SAP on Tuesday announced it has agreed to acquire TechWolf, a Belgian AI firm that tracks what workers do and which abilities they apply, to supply that information to the HR agents in SAP SuccessFactors. The company revealed the deal at its Connect conference in Las Vegas, with both parties expecting the transaction to close in the fourth quarter pending regulatory approval. TechWolf will continue operating independently under co-founder Andreas De Neve as CEO, while bringing its technology to a customer base that includes Booking.com, HSBC, MetLife, PayPal, AMD, Ericsson, and GSK.
SAP invested in TechWolf's $42.75 million Series B round in 2024, a funding effort led by Felix Capital that also drew participation from ServiceNow and Workday, two rivals competing with SAP for HR software spending. TechWolf's platform connects to existing HR software and business applications companies already use, drawing inferences about abilities from people's actual work rather than from self-reported assessments. The startup, founded in Ghent in 2018 by De Neve, Jeroen Van Hautte, and Mikaël Wornoo, calls the output a "context graph for work" that spans three layers: the individual tasks that compose each role, the abilities employees apply, and the external labor market, then aligns that with the company's strategic direction. TechWolf's platform already feeds inferred abilities back into SuccessFactors modules including the Talent Intelligence Hub, Recruiting, and Learning.
According to Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for SAP Autonomous Suite, TechWolf's proprietary context graph "provides an excellent grounding layer for agent queries regarding work and skills planning and talent management." He adds that the graph "makes token usage more efficient" to reduce the expense of operating HR agents, helping Joule perform better at tasks like skills-based hiring and role redesign. De Neve notes in the announcement, "Organizations everywhere are trying to figure out how AI is reshaping work, and what their workforce needs to look like because of it." The report points out that Atlassian made a comparable argument for its Teamwork Graph in May, claiming agents with access to its context consumed 48 percent fewer tokens, and that other companies are advancing similar claims about token efficiency.
SAP expects TechWolf to become a core component of the SuccessFactors portfolio, channeling its information into tools for charting employee abilities, planning headcount, and reorganizing teams. At Connect this week, the company also unveiled a Workforce Planning Assistant, which it's rolling out to early adopters this quarter. The acquisition supports the position SAP presented at Sapphire in May that enterprise AI is fundamentally a context challenge. With Reltio, which SAP purchased earlier this year, Joule's agents receive a unified view of a company's customers, suppliers, and products. TechWolf aims to deliver the same type of unified view of the workforce. For enterprise software buyers, the pairing of skills inference with autonomous agents represents a shift from HR systems that simply store employee records to platforms that actively guide talent decisions. The question now is whether context graphs can truly capture the nuanced realities of how people work, or whether they'll oversimplify the human side of the organization in pursuit of efficiency.