquisition teams can benefit from deep continuous workforce planning insights that guide for and optimize the balance between internal mobility and external hiring for a higher efficacy in talent placement.”
As we look toward the future, organizations that embrace skills-based talent strategies and AI-driven talent acquisition will be best positioned to adapt, grow, and lead in an ever-changing world of work. Learn more about why we were named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Talent Acquisition 2025 Vendor Assessment and discover more about SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding.
About nine out of 10 ERP implementations fall short, often due to lack of adoption by either employees or business units, according to global consultancy Bain & Company. So, how do experts such as Bain ensure success during their own big-bang implementation of, say, SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud?
“We executed this change management successfully by leveraging our own playbook on ourselves,” Ramesh Razdan, Global Chief Technology/Information Officer, Bain & Company, told SAP. “Just as we have done [with clients] multiple times across the globe, in partnership with SAP.”
The “playbook” is Bain’s methodical guide to modernizing an organization’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. And it played a vital role in Bain’s own ERP journey.