In January 2025, Workday announced it was rolling TechWolf out across its own 20,400 employees. Its chief people officer, Ashley Goldsmith, said the partnership would turbocharge Workday’s existing skills offering.
Head over heels, basically.
On Tuesday, SAP agreed to buy TechWolf. Workday put money into TechWolf’s Series B in 2024. So did SAP and ServiceNow, and only SAP bought the company.
So Workday’s skills-inference partner now belongs to SAP. Mad world.
Josh Bersin wrote this spring that the world is moving from “systems of record” to “systems of context.” I’m borrowing the line because it describes this deal better than anything I could come up with.
For a long time the fight was over where your data lives. Now it’s over what an agent asks when it needs to know who does what.
SAP’s own pitch for TechWolf is about agents. Manoj Swaminathan, SAP’s president and chief product officer for the Autonomous Suite, said the context graph would ground agent queries and make token use more efficient. He also pointed to cheaper deployment of workforce agents. Skills-based hiring comes later in the list.
Bersin’s version of context is the business rules and objects your HCM already holds, which is why he points to Workday’s Business Process Framework as an existing semantic layer. Foundation Capital popularized “context graph” in a paper on decision traces, meaning a record of what got decided and why. Its pitch is that AI agent startups building those graphs gain a structural advantage. TechWolf’s version is evidence of what work people actually do and which skills it takes. SAP bought that third kind.
I’d argue the big vendors have split into two camps on where context comes from. Workday is building it on top of its own transaction data. Gerrit Kazmaier told Bersin that Workday’s biggest accuracy gains came from knowledge graphs and context engineering, not bigger models. What Workday has bought is the front door and the plumbing, including Sana and Pipedream (and Paradox, for recruiting).
SAP is buying the context layers themselves. It bought Reltio in March. Dremio and Prior Labs followed in May, and now TechWolf. Constellation’s read on the Dremio and Prior Labs deals was that SAP may be admitting it’s behind.
That’s the skeptical read, but it’s fair.
ServiceNow sits between the camps. It launched a Context Engine in April, assembled partly from companies it bought, and it’s a TechWolf investor and customer too. Microsoft built its own, called Work IQ, and opened up the APIs in June.
Gloat launched Loomra in March, a context layer that sits on top of whichever HCM you run, and Bersin said he wasn’t aware of any HCM vendor that had built one yet. Celonis, the process mining company, bought Ikigai Labs and launched its own Context Model.
Both camps have an agent registry now, so that’s not where they differ. Workday’s Agent System of Record is live, and SAP’s AI Agent Hub is rolling out. Where the context comes from is the difference.
If you’re renewing an HCM contract, ask which camp your vendor is in. Ask where the skills and work data behind its agents comes from. If the answer is a partner, ask what your contract says if that partner gets bought.
Thomas Otter, who invested in TechWolf through Acadian, wrote in May that he didn’t expect the transaction-layer incumbents to win the work context graph. In his view the layer has to bridge ecosystems and their traditional antagonists, and he said SAP was mired in API tollbooth confusion. The day SAP announced the deal, he called it a vindication of Acadian’s thesis.
He may be right both times, but it is a tough fence to walk. A layer that has to work across rival HCM vendors gets harder to run once one of them owns it.
I wrote about the deal itself, and why I worry about TechWolf staying independent, over on the 3Sixty Insights blog. Take a read if this sort of stuff matters to you.
What else is going on this week?
The September 2026 Jobs Report: Here’s the Breakdown. Keirsten Greggs has a great rundown of the jobs numbers: 29,000 jobs added, unemployment up to 4.2%, and Black unemployment up a full point to 7.0%.
Why Writing a Thriller Made Me a Sharper CEO. I love this from Donald Thompson, who says writing a political thriller sharpened how he handles the rest of his work.
Punk Rock HR: Job Searching With Stephanie Fackrell. Stefanie Fackrell tells Laurie Ruettimann‘s Punk Rock HR audience to spend about two hours a day on job boards instead of eight. Good advice here.
Trust Stories: The Orks and the Ring. Skepticism is warranted. Kristy McCann says the AI accord seven men signed at the White House last week has no enforcement mechanism.
“Human in the Loop” Is Starting to Sound Suspiciously Like “Human on the Hook”. Francesca Ranieri cites IBM’s finding that 43% of employees say they take the blame when AI goes wrong. Still, don’t put your name to work you can’t back up.
LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant 2 Aims to “Just Be Smarter”. David Manaster says Hiring Assistant 2, due in November, will fill in a sparse search from the recruiter’s and company’s hiring history so it does what you meant. If only that worked for people.
4 HCM Industry Trends: Service, Compliance, Implementation, and Why 49% of Buyers Would Pay More for Better Support. Good stuff from my colleague Dylan Teggart: 49% of 524 U.S. business leaders in the 3Sixty Insights survey with Insperity would pay more for better human-led HCM support.
Complaining Is Not A Talent Strategy. Brian Fink says TA is great at diagnosing why creative strategy gets undermined and bad at doing anything about it. A way to rethink how TA makes the case.
Stop Filling Jobs. Start Building Capability. Kevin Wheeler opens with work no longer happening in neat, permanent boxes, then tells recruiters a permanent hire is only one of four options. The boxes were never permanent, though.
What Is an AI Agent? And Why Aren’t They All Created Equal?. A good primer for those getting into the agentic game: Jason Averbook walks through four kinds of agents using a Chicago business trip.
The Future Has a Demolition Phase. Jess Von Bank says this is a rip and retire moment, not a rip and replace one: stop rushing to protect jobs and rush to protect people. Preserve people, not roles, and I love it.
Have Your Agent Call My Agent. Matt Alder imagines a candidate’s AI agent and an employer’s agent handling the front end of hiring between them. I’m not sure we’re ready for this.
Two Days in Amsterdam: Notes from Intelligence Group’s Talent Strategy & Intelligence Event. The Talent Intelligence Collective’s recap of Intelligence Group’s Amsterdam event has Lisa K. Simon of Revelio Labs saying employers now need roughly six job postings to make one hire. Always good stuff.
Surveillance Pricing Is One Way AI Is Destroying Us. Come for the golf, stay for the surveillance. Mike Wood goes from picking up driving range balls to a Big Mac in Fresno at $5.69 in one store and $6.89 two miles away.
Open Enrollment Is a Foreign Language. Robin Schooling traces why HR ended up translating open enrollment to a World War II wage freeze, and wonders whether HR’s fluency is part of the solution or one of the reasons we’re still stuck. Good questions here.
15 Workforce and HR Leaders on What Executives Are Getting Wrong About AI and the Future of Work. Dan Schawbel‘s roundup has great insights, including Dean Carter of Instill warning that agents with no shared norms risk an organizational Lord of the Flies.
Leadership Through Human Connection. Mervyn Dinnen gives a nice rundown of O.C. Tanner’s Influence Greatness event, including Starbucks reporting a 375% increase in recognition in the first month after adding recognition to its My Daily tool.
A New Approach to Goal-Setting: We Are *Way* Overdue. I like this take from Katrina Kibben, who sets annual goals as more or less of something rather than a number.
Apparently, Iced Coffee Can Cost You the Job Now. This story is so dumb. Shannon Pritchett answers the claim that iced coffee in an interview looks like running errands with the obvious: an interview is an errand.
I Tested Local LLMs for HR. Here’s What I Learned.. I’ve been curious about this too, and Anita Lettink found a Gemma model beat the rest, proprietary ones included, on her Dutch 30% tax ruling question.
Get in the Right Room. Seth McColley argues a $50M CEO may have more in common with another $50M CEO in a different industry than with a $2M or $2B one.
What’s on Your Unofficial CV?. Good advice from Damon Klotz, who asks team leads to find out what’s on each person’s unofficial CV, the skills and stories their role doesn’t see yet.
Thank You, Anne Fulton. Happy trails to Anne Fulton, one of the best, who is handing the CEO role at Fuel50 to co-founder Jo Mills.
I’m Excited to Announce the Launch of HRME2. Congrats to Howard Tarnoff on launching HRME2, a customer success advisory practice for HCM companies.
In the news
How Pearson Will Advance AI Skills With Workera Acquisition via Technology Magazine
Metaview Raises $60m to Put AI Agents Across the Whole Hiring Process via The Next Web
Trump H-1B Fee Proposal Tees Up Fight Over Congress’ Authority via Bloomberg Law
Newsom Signs Law Barring Sole Use of AI in Hiring, Firing Decisions via UPI
EEOC Sues Harvard for Records in I&D Discrimination Probe via SHRM
Is EEO-1 Done? What the EEOC’s Proposed Rule Means for Employers via HR Defense
Booking Goes to Court to Force Staff to Go to the Office via DutchNews.nl
Why the US Economy Looks Strong but Feels Bad to Many: Explainer via Bloomberg Law
Workday Global Workforce Report: AI Is Rewriting Jobs More Than It’s Cutting Them via Stock Titan
Apple’s Reported Overhaul Highlights the Work Behind a Leaner Structure via HR Executive
AI Is Fueling Union Interest, but Only 9% of Orgs Are Ready via HR Executive
6 in 10 Employers Fall Short on Women’s Progression or Retention via HR Grapevine
Survey: CHRO Confidence Remains in Positive Territory, but Continues to Inch Down via The Conference Board
Forget ‘Coffee Badging’: ‘Calendar Stalkers’ Game Return to Office via Money Talks News
With the Iced Coffee Debate, Gen Z Cultural Differences Come to a Head via HR Dive
PwC Survey on Workforce, AI Skills & More via Bernews
AI Skills Are Boosting IT Pay, but Mostly for Senior Roles via CIO
‘It Was the AI, Not Me’ via Canadian HR Reporter
Have a great rest of your week!
On the SAP acquisition of Tech Wolf. I feel like SAP has for decades been content to fall behind and play catch up via acquisition. This latest fits that pattern.