AI has changed the jobs of 88% of employees in SAP’s research, yet half of those changes happened without meaningful guidance from managers or their organisations. The findings put a practical question to employers: are they redesigning work around AI, or simply asking people to do more with it?
SAP Watch analysis
What happened
SAP’s Future of Work Research Lab says its latest report draws on research involving 2,718 employees, 500 C-suite leaders, 60 HR executives and founders of AI-native companies. SAP says 55% to 70% of employees reported receiving no clear organisational guidance on the changes they are expected to navigate.
The report argues that organisations are measuring AI chiefly through efficiency, productivity and time saved, while giving less attention to how work itself could change. SAP describes six shifts it says can make work more enriching: from specialist to generalist, static jobs to dynamic roles, pyramid to diamond structures, output to impact, centralised authority to decentralised decisions, and people management to self-leadership. In an experimental study, employees perceived 77% greater autonomy under decentralised decision-making; dynamic roles were perceived as 49% more challenging than static jobs.
Key findings
- Work is changing without a shared playbook
SAP says 88% of employees reported AI-related changes to their jobs, and half of those changes lacked meaningful guidance. - Efficiency is winning the measurement contest
SAP says 72% of C-suite leaders believe many organisations claiming AI-led transformation are mainly automating existing jobs faster. - Redesign could matter more than simply automating
SAP reports that executives ranked work redesign as the transformation pillar likely to create the greatest enterprise value over the next five years. - The proposed shifts have measurable effects in SAP’s experiment
Participants perceived 77% greater autonomy with decentralised decision-making and 49% more challenge in dynamic roles than static jobs.
Why it matters
The report’s useful distinction is between using AI to speed up existing tasks and rethinking who does what, how teams make decisions and what counts as valuable work. If people are already changing their jobs without clear direction, organisations risk leaving those changes to ad hoc experimentation rather than deciding what they want them to achieve.
The six shifts are proposals supported by SAP’s research, not a universal blueprint. Still, the findings give employers something more concrete to discuss than another promise that AI will make everyone more productive.
Our read
SAP has a commercial interest in selling technology for the future of work, so its vision deserves the usual clear-eyed reading. But the gap it highlights is specific: employees report work changing, while many say their organisations have not explained how to navigate it. Leaders should start by asking which tasks AI is changing, what outcome they want, and whether workers have the authority and support to adapt.
What to watch
- Whether employers give teams clear guidance on AI-related changes to their work.
- Whether organisations measure impact and work quality alongside time saved.
- Whether the six proposed shifts improve outcomes beyond the experimental settings SAP describes.
- How HR teams take responsibility for work redesign, rather than treating it as a software rollout.
Discussion spark: If AI changes a job before management provides guidance, should employees be free to redesign the work themselves, or must employers set the rules first?
Sources and evidence
- Spoiler Alert: The Future of Work Is Already Here (7 October 2026, 11:59 UTC)
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