The morning of HR Connect 2025, organized by SAP SuccessFactors, opened in Paris with a packed program focused on the transformation of the talent experience through artificial intelligence.
The round table opened with a central question:what role do skills play in today's organizations?
To answer these questions, the following were present: Vincent Bassinet (Group HR IS & HR Digital Transformation Director - Colas), Cécile Decourtray (Head of People Strategy & Transformation - KPMG), Raphaëlle Giovannetti (EVP, HR Digital & Transformation - Safran) and Nicolas Pauthier (Global VP of HR, Learning & People Development - L'Oréal).
Historically structured around professions, companies are reorienting their HR processes around skills, to adapt to the rapid obsolescence of know-how, changing employee expectations and the impact of digital transformation.
At Colas, skills are a strategic pillar, particularly when it comes to meeting CSR challenges or integrating AI into their infrastructures.
L'Oréal, for its part, has adapted to the explosion of e-commerce and the digitalization of the media. As a result, 600 skills have been mapped to support the skills upgrading of the entire value chain.
Some companies opt for an open-access declaration of skills, relying on individual responsibility rather than systematic validation. The challenge is to build a living, evolving skills map. More and more people are being hired without reference to qualifications. Skills are becoming a central criterion, including in internal career management, thanks to modules such as "Succession Planning".
As part of a modernized GPEC approach and a move towards a skills-based organization, SAP SuccessFactors offers the Talent Intelligence Hub, an AI-powered structuring repository that centralizes the skills, behaviors, preferences and work styles of each employee.
This repository, which is continuously updated, provides a fine-tuned, dynamic vision of the talents present in the company. Attributes - understood as observable, technical or behavioral skills - are organized within a coherent central library, shared throughout the organization.
Each employee can take ownership of this framework via his or her Growth Portfolio, a veritable passport to professional development, in which he or she enhances his or her experience, highlights his or her strengths, and expresses his or her development aspirations. This encourages the emergence of personalized career paths, identified in line with the company's needs.
For managers, this approach facilitates the identification of suitable profiles for projects or key positions, based on up-to-date, comparable data. Linked to internal mobility, succession planning and succession processes, it becomes a powerful lever for anticipating and securing strategic resources.
The Talent Intelligence Hub paves the way for more fluid, inclusive and proactive talent management, where every skill becomes an opportunity, serving collective performance and individual development.
Technology is a facilitator, not a starting point. Two approaches to success:
SAP reiterated its vision: to make HR a strategic lever at the heart of the enterprise, by connecting data, processes and people. SAP SuccessFactors innovation is based on a "flywheel" model: the more users interact with HR applications, the more data they generate, which then feeds AI models, enabling actions to be automated, HR processes to be optimized and data to be generated again.
The aim is to move from simple descriptive analysis to predictive and prescriptive HR, integrated into the company's entire ecosystem (finance, supply chain, customers, etc.).
SAP is fully committed to Joule, its intelligent assistant integrated into SuccessFactors. It can now handle 80% of the most common tasks via a chatbot-like interface, for employees, managers and HR staff alike.
Data innovation is embodied in two major new features:
People Intelligence, scheduled for release in the second half of 2025, is the new HR analysis module integrated natively into SAP SuccessFactors. Designed for HR professionals, it offers a more strategic, intuitive and autonomous approach to HR data exploitation, based on a natural language interface. No need for technical knowledge or complex queries: an HR manager can simply ask a question like "Which departments have seen the most departures this quarter?" or "What is the correlation between performance and internal mobility this year?", and immediately obtain clear indicators, dynamic visualizations or ready-to-use reports.
This new tool goes far beyond traditional dashboards. It enables real-time cross-referencing of HR data with data from other corporate functions, such as finance, sales or operations, without the need for external tools or complex extractions. This paves the way for enriched multi-business analysis, for better-informed, shared decision-making.
For example, we can analyze the impact of training on the results of a sales team, or study absenteeism in relation to peaks in activity. This approach enables HR to move away from a logic of reporting to one of anticipation and active advice, bringing human issues closer to business objectives.
With People Intelligence, HR analysis becomes more predictive, more proactive and fully integrated with corporate strategy, by equipping HR with a tool as powerful as it is accessible, capable of making data speak for human development and collective performance.
The next developments in SAP SuccessFactors for human resources: a redesigned, smoother and smarter experience
The administrative management module (Employee Central) is evolving with a new, clearer, more interactive and comprehensive employee profile, designed to better reflect the career path and specific characteristics of each employee. An enriched, interactive organization chart makes it easy to visualize team structures, reporting lines and interactions between departments. A new personalized home page will also complete the experience: adapted to the role of each user, it will highlight useful information thanks to artificial intelligence.
The "Explanation of my payslip" functionality, based on the Joule intelligent assistant, will enable employees to clearly and autonomously understand the details of their remuneration. It will be able to explain differences from one month to the next, trace events that have an impact on payroll, and offer an immediate answer to frequently asked questions - easing the burden on HR and payroll teams.
In the field of working time management, new functionalities will enhance the management of work schedules. In 2025, the emphasis will be on more flexible, more precise scheduling and shift planning, better adapted to the needs of each sector (industry, commerce, healthcare, etc.). These new features will make it possible to reconcile operational requirements with employees' preferences and constraints, while respecting social regulations.
From May 2025, a new HR request management module will be available. It will enable employees to formulate their requests directly online, consult automatic and contextualized responses, and access evolving help sheets. Thanks to Joule's intelligence, requests can be processed more quickly, with better follow-up, easier prioritization, and greater transparency for all parties.
Finally, SAP offers Joule Studio, a platform for creating your own AI agents tailored to your specific HR processes. This will enable organizations to customize AI to fit their culture, workflows or business challenges.
Norbert Goy, our Sales Manager, led a workshop alongside Cédric de Beaumont, HRIS Director for the Limagrain Group (a seed company present in 53 countries). Together, they shared feedback on the deployment of the IHRIS HRIS project, supported by the Arago teams.
We supported Limagrain in all phases: scoping, implementation, change management and governance, right through to progressive roll-out in waves.
The IHRIS project carried out by Limagrain, with the support of Arago, goes far beyond the simple implementation of an HR tool. It involves a truly global overhaul of the HR function, aimed at harmonizing processes in more than 90 legal entities in 43 countries. The HRIS thus became the master repository for employee data, particularly in relation to the many existing payroll systems. This fundamental project has redefined HR roles, clarified responsibilities between payroll, local HR and managers, and established a common base of practices on an international scale.
Several HR benefits are measurable: improved employee and candidate experience (career site, onboarding, self-services), better managerial steering thanks to reliable and accessible data, and centralized reporting to guide strategic decisions, such as the choice of partner schools. At the same time, the reduction in administrative workload through automation enables HR teams to refocus on higher value-added missions, reinforcing their role as business partners.
The success of this project is as much down to the method as to the people. A thorough scoping phase preceded implementation: six months to define the target processes, then six months to choose the solution and integrator. Gradual roll-out in waves enabled a controlled ramp-up. This momentum was supported by strong sponsorship from top management, solid governance and the creation of a genuine "One Team" between Limagrain, Arago, SAP and local relays. The involvement of Business Process Owners (BPOs) and Key Users in each country ensured that the change was implemented as close to the teams as possible.
In spite of this structuring, certain points of vigilance remain crucial: maintaining fluid communication between teams and systems, anticipating the effective mobilization of HR staff in the field, and managing the complexity of interfacing more than 80 payroll systems, some of them highly heterogeneous. Finally, data quality is a key success factor: for the HRIS to play its full role as a decision-making foundation, information must be reliable, consistent and up-to-date across all entities.
HR transformation projects carried out in organizations today are no longer limited to implementing a tool or harmonizing processes. They are laying the foundations for an enhanced HR function, capable of using data to anticipate, recommend and act more strategically.
The innovations supported by SAP SuccessFactors - whether conversational AI, predictive analytics or business data interconnection - open up concrete prospects for moving HR practices towards greater fluidity, personalization and added value.
For companies that have already structured their HRIS and consolidated their governance, the challenge then becomes: how to activate this intelligence?
AI doesn't replace people, it liberates them. It enables HR teams to refocus on their role as business partners, supported by tools capable of transforming data into action.
HR transformation doesn't stop with implementation: it continues with use, appropriation and continuous innovation.
Would you like to discuss your own HRIS project or explore the possibilities offered by AI in your HR processes? Contact us!