SAP Research: Firms Risk Optimizing AI Work for Efficiency, Not Value

The productivity trap

According to SAP, its latest research combines monitoring of more than 500 business, academic, government and economic resources with original global mixed methods research. The sample includes 2,718 employees, 500 C-suite leaders, 60 HR executives and founders of AI-native companies.

In October 2025, the lab published 10 predictions for work, workforces and work practices, each with two possible futures. A year later, SAP says the evidence is strongest for what it calls the "AI Upgrade" future, in which AI's value is measured through efficiency, productivity gains and time savings. Signs of broader work transformation are emerging, but they remain less established.

SAP argues the focus on productivity is understandable because time savings, output and cost reductions are relatively easy to measure. The harder question, it says, is what organizations do with the capacity AI creates: ask employees to produce more of the same work, or redesign work, roles, teams and talent systems around what people and AI can achieve together.

Employees lack a north star

Related research from SAP's strategic work redesign program found that 88% of employees said their jobs have changed because of AI. Half of those changes occurred without meaningful guidance from managers or their organizations. Between 55% and 70% of employees said they had received no clear organizational guidance on the work shifts they are expected to navigate.

Leaders see a similar problem. According to the research, 72% of C-suite leaders said most organizations claiming to transform work with AI are really automating existing jobs faster. SAP warns that without a shared vision, companies risk isolated experimentation and efficiency-first use cases, which create uneven outcomes.

Six shifts for better work design

SAP endorses six shifts that it says are enabled by AI and linked to work-enriching characteristics associated in organizational psychology with higher motivation, effort, performance and retention:

• Specialist to generalist: apply core expertise across a broader range of problems and tasks.
• Static jobs to dynamic roles: organize work around flexible responsibilities and outcomes.
• Pyramid to diamond organizational design: reduce coordination layers and place more people close to core work.
• Output to impact: evaluate work by the value it creates.
• Centralized authority to decentralized decision-making: move decisions to people with context.
• People management to self-leadership: give employees more ownership of direction, performance and growth.

In an experimental study, SAP says employees perceived 77% greater autonomy under decentralized decision-making, while dynamic roles were perceived as 49% more challenging than static jobs.

HR faces its own transformation

SAP says HR was built for fixed jobs, predictable career paths, established hierarchies and talent systems designed for consistency, and that AI challenges each of those assumptions. It describes a new HR mandate with three pillars.

• Automate: release capacity from administrative work. 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 across people and AI. Executives ranked it as the pillar that will create the greatest enterprise value over the next five years and named HR as its leading owner.
• Reinvent: overhaul recruitment, development, mobility, performance and rewards. 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.

The full report also explores four plausible futures for how these pillars could shape HR's strategic contribution.

What it means for employers

The report's message, written by Dr. Autumn D. Krauss, chief scientist of the Future of Work Research Lab for SAP SuccessFactors, is that the future of work is a choice. Organizations that give employees a clear direction and redesign roles, rather than only speeding up existing tasks, are the ones SAP says can create better work for people and greater value for the business. The full report includes a prioritized path for leaders to get started and a comparison of where organizations stand today with where employees believe they need to be.