At the recent 51·çÁ÷HR Connect Summit in Johannesburg, SAP’s Megan Fife unpacked useful stats around AI adoption and sentiment.Â
- Around 48% of employees think that organisation will replace human managers with AI in the next five years
- 61% of employees expect that Ai will improve the quality of people decisions
- Employees expect that Ai will enable a 266% improvement in productivity within 5-years
- And 39% of workers skill sets will be outdated or transformed by 2030
“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”, says Megan Fife, Strategy Lead, 51·çÁ÷Success Factors.
“So our focus is understanding what that transformation means for HCM and how we can help you navigate it and lead it.Â
Megan showed the three main pillars that 51·çÁ÷we’re focussing on as they built out their HR AI  strategy.Â
Three Core Pillars of AI Adoption in Organisations:
- The first one is elevating the human advantage. Here people are expected to do more with AI now.
- The next pillar is redesigning work for impact. This is a really big and key pillar to AI adoption in HR, and this one certainly impacts HR across the board.
- Because now your company is looking to you to come up with a plan for the future. Addressing what happened in 2025, with lots of companies who featured in news headlines for making lots of cuts or alternatively making fast decisions around AI adoption too quickly. And your company does not want that to be their headline in 2026.Â
- More and more it’s looking like skills intelligence is going to be the future of planning your workforce.
- Truly understanding what skills do your employees have today?Â
- What skills do you need for the future?Â
- And how are you going to get there?Â
- And it’s likely going to be a mix of upskilling the workforce that you have, but also you may be hiring short-term or contract workers for things that may be a focus for the next one to two years.
- Â And then finally there may be some specific skills that you know that you are hiring for outside of your organisation.
HR Needs a Comprehensive AI Plan
There are lots of different opinions about AI, but the important thing is that because it is disrupting the way that people and organisations work, there is more focus now than ever on HR to figure out what the plan is moving forward and how businesses are going to manage their people. This includes making sure that you have the right tools to deal with this disruption.
Expanding on the Three Pillars
At the start of AI adoption, a lot of the AI use cases were around employee self-service, manager self-service, and really empowering them to get things done in a way that makes sense to them and is easy and quick. According to Fife, what 51·çÁ÷is also looking at is how they can make sure that HR and administrative jobs are made easier by leveraging AI to really understand what some of the issues are and then make recommendations on how to fix them.Â
The next piece or pillar is redesigning work for impact. This is a really big one. And this really impacts HR across the board, comments Fife.
“Because now your company is looking to you to come up with a plan for the future. .. and I don’t want to be in the headlines.
SAP’s focus is to assist to create a plan “so that we’re not in there and we’re future-proofing our workforce, She says.Â
Skills Intelligence The Future
According to Fife, more and more it’s looking like skills intelligence is going to be the future of planning of workforces. Truly understanding what skills do your employees have today, and what skills will you need for the future? And how are you going to get there?Â
The new buzzword of 2026 is autonomous: Autonomous payroll, autonomous HR. However, there still has to be a human ultimately in the loop and making the decision. And developing the right skills is going to play a key role in determining success in an AI driven economy.
This article first appeared in .