Introducing the Project Team Orientation (PTO)
Introducing SAP SuccessFactors Career Development Planning and Mentoring
Explaining the Development Goal Plan
Using the Career Worksheet
Exploring Recommended Roles and Career Paths
Exploring Opportunity Marketplace
Exploring Mentoring
Planning Next Steps

Exploring AI Capabilities for Career Development Planning

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to configure the AI capabilities for Career Development Planning.

SAP Business AI Introduction

SAP Business AI enhances the capabilities of SAP applications, enabling them to learn and improve business outcomes.­ This­ leads­ to­ significant improvements in key business processes, giving customers access to more intelligent and automated solutions. SAP Business AI is infused across the SAP product portfolio, and every embedded scenario has gone through a rigorous AI ethics process.

Generative AI enables completely new capabilities in business software. With Generative AI, new content can be created, complex information can be summarized, computer code written, and more. It is a new generation of AI that can reason through business problems and make suggestions.

Note

More information about SAP Business AI strategy is available here: https://www.sap.com/products/artificial-intelligence.html

Key Terms in Artificial Intelligence

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI): a technology that equips machines with human-like capabilities, such as problem-solving, visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation, seen in everyday applications like AI assistants and facial recognition software
  • Machine Learning (ML): a subset of AI that focuses on enabling computer systems to learn and improve from experience or data, incorporating elements from fields like computer science, statistics, and psychology
  • Deep Learning: a branch of machine learning that uses multilayered neural networks to analyze complex data patterns, and may employ different learning methods like supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning depending upon the task and available data
  • Generative AI (GenAI): Generative AI is a form of deep learning which utilizes foundation models, such as large language models, to create new content, which can include text, images, sound, and videos, based on the data they were trained on.
    • Foundation models: AI systems that use self-supervised learning on vast data to perform a variety of tasks, such as writing documents or creating images. Their versatility and adaptability make them a significant advancement in AI, lowering the barriers to adoption.
    • Large language models (LLMs): Large language models are a subcategory of foundation models that are used for text and computer code.

A good overview of these SAP Business AI capabilities can be found on the following learning journey: https://learning.sap.com/learning-journeys/exploring-the-sap-business-ai-portfolio

Joule and CDP Agents

Joule is the AI copilot that revolutionizes how you interact with your SAP business systems, making every touch-point count and every task simpler.

Joule offers conversational interactions between humans and computers to simplify access to information and automate business processes, thus improving both employee and customer satisfaction. Joule can direct you to the right application to complete your tasks, help you to complete certain tasks, and find the information you're looking for quickly and easily.

Joule Agents

Joule Agents are AI agents embedded into every business function and accessed with role-based assistants. They use SAP’s process expertise to automate complex workflows and deliver AI value at scale. You can explore more details about Joule Assistants and Agents for SAP SuccessFactors with the following links:

The following agents are currently available for Career Development Planning*:

Career Development Planning Agents

Agent NameBenefits
Career Development Agent: An intelligent agent to help employees identify skill gaps, recommend role transitions, and curate personalized development opportunities.
  • Empower employees to close skill gaps faster through automatically assembled, personalized development plans tailored to their target roles.
  • Guide employees toward meaningful career growth by highlighting career paths that align with both their skills and traditional role progressions.
  • Increase career mobility by helping employees identify viable next roles and clearly understand the capabilities required to progress confidently.
Development Goal Creation Agent: Create personal development goals based on an employee’s description of what they want to achieve. Upon content review, if users update their input and regenerate content, they can compare the original content with AI-generated content and choose which one to use.
  • Dramatically speed up goal creation.
  • Reduce time spent on ideation and content drafting, helping the goals be more concise, measurable, and aligned across the organization.
  • Personalize content to individual users.

Note

*IMPORTANT: At the time we published the 1H 2026 release content, these agents were planned but not yet generally available in the SAP SuccessFactors environment. Joule follows a different approach when it comes to release enhancements which differs from the SAP SuccessFactors release cycle. The latest information on Joule can be followed with this article: KBA 3604540-Joule in SuccessFactors Monthly Release

Joule Use Cases

Joule has many use cases available, with more being added monthly. The table below shows a sample of the Joule use cases currently available for Career Development Planning:

Joule Use Case Examples

ProductUse CaseDescription
DevelopmentView development goalsAllows users to view development goals, including the goal name, goal plan name, and goal status, and follow a link to the goal details page for more information.
DevelopmentEdit development goalsAllows users to edit the status and completion percentage of development goals. Currently only these two fields are supported.
DevelopmentAdd comments to development goalsAllows users to add comments to development goals.
DevelopmentApprove mentorsAllows managers to approve or decline employee requests to be a mentor.
DevelopmentApprove mentoring requestsAllows mentors to accept or decline mentoring requests sent by mentees.
Opportunity MarketplaceApprove assignment offersAllows approvers to approve or decline the assignment offer requests.
Opportunity MarketplaceApprove acceptance of assignment offersAllows approvers to approve or decline requests of accepting assignment offers.
Opportunity MarketplaceApprove assignment applicationsAllows approvers to approve or decline requests of applying for assignments.
Opportunity MarketplaceApprove assignment publishingAllows approvers to approve or decline requests of publishing assignments.

Joule for Consultants

SAP Joule for Consultants is a Gen AI-powered copilot designed to boost consultant productivity by providing fast, reliable answers grounded in exclusive SAP content. It reduces rework by offering expert-level guidance that enhances design decisions and ensures alignment with best practices across project management, functional, and technical consulting.

Joule for Consultants draws from SAP's comprehensive knowledge base containing 18M+ pages of exclusive SAP documentation and training materials and leverages SAP's specialized fine-tuned ABAP model, trained on 300 million lines of ABAP code and 30 million lines of CDS code, to handle detailed code explanation and basic code generation. This extensive repository includes more than 9 terabytes of curated SAP knowledge content, 100+ SAP certifications, implementation guidance, product documentation, learning journeys, and insights from the SAP community.

Key Capabilities of Joule for Consultants

  • Enablement and Discovery: Provides comprehensive insights into the SAP domain by addressing questions related to product names, entity definitions, SAP concepts, programs, processes, and functional capabilities across the SAP portfolio.
  • Guidance and Instructions: Offers step-by-step support for achieving specific objectives, including setup, configuration, customization, and transformation of SAP systems and business processes across the SAP product suite.
  • Support and Troubleshooting: Delivers precise solutions for resolving functional issues or operational challenges within SAP systems and business processes across the SAP ecosystem.

Note

Joule for Consultants requires an SAP AI Units License.

AI Services Administration for Career Development Planning

Users can now take advantage of AI to assist them in creating development goals and assignments, managing goal content more efficiently, gaining career insights, and joining mentoring programs. There are some prerequisites required in order to use the Generative AI features in Career Development Planning:

  • Latest Goal Management enabled
  • SAP AI Units license
  • The following permission needs to be granted in Role-Based Permissions (RBP): Administrator Permissions→Manage AI Capabilities→AI Services Administration.

With these prerequisites, an administrator can navigate to AI Services Administration using Action Search, and enable the following AI features relevant to Career Development Planning:

  • Global Features→Assisted Writing: The AI-assisted writing tool is an interactive tool that uses Generative AI capabilities to assist employees with their writing tasks. While writing content in text and textarea fields within the SAP SuccessFactors applications, employees can leverage the features of the AI-assisted writing tool to enhance multiple aspects of their writing, such as clarity, conciseness, and tone. Additional Assisted Writing features that can be enabled are Translation and Text Analyzer (which searches for potential bias and removes harmful language). An SAP AI Units License is not required to use AI-assisted Writing.
  • Talent→Assisted Development Goals: With this feature, end users can create detailed development goals using Generative AI.
  • Talent→Assisted Opportunity Marketplace Assignments: Employees can use the AI-assisted writing to improve the description of assignments when assignment owners create or edit assignments, and the comment of assignment applications when assignment applicants apply for assignments.
  • Talent→Assisted Career Insights: With this feature, end users can gain insights into current and target roles including suggestions for areas needing improvement.
  • Talent Intelligence Hub→Assisted Skill Recommendation for Opportunity Marketplace Assignments: Recommends Growth Portfolio skills using AI capabilities for Opportunity Marketplace assignments.
The AI Services Administration Features Settings page is displayed.

Note

There are some other AI features that can be enabled from this tool that might be relevant for other SAP SuccessFactors solutions, such as SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Management, Employee Central, Talent Intelligence Hub, and Performance Goal Management. You can find out more information here: Premium AI Features in SAP SuccessFactors

Summary

  • SAP Business AI improves business outcomes by learning and automating processes, integrating across products, and adhering to ethical AI practices.
  • Generative AI enables new capabilities, including content creation, summarization, and business problem-solving using foundation and large language models (LLMs).
  • Joule simplifies interactions, automates processes with multiple AI agents, and supports tasks like goal editing, mentoring approvals, and assignment management in SAP systems.
  • AI Services Administration enables features like Assisted Writing, Development Goals, and Career Insights within Career Development Planning.
  • Prerequisites for AI features include enabled Goal Management, AI Units license, and granted Role-Based Permissions for AI Services Administration.
Learning

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