In the 1H 2026 release, we continue to focus on how organizations plan, develop, and grow their talent. AI agents and new experiences support how talent foundations help organizations develop the skills and capabilities needed for future growth.

We’re excited to announce the Career Development Agent, now available to make employee growth easier with AI-driven insights. It offers a conversational way for employees to get career questions answered and helps close skill gaps faster by automatically creating personalized development plans tailored to target roles. By making career paths more transparent and aligned with employees’ current skills and traditional role progressions it guides meaningful growth. Identifying viable next roles and clearly outlining the capabilities needed to advance gives employees confidence to move forward while enabling organizations to drive talent mobility.
👀  Check out this demo to see the agent in action: Demo: Career Development Agent 

Also with this release, we are introducing the Succession Planning Agent, which transforms succession by continuously evaluating the health of succession plans and offering clear, actionable recommendations to secure talent pipelines reducing manual work for all succession planners. It helps to proactively mitigate succession risks and make data informed decisions faster, supporting retention and engaging top talent while optimizing where succession resources are allocated. The result is a stronger, more resilient talent pipeline that keeps organizations prepared for change.
🌟  Take a look at the demo to learn more: Demo: Succession Planning Agent 

We are further enhancing the succession experience with deeper EU-aligned compliance, enhanced consent management, and improved filtering. Administrators can now use role-based permissions to control the visibility of overall performance ratings in AI-assisted successor insights, preventing sensitive information from being exposed to unauthorized users. Also, generic object and foundation object filters are now supported in Position Tile live slides allowing users to efficiently filter and present positions in Presentations.

Additionally, enhanced personalized recommendations leverages advanced AI for learning, roles, and career paths, providing consistent, personalized growth at scale. Automatically generated suggestions adapt by career level, location, skills, interests, proficiency, and organizational priorities, helping to ensure recommendations align with company rules and goals. Employees receive skill-focused learning suggestions that drive meaningful development and a more relevant, user-friendly experience to support career progression and build critical capabilities across the organization.

Explore more innovations across the suite in the 1H 2026 release by checking out the release highlights brochure, overview video featuring Bianka Woelke and much more on the Product Release & Road Map Information page.

Learn more about SAP SuccessFactors Career and Talent Development