SAP Talent Intelligence Hub
SAP Talent Intelligence Hub is the part of SAP SuccessFactors that keeps skills: one library for the whole company and a profile for each employee, connected to performance, learning, recruiting and career development. Employees and managers record skills and levels, review forms, courses and recruiting add more, and paid AI suggests skills from a person’s CV or the notes they write about their work. For a company already on SuccessFactors, the module costs $0 extra, so far, and the AI is charged separately.
The skills record inside SuccessFactors, filled by employees, managers, review forms and courses, with paid AI that suggests skills from what people have written.
You already run SuccessFactors, you want performance, learning, recruiting and career development working from one skills list, and you are content for employees and managers to record skills and levels, with approval on level changes where you want it.
You want skills worked out from the work people do, or you expect SAP’s AI to suggest the skills that are specific to your company. If you are not on SuccessFactors, there is nothing to buy, because SAP does not sell it on its own.
$0 extra, so far, as part of SuccessFactors. The AI that suggests skills is paid for separately, in credits SAP calls AI units, and SAP does not publish what an AI unit costs.
What it is, and how skills and levels get into it
Talent Intelligence Hub has two halves: a single library for the whole company, holding skills, certificates and similar records, and a profile for each employee, which SAP calls a Growth Portfolio, filled from that library. Other SuccessFactors modules take their skills from the library, and new SuccessFactors systems have it switched on by default.
How far you can rely on those profiles depends on how a skill and its level get onto them. The employee picks a skill from the library and rates their own level, or their manager adds it and sets the level. Skills also arrive with the person’s job role and development goals, from completed performance and 360 review forms, from courses in SuccessFactors Learning as the employee works through them, and from what a new hire was assessed on during recruiting. When someone completes an internal assignment, SuccessFactors can email them to update their own profile with what they learned.
On top of those routes sits paid AI, and two of its features suggest skills for a person. One reads an uploaded CV, and the other reads what the employee types into the achievements, activities or feedback sections of Continuous Performance Management, SuccessFactors’ tool for ongoing performance notes. In both cases the employee chooses which suggestions to keep, and SAP’s app for Microsoft Teams shows employees their suggestions on its home tab. A third feature builds the skills library for jobs rather than people, reading your job profile descriptions and the three most recently approved job requisitions for each role from the past two years.
SAP’s identified skills partners, TechWolf among them, can also write skills and levels into profiles directly. There is no skills test inside the product, so a level is as good as the person, form, course or partner that set it.
For a SuccessFactors customer, then, Talent Intelligence Hub is an orderly record of what employees, managers, review forms, courses and recruiting report, with paid AI that helps people fill it in from what they have already written. Skills worked out from the work itself come into it through a partner.
What it costs, and what costs extra
The module and the AI that helps people fill it in are paid for in different ways. Talent Intelligence Hub comes with every SuccessFactors subscription at $0 extra, so far, and is not sold separately; the HR software packages themselves are priced by quote.
Suggesting skills with AI needs a separately purchased AI units licence. The Premium AI list includes the suggestions from a CV, the suggestions from performance notes and the tool that builds a skills library from job profiles, all paid for in AI units, which are credits bought once a year that expire after 12 months if they are not used. The AI that matches your skills to SAP’s standard names uses no units, but it works only once you have bought an AI units licence for a premium feature.
The published rates are in AI units only: 0.1 units per object to suggest skills for a person, and 2 per object to build the skills library, counted only on what SAP calls productive use. An object is defined as a data object managed in the service, and no money value is published for an AI unit, so get a written quote for your own headcount before anyone promises the feature to employees.
Skills from completed courses, and learning suggestions for a skill, both need SuccessFactors Learning, which is a separate subscription, so check whether your contract includes it. Some setup steps also sit in a part of SuccessFactors that customers cannot reach, so your implementation partner or SAP account executive has to carry them out, and that time belongs in the budget.
On company size, the minimum orders apply to SAP’s HR packages rather than to this product, from one user for its Base package to 500 users for Premium, and SAP says its HR software is not only for large enterprises. The customers named for Talent Intelligence Hub include Norsk Hydro, with 33,000 employees, and Capgemini, with 340,000, so ask SAP for a reference customer of your own size that has it switched on for everyone.
If you leave, your skills data can come with you, because every employee’s profile can be exported to your own secure file server, in full the first time and then only the records that changed. The product itself stays behind, because it is part of SuccessFactors, and leaving SuccessFactors means leaving it too.
There is a second route to this. The same job, built on the systems you already run, is usually a narrower piece of work, and we have mapped what that version looks like. See it as an agent
Who it suits
You run SuccessFactors and want one skills list
Performance, learning, recruiting and career development in SuccessFactors all connect to the same skills library, and SAP built its combined career and talent development product on this skills data. That gives you one list to maintain, instead of a separate tool to buy, connect and keep in step with everything else.
You are comfortable with people recording their own skills
Talent Intelligence Hub puts controls around self-reporting rather than replacing it. A manager can add skills and set levels in a team view, which shows up to 30 people at a time and can highlight the gap between each person’s level and the level expected. You can require approval when someone changes a level, an administrator can choose to count ratings from completed performance forms, and employees can attach proof when they add a certificate.
You already run SuccessFactors Learning
Courses can carry skills and levels, and these reach an employee’s profile as the employee works through them. A finished course can raise a skill’s level where an administrator allows it, and the profile suggests learning for a skill only when Learning is switched on. SAP also sells AI that suggests skills and levels for courses from their titles and descriptions, so if pointing people to the right learning is your main use for skills data, test this part first.
You want to start with a pilot
Norsk Hydro, with 33,000 employees, began in April 2024 with a pilot of 100 employees, and planned to roll the product out to everyone once the pilot succeeded. It built its skills library from an outside provider’s curated library, mapping about 4,000 skills to job families, and tagged its courses with a tool from TalenTeam, one of SAP’s partners. Its employees “generally may decide their proficiency levels for most skills”.
You may add a skills partner later
SAP named eight first partners for this product: Beamery, Degreed, iMocha, Korn Ferry, Lightcast, Phenom, TalenTeam and TechWolf. TechWolf, one of them, works out skills from the work people already do and writes them back into SuccessFactors, with Talent Intelligence Hub staying the place where skills are kept. That arrangement lets you start with SAP’s own module now and add software that works out skills from people’s work later, if you find you need it.
Where it stops short
Most of these limits can be planned around, provided the decisions they call for are made before employees see the product.
Reading work tools is planned, with no date
SAP built one feature that read Microsoft 365, suggesting skills from Outlook calendar invitations, team names and descriptions in Microsoft Teams, and distribution lists, and in July 2024 it stopped maintaining it and asked customers testing it not to roll it out. SAP plans to read Microsoft 365 and other outside data “as soon as practical, after internal data sources are stable”, and customers who want outside skills data need a licence directly with that skills vendor. Until then, skills worked out from people’s work come into SuccessFactors through a partner.
Your most important skills are specific to your company
When SAP’s AI matches your library to its standard skills list, any skill it does not recognise is marked Unclassified, and any skill you keep under your own name, which SAP calls Custom, is left out of all its AI skill suggestions. So if the skills that matter most to you carry your company’s own names, the paid AI will not suggest them, and people will need to add them some other way.
You are coming from SAP’s older tools
If your job roles sit in Job Description Manager, SAP’s older framework for job families and roles, you have to move off it before SAP deletes it on 12 November 2027, and the move is one-way: the old data becomes read-only. Skills held in Job Profile Builder, SAP’s tool for job profiles, cannot be moved into Talent Intelligence Hub in the current release. SAP cites technical issues and plans to enable the move soon, so get a date in writing before you plan around it.
You want sign-off on the skills people claim
You can require approval when an employee changes a level, but not when they add or remove a skill, and the approval screens are only in English. That means an employee can put any skill from the library on their profile without a manager agreeing. Norsk Hydro notes that some skills may need to be validated for legal compliance, so decide early which of yours need checking some other way.
Self-rated levels travel into career planning
Once you move to Talent Intelligence Hub, the Career Worksheet in SAP’s succession and development module takes skill and competency ratings only from employee profiles. Where someone set their own level, that is the level the career view shows, so settle how levels get checked before succession conversations start to rely on them.
Direct connections are for SAP’s partners
The direct connections that bring data into employee profiles or take it out are open to SAP’s identified skills partners. Your own team can move profile data in and out as files, so before you plan anything that depends on a direct connection, ask SAP whether your IT team will be allowed to use it.
You need skills data to stay in your country
The AI skills features may send your data from the country of your SuccessFactors data centre to the country of SAP’s sub-processor’s data centre, and switching AI features on counts as acknowledging those transfers. Take that to your data protection officer, and your works council if you have one, before any AI is switched on.
You may want to change the rating scale later
Moving from Job Description Manager creates a five-point scale, which cannot be changed once employee profiles are switched on. Changing any scale already in use means switching profiles off first, and SAP advises against doing that on your live system at all, because data may end up inconsistent across modules. Plan on keeping whatever scale you launch with, and agree it with the people who will rely on the levels before profiles are switched on.
Partners can rewrite ratings unless you stop them
Once you activate an outside skills partner, it is allowed by default to overwrite employees’ existing ratings and to lower them. Skills from any source you mark as trusted go straight into the library without an administrator reviewing them, so decide both settings before a partner goes live.
Your people work mainly in a partly supported language
The AI skills features are fully supported in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Partly supported languages, including Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese and Turkish, get translations of common skills only and less complete synonyms, which matters when people describe the same skill in different words. Ask to see your own languages working before you roll it out.
What to ask SAP
- Show us, in our own system, every way a skill and its level reach one employee’s profile today, and tell us which of those ways use AI units.
- Your published rates are 0.1 AI units per object to suggest skills for a person and 2 per object to build the skills library. What counts as one object: a CV, an employee or a single suggested skill? And will you put in writing what one AI unit will cost us?
- Across your customers, what share of employees have rated at least one skill after twelve months, and how many customers have profiles switched on for all their staff?
- In July 2024 you told early customers not to roll out skill suggestions from Microsoft 365. Is reading skills from Microsoft 365, or from any other system where work happens, now on a dated plan?
- Your August 2026 guide says skills in Job Profile Builder cannot be moved across because of technical issues. When will that be fixed, and what happens to our skills data until then?
- Which sub-processor handles our data for the AI skills features, and in which country?
- Can our own IT team use the direct connections for loading and exporting profiles, or are they reserved for your identified skills partners? If they are reserved, are we limited to files?
- Partner connections are allowed by default to overwrite and lower employees’ ratings. What setting do your reference customers use, and why?
- Can we speak to a customer with fewer than 5,000 employees that has this switched on for all staff?
Alternatives to SAP Talent Intelligence Hub, including buying nothing
If you run SuccessFactors, the alternatives to Talent Intelligence Hub on its own are TechWolf, one of SAP’s named partners, which writes skills into it, and Microsoft People Skills, if most of your people’s work happens in Microsoft 365. The third route is the hub you may already have, with no further purchase.
If you already run SuccessFactors, start with what you have: switch Talent Intelligence Hub on if it is not on already, and see whether skills and levels recorded by employees and managers, together with ratings from review forms, answer the question you are asking. If that question is where a team falls short of what its roles expect, a manager’s team view shows it, 30 people at a time, and buying nothing more is a sound answer.
If you want skills worked out from the work people do and you are staying on SuccessFactors, look at a partner that writes into it. TechWolf is one of SAP’s named partners, draws on systems such as Jira, Salesforce and Microsoft Teams, and keeps Talent Intelligence Hub as the place skills are stored. Its price is not published, and you need a licence directly with an outside skills vendor, so expect a second contract alongside SuccessFactors. The smallest customer TechWolf names in a case study, Cotality, has about 5,000 people, so if you are smaller, ask early whether it works with organisations of your size.
If most of your people’s work happens in Microsoft 365, Microsoft People Skills works out skills from that work, and if you already pay for Microsoft Copilot or Viva, it costs $0 extra, so far. Only skills an employee has confirmed by hand can be exported from People Skills, and SuccessFactors can load profile data from files, so moving the confirmed skills across is a job for your IT team rather than a setting.
The guide to skills intelligence software sets out which decisions need skills worked out from people’s work and which can run on what people report about themselves, so read it before you compare other products.
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