Y26.1.1 release highlights

This release brings further usability and platform enhancements. We designed these to simplify navigation, strengthen data protection, and improve key HR workflows. We're also delivering more options for our Early Adopters using Sage People with AI.

Release features:

Org Chart enhancements - improved usability and experience within the new Org Chart capability
Bug fixes - across both Sage People core and AI packages, improving overall stability and quality
Security improvements - continued strengthening of platform protection and compliance
Angular upgrade - a critical platform update to future proof for Salesforce changes
Accessible time off colors – Altered time off colors to improve visibility and recognition
Accessible manager navigation items – Icons on manager dashboards to improve navigation clarity

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 organisational 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 organisational 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

We've enhanced the HR Assistant with additional organizational data grounding capabilities. This enables more relevant and personalized responses when answering HR policy questions and data queries.

When administrators enable it, the assistant can use organizational data alongside HR policy content. This includes information such as employment, salary and bonus, dependents, emergency contacts, passports and visas.

By combining policy knowledge with organizational context, the HR Assistant can deliver more accurate and relevant responses while respecting existing data access permissions.

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

We've made significant improvements to how the HR Assistant manages policy documents, reducing both setup effort and running costs for organizations with multiple HR policies. Previously, customers often needed to upload and maintain the same document separately for each policy that used it. You can now reuse documents across multiple policies, providing several benefits.

Lower administration effort — upload and maintain shared content once rather than managing multiple copies across policies
Reduced maintenance overhead — document updates become simpler and easier to manage
Improved consistency — helps ensure policies reference the same source content
More efficient AI consumption — avoids repeatedly processing identical documents, helping you make 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 now rate summaries and provide comments to help shape future improvements
Clearer labels and guidance — updated field names, descriptions and help text make AI-generated content easier to understand
More relevant processing — summary generation focuses on active employees by default, helping optimise processing and relevance
Improved error handling — generation issues are recorded against the performance review summary, making problems easier to identify and resolve while preventing repeated failed processing attempts
Better handling of lengthy summaries — summaries that exceed field limits are automatically truncated and flagged, helping ensure content is successfully generated and saved

Together, these enhancements provide a more reliable experience while helping us continuously improve AI-generated insights through customer feedback.

Join the Early Adopter Programme

These capabilities are available through the Sage People AI Early Adopter Programme (EAP), giving customers early access to new AI innovations and the opportunity to help shape future development through direct collaboration with the Sage People product team.

We're continuing to invest heavily in Sage People with AI throughout FY26, delivering regular enhancements that help organisations benefit from trusted, practical AI embedded directly within Sage People.

Interested in exploring Sage People AI and influencing what's next? Contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to learn more about joining the Early Adopter Programme.