Building on SAP Business AI Platform: Bringing People and Culture into the enterprise AI agenda

As organizations evaluate where to invest in AI, the case for including HR rests on the workforce challenges it can help address and their importance to the business. In its roadmap for an AI-infused HR operating model, Gartner argues that organizations should prioritize AI around their workforce challenges, considering business importance, current process performance and realistic AI potential together. We believe people and culture are critical to business performance and therefore belong directly in the enterprise AI conversation.

Recognition, communications, employee listening and sentiment, manager effectiveness and rewards each bring a different view of working life. Enterprise AI should help organizations understand what employees are experiencing and respond through better-informed people decisions, from following up on feedback to adapting recognition and communications programs.

Semos Cloud is building toward that opportunity through our People and Culture Intelligence platform, serving over 150 enterprise customers and 2 million users. Our decision 10 years ago to build within the SAP ecosystem laid the foundation for connecting enterprise data with people and culture applications.

SAP Business AI Platform and SAP Business Data Cloud now allow us to develop that connection further, giving our AI agents the context they need to provide intelligent support. In SAP’s customer story featuring our CEO, Filip Misovski, he explains what this enables us to build. That long-term choice shapes both the capabilities we develop and how they fit into the enterprise environments where they will be used.

Connecting AI investment to the work of shaping culture

The relationship between technology and culture becomes tangible in everyday work: which contributions receive recognition, how managers support their teams, whether employees feel heard and how clearly they understand their rewards. These experiences can influence both how effectively people contribute and whether they choose to stay. Technology helps structure those interactions, and the information it captures can help organizations understand how culture is experienced.

Gartner’s analysis of culture transformation as work changes reinforces this connection: processes, budgets and technology should support desired cultural norms, and leaders need to remove barriers to those behaviors in daily work.

Acting on that information requires context. A change in employee feedback, for example, gives HR a reason to investigate. Understanding which teams are affected and the circumstances around them helps determine an appropriate response. AI’s usefulness depends in part on whether it can draw on those relationships.

This is where SAP Business Data Cloud supports the work we are doing. It provides the data foundation, while Semos Cloud’s Culture Intelligence engine runs on a knowledge graph on SAP HANA Cloud, connecting relationships across people and workforce data. For organizations running SAP, this creates an opportunity to bring enterprise context into the everyday work of understanding and supporting employees.

AI agents for HR: connecting people signals with action

At SAP Sapphire 2026, we showcased an AI-native engagement layer that brings together Semos IQ and domain-specific agents for SAP customers. Built on SAP Business AI Platform, the portfolio of more than 20 AI agents spans recognition, listening and communications, manager effectiveness and rewards, putting organizational context to work across these areas.

Semos IQ surfaces signals such as recognition gaps and changes in communications engagement. The agents help employees, managers and HR work with that information and take action, from asking for guidance to drafting recognition or redeeming rewards. These interactions run in natural language, reducing friction so more people can participate in everyday people and culture activities.

Agents can suggest responses and prepare drafts, while people review, refine and approve them. This connects what an organization understands about its workforce with the decisions and actions that shape employees’ experiences.SAP provides the environment in which we build these capabilities. The agents run on SAP Business Technology Platform and use SAP AI Core and the generative AI hub for model orchestration through the SAP AI SDK.

Building within this environment connects the people and culture use cases with the SAP foundation organizations already rely on. HR and IT can then evaluate the agents’ practical value alongside how they fit into existing systems and governance requirements.

“The SAP Business AI Platform empowers partners to build the next generation of enterprise agents, rooted in real business context, trusted data, and end-to-end workflows. Semos Cloud exemplifies the AI innovation we want to accelerate in the SAP ecosystem, marrying domain depth with native platform development to bring ready-to-run agents to customers.”

Thorsten Leiduck
SVP & Global Head of SAP Business AI Ecosystem

Extending SAP investment with governance in view

For organizations evaluating these capabilities, workforce value and enterprise fit need to be considered together. HR needs to understand what an application can help people do. IT needs a clear view of where it operates, how employee information is processed and how access is managed.

Semos Cloud agents integrate with Joule through the agent-to-agent protocol and are compatible with Joule Studio, providing defined connections to SAP’s AI environment. Configurable role-based access controls and enterprise single sign-on support organizations’ governance requirements. These are concrete points for HR and IT to examine against their own use cases and deployment requirements.

Our Total Rewards solution’s certification as Built with SAP Business AI confirms that its AI capabilities are developed in alignment with SAP’s enterprise standards for governance, security and reliability.

Our relationship with SAP spans both platform development and its own workforce. Semos Cloud was one of the first AI-native ISVs on SAP Business AI Platform and won the Agent Race to Sapphire 2026. SAP itself runs its recognition and communications programs, SAP Appreciate and SAP Comms Hub, on Semos Cloud for its 100,000+ employees across 140 countries.

This alignment gives organizations running SAP a basis for evaluating how people and culture capabilities can extend their existing technology investment. The applications, their connections to SAP and the controls supporting their use belong in the same decision.

Giving people priorities a place in enterprise AI

For organizations running SAP, this is an opportunity to extend the value of enterprise data into employees’ everyday experience. Semos Cloud connects people signals with applications for recognition, listening, communications and rewards, using a shared data foundation and defined connections to SAP’s AI environment. HR and IT can evaluate those capabilities together against workforce needs and enterprise integration and governance requirements.

Improving productivity and business performance requires organizations to invest in how people work, develop and respond to change. Recognition, employee listening, communications and manager support are part of that effort: they help shape whether people can contribute effectively and remain engaged.

By building these capabilities on SAP’s enterprise foundation, Semos Cloud connects the people and culture agenda with the organization’s wider AI investment. The ambition is sustained performance and a workforce equipped to support the next phase of business growth.

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