Sage People with AI - EAP release (Y26.1.1)

Sage People with AI - enhancements in 26.1.1

We're continuing to invest in Sage People with AI through our Early Adopter Programme, delivering new capabilities and ongoing improvements based on customer feedback. This release expands AI-assisted objective creation, enhances the HR Assistant, and introduces quality and reliability improvements to AI-generated performance review summaries.

AI-assisted objective creation gets smarter

We've expanded and improved AI-assisted objective creation, with enhancements that make the experience more powerful, transparent and aligned to organizational priorities.

  • Draft operational objectives with AI — alongside development objectives, users can now generate operational objectives focused on role performance and business outcomes. You can inform suggestions by organizational context, including company objectives and manager objectives where available

  • AI feedback in the flow — users can now provide thumbs up/down feedback on AI-generated content directly within the experience, helping us continuously improve the quality and relevance of AI suggestions

  • More room to describe tasks — we've increased the objective task field limit from 120 to 255 characters, making it easier to capture additional detail such as deliverables, milestones, and target dates

  • Clearer explainability — improved guidance helps users understand why AI suggested specific objective titles, making it easier to select the most relevant option

  • Smarter, non-duplicated suggestions — the system check AI-generated objectives against existing objectives to help prevent duplicate or overlapping goals

  • AI-assisted objective refinement — users can edit and auto rewrite descriptions with AI

Together, these enhancements help users create higher-quality objectives faster while maintaining alignment with business priorities.

HR Assistant – Expanded organizational data grounding

When administrators enable it, the assistant can use organizational data alongside HR policy content. This includes employment, salary and bonus, dependents, emergency contacts, passports and visas. By combining policy knowledge with organizational context, the HR Assistant delivers more accurate, relevant responses while respecting existing data access permissions.

HR Assistant – Easier and more cost-efficient to run at scale

You can now reuse documents across multiple policies rather than uploading and maintaining separate copies:

  • Lower administration effort — upload and maintain shared content once

  • Reduced maintenance overhead — document updates become simpler

  • Improved consistency — helps ensure policies reference the same source content

  • More efficient AI consumption — avoids repeatedly processing identical documents, making better use of available AI credits

These improvements make the HR Assistant easier to deploy, easier to maintain and more cost-effective to operate at scale.

AI summaries of past performance reviews – Quality and reliability improvements

We've introduced several enhancements to improve the quality, usability and reliability of AI-generated performance review summaries.

  • In-product feedback — managers and employees can rate summaries and add comments

  • Clearer labels and guidance — updated field names, descriptions and help text

  • More relevant processing — summary generation focuses on active employees by default

  • Improved error handling — generation issues are recorded against the summary, making problems easier to resolve and preventing repeated failed attempts

  • Better handling of lengthy summaries — summaries exceeding field limits are automatically truncated and flagged

Join the Early Adopter Program

These capabilities are available through the Sage People AI Early Adopter Program (EAP). It gives you early access to new AI innovations and the opportunity to shape future development through direct collaboration with the Sage People product team. Interested in exploring Sage People AI and influencing what's next? Contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to learn more.