SAP's HR strategy lead warns against rushed AI workforce decisions as skills intelligence emerges as planning priority

Data presented at SAP HR Connect in Johannesburg points to a widening gap between AI adoption speed and organisational readiness in human capital management.

Megan Fife, Strategy Lead for SAP SuccessFactors, the human capital management division of enterprise software company SAP, used a presentation at the SAP HR Connect Summit in Johannesburg to lay out the data shaping how organisations are approaching AI adoption in the workplace, and the risks of moving faster than their structures can absorb.

The figures Fife presented describe a workforce caught between expectation and anxiety. Around 48% of employees believe their organisations will replace human managers with AI within five years, while 61% expect AI to improve the quality of people-related decisions. Employees also anticipate a 266% improvement in productivity within the same window. At the same time, 39% of workers expect their current skill sets to be outdated or significantly transformed by 2030.

Against that backdrop, Fife pointed to a pattern that emerged prominently in 2025: organisations making rapid workforce cuts in response to AI adoption pressure, only to reverse those decisions within months. "Lots of companies making very quick decisions to get rid of an entire area of their workforce only to just hire them back a few months later because they realised they weren't ready for it," she said.

SAP's response to this pattern is structured around three areas. The first is what the company describes as elevating the human advantage, focused on enabling employees to work alongside AI rather than be displaced by it. The second is redesigning work for impact, which Fife described as the pillar with the broadest implications for HR functions.

"Because now your company is looking to you to come up with a plan for the future," she said, noting that HR departments are under growing pressure to provide direction on AI integration rather than simply respond to it. "I don't want to be in the headlines," she added, referencing the media coverage that followed high-profile workforce decisions last year.

The third area centres on skills intelligence, which Fife identified as the likely foundation of workforce planning going forward. The practical question, as she framed it, is whether organisations truly understand what skills their employees have today, what skills they will need, and how to close that gap, through a combination of internal upskilling, short-term contract hiring for near-term priorities, and targeted external recruitment for specific capabilities.

On the technology side, Fife noted that early AI applications in HR tended to focus on self-service tools for employees and managers. SAP's current focus extends that toward using AI to identify underlying HR and operational issues and generate recommendations for addressing them. She also flagged that terms like autonomous payroll and autonomous HR are gaining traction as concepts for 2026, while emphasising that human oversight remains a requirement: "There still has to be a human ultimately in the loop and making the decision."