Workforce of the Future
An end-to-end immersive showcase built around a physical keychain that travelled through four AI-powered scenes. Humans, AI agents, and robots - one team, one story.
Built for the SAP NOW AI Tour 2025 - SAP’s flagship UK event in London. The showcase occupied a dedicated Experience Centre space at the venue, designed and built by our team from the ground up.
The central idea was a single physical object: a personalised laser-engraved keychain. Every visitor placed a real order, and that order travelled through four themed scenes representing a complete future business operation - Plan, Manufacture, Operate, Deliver. At the end, they collected their keychain from a smart retail shelf. It made everything tangible. Abstract AI concepts connected to something personal.
The overarching theme: a hybrid workforce of humans, AI software agents, and physical robots, collaborating across a full business lifecycle. Not AI replacing people - AI and people working together, each doing what they do best.
Plan
This scene is set in the HR and workforce planning space, using SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Analytics Cloud. The focus is on skills intelligence - understanding where the gaps are, what the business risk is, and how to act on it. Joule runs throughout as the planning copilot, connecting data to decisions to actions within the HR system.
A workforce planner is dealing with a critical skills gap following the company’s push to onshore manufacturing to the UK. New factories, not enough people with the right skills. Joule proactively surfaces the revenue risk, then guides the planner through a skills analysis, a comparison across locations, and tailored recommendations - upskill in one site, bring in contractors in another. The scene ends with Joule generating a job posting on request. Months of strategic planning, compressed into minutes of guided action.
Manufacture
This scene sits in the manufacturing operations space, built around SAP Digital Manufacturing. A live robot arm and laser engraver run in the physical space, while the digital story plays out on screen - showing how AI embeds into production planning, machine optimisation, and quality management.
A demand surge means the production line can’t keep up. AI analyses the constraint, suggests optimisations to existing equipment, then walks through scenario planning for longer-term capacity - modelling cost, lead time, and impact for each option. The production supervisor stays in control; Joule does the analytical heavy lifting. The scene ends on a cliffhanger: the machinery breaks down mid-run, setting up the next chapter.
Operate
This scene is built on SAP BTP, with a custom integration connecting the platform to a Unitree Go 2 Edu robot dog. It demonstrates what autonomous asset inspection looks like when robotics, AI, and ERP are genuinely connected- not as a concept, but running live in the room.
No technician available. The breakdown is in an area you’d rather not send people into unnecessarily. Wilson, the robot dog, is dispatched autonomously to inspect the fault. He navigates to the asset, films it, and AI analyses the feed - not just visually, but picking up on audio cues that point to a deeper root cause. Diagnosis confirmed, a replacement part recommended, and a purchase requisition raised automatically in S/4HANA. Robot inspects. AI diagnoses. ERP acts.
Deliver
This scene spans SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP BTP, and SuccessFactors, with physical electronic shelf labels and AI shelf cameras from partner VusionGroup. It brings together retail personalisation, inventory intelligence, sustainability, and operational safety - all in one connected space.
The keychain is ready. The visitor finds their order waiting at a specific shelf location, their name lit up on an electronic label. The scene also demonstrates the broader potential of an AI-powered retail environment - autonomous store patrols generating operational safety reports before the store opens, AI shelf cameras monitoring stock and flagging waste before it happens, and a retail assistant that can execute a price change across the physical store in a single sentence.
The Build
Five separate systems ran the showcase in parallel - an operations portal serving all four scene interfaces, a customer-facing order tracker mobile app that each visitor had, a robot arm controller, and an iPad kiosk app at the visitor entrance - all deployed on SAP BTP. AI inference for the robot inspection, badge scanning, and other tasks ran through SAP AI Core. The whole thing ran live, at an event, in front of customers all day.