SAP on Tuesday announced that it has agreed to acquire TechWolf, a Belgian AI company that maps what employees work on and which skills they use, to feed that data to the HR agents in SAP SuccessFactors.SAP announced the deal at its Connect conference in Las Vegas. The two companies didn’t disclose terms, and SAP expects the acquisition to close in the fourth quarter, pending regulatory approval. It’s worth noting that TechWolf already had a long-running partnership with SAP.Under SAP’s current plans, TechWolf will keep running on its own, with co-founder Andreas De Neve staying on as CEO.TechWolf’s customers include the likes of Booking.com, HSBC, MetLife, PayPal, AMD, Ericsson, and GSK.As Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for SAP Autonomous Suite, notes in the announcement, “TechWolf’s proprietary context graph for skills and work 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 help cut the cost of running HR agents. This will make Joule better at tasks like skills-based hiring and role redesign. Atlassian, of course, made a similar case for its Teamwork Graph in May, saying agents with access to its context used 48 percent fewer tokens. Other companies are making similar arguments about token efficiency. The deal also fits the argument SAP made at Sapphire in May that enterprise AI is largely a context problem. SAP expects TechWolf to become a central part of the SuccessFactors portfolio, feeding its data into tools for mapping employee skills, planning headcount, and restructuring teams. At Connect this week, the company also introduced a Workforce Planning Assistant, which it’s bringing to early adopters this quarter.How TechWolf worksDe Neve, Jeroen Van Hautte, and Mikaël Wornoo founded TechWolf in Ghent in 2018. Its platform plugs into the HR software and other business applications a company already uses and infers skills from people’s actual work, rather than from self-assessments.TechWolf calls the result a “context graph for work.” The graph covers three layers that range from the individual tasks that make up each job to the skills employees put to use and the outside labor market, then lines that up with where the business is headed. TechWolf: an existing SAP partnerSAP was among the investors in TechWolf’s $42.75 million Series B in 2024. That round, led by Felix Capital, also included ServiceNow and Workday, two companies that compete with SAP for HR software budgets.TechWolf’s platform already writes its inferred skills back into SuccessFactors modules like the Talent Intelligence Hub, Recruiting, and Learning, and SAP says joint customers are seeing results from that integration.For developers, TechWolf may be more familiar for the open models it publishes. Its JobBERT models on Hugging Face map job titles and descriptions into a shared vector space for matching, and the latest version handles English, Spanish, German, and Chinese. Its datasets, though, may be even more popular than the models, often racking up millions of downloads. De Neve says 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.”With Reltio, which SAP bought earlier this year, Joule’s agents get one consistent view of a company’s customers, suppliers, and products. TechWolf could give them the same kind of view of its workforce.The post SAP acquires TechWolf to feed more context into its HR agents appeared first on The New Stack.