SAP Knowledge Base Article - Public

3806903 - AI-Assisted Successor Recommendation does not generate any recommendation

Symptom

When enabling AI Successor Recommendations feature, and setting the criteria and weights that are used under the Nomination Setup page with the "Include skills and competencies" set to 0% and Work Experience as 100%, no recommendation is generated.

Environment

  • SAP SuccessFactors Succession Management
  • SAP SuccessFactors Talent Intelligence Hub

Reproducing the Issue

  1. Go to Admin Center > AI Services Administration.
  2. Select the Assisted Successor Recommendation option.
  3. Save your change.
  4. Go to Nominations Setup.
  5. At the bottom of the page, choose the weight 0% to the criteria "skills and competencies" and 100% for "work experience".
  6. Save your changes.
  7. Go to the Succession Org Chart
  8. Select a Position and click to generate a Successor Recommendation
  9. No recommendation is generated.

Resolution

The functionality Enable AI-Assisted SAP SuccessFactors HCM Skills is required for the Skill AI functionality.

You must purchase an AI Units license from SAP in order to use this feature. Please contact your Account Executive to know more about the purchasing process. 

Furthermore, Mapping competencies to the role is not mandatory for this feature to work. AI recommendations are generated based on multiple attributes such as skills, experience, competencies, proficiency etc.

For skills-based recommendations, the Skill AI feature must be enabled. If this feature is not enabled, and competencies are mapped in the job profile, the system relies primarily on competencies for generating recommendations. This is why the customer is currently seeing recommendations only when competencies are present.
 
Additional FAQ's:
  • Which experience data source is considered by the AI recommendation engine?

Assuming all configurations are correctly set up on the Succession side, experience-based matching considers overall experience, skill-based experience and job family-based experience.

  • Where should this experience information be maintained?

Experience requirements are inferred from the job profile description, while employee experience details are retrieved from the Employee Profile (Job History) and Growth Portfolio data sources.

  • How is it surfaced in the recommendation process?

From the Succession module's perspective, work experience data is surfaced directly from the SIF recommendation response and displayed to the end user as part of the recommendation details. There is no additional consumption or processing logic on the Succession side — the data is presented as-is for reference purposes only.

  • Is the experience considered when adding successors, when generating insights, or in both scenarios?

"Adding a Successor" is ultimately a user-driven action. Work experience data is presented as a contextual reference to help the user evaluate a candidate, but it does not influence or factor into the act of adding a successor itself. The experience data plays a role in how the SIF recommendation engine surfaces and ranks candidates, not in the final add operation. So the answer is only "generating insights scenario".

Keywords

TIH, Talent Intelligence Hub, AI-Assisted Successor Recommendations, Successor Recommendations, Job Profiles, SCM, Skill, work experience , KBA , LOD-SF-SCM-NOM , Nominations - Form Based and Formless , LOD-SF-TIH-SKL , AI Assisted Skills , Problem

Product

SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development all versions