From months to days: How SAP gets global insights into the future of work, faster

The Future of Work Research Lab studies how work, HR, and technology are changing. Comprised of behavioral scientists who are experts in the world of work, the team leads organizational research for SAP SuccessFactors, generating insights that guide HR practices and technology recommendations.

The lab’s research often has to be completed within tight timelines to inform product decisions and provide market and customer thought leadership. Traditional research vendors couldn't keep pace, taking months to field surveys with quantitative responses. By using Prolific, the team has cut study timelines from months to days, collected rich insights from open-text questions, and reached precise global audiences without losing the methodological rigor their research demands.

The challenge: Getting global insights in tight timelines

The Future of Work Research Lab aims to understand the trends, pressures, and shifts redefining work. That means the team's research needs to move at the speed of product decisions.

Before Prolific, the team relied on traditional survey vendors. The process was too slow at every stage, from setting up the survey to translating it for a global audience and waiting for pilot data. By the time results came back, weeks or months after the first ask, the world had often moved on.

"There was a big lead time between having a question we needed answered and actually getting the data back to synthesize into the report," explains Dr. Caitlynn Sendra, a Senior Research Scientist at the lab.

"By the time we got the data back, the questions we needed to ask had often changed,” adds Dr. Lauren Park, Quantitative Science Team Lead. “The topics we study move so fast."

That lag brought a sense of dread to every survey they fielded. If it would take months to see the data, the team felt pressured to ask every possible question up front. “We'd combine survey efforts and topics, leading to huge surveys covering many different things, because it felt like our one chance," says Dr. Sendra.

On top of tight timelines, the team faced further constraints:

• Lack of qualitative depth: The team didn't trust open-text questions with previous vendors. "We would never even consider adding a qualitative question. We knew the data would be so poor it would be unusable," says Dr. Sendra.
• The cost of niche audience samples: Narrowing a sample to a specific role, such as HR professionals or people managers, was so costly that the team usually used a general employee sample instead.

"Getting a survey out in time can be the difference between informing a decision while it's still being made versus missing that window entirely,” says Senior Scientist Dr. Katherine Gibbard. “Especially with our AI product, there's a real need for rapid answers."

The solution: A reliable source for fast qualitative data

Dr. Sendra, Dr. Park, and Dr. Gibbard all have PhDs and have spent years developing and fielding their own surveys. This, plus growing frustration with vendor lead times, raised an obvious question.

"There was a sense of, why do we have a middleman doing work we're capable of doing ourselves?” says Dr. Gibbard. “We wanted to bring ourselves closer to our data and have greater control and immediacy."

Dr. Gibbard had used Prolific years earlier for her own PhD research studying trust and adoption of generative AI in a pre-ChatGPT era. “I had fond memories of the data quality, as well as the sampling parameters you can filter and select by,” she recalls. “A lot of intuitive features I remembered from back then turned out to still be there. And, no surprise, there’s actually more now than there used to be.”

Quality responses for qualitative questions

With visibility into how Prolific verifies and screens participants, the team began adding open-text questions to surveys, something they'd avoided with previous vendors for years.

Precise targeting, at no extra cost

Third-party vendors charged a premium to narrow a sample to a specific role or seniority level. Prolific lets the team filter to precise populations, like HR professionals, at no additional cost.

"Now, at no more cost than a general population sample, we can dig down to specific groups like HR professionals or early talent,” says Dr. Park. “It's opened up a lot of possibilities to study a specific population without sourcing expensive qualitative interviews or paying vendors a premium for that specificity."

Global reach for representative findings

Because SAP SuccessFactors serves customers on every continent, global samples aren't a nice-to-have for the team. Without global coverage, it's hard to convince a room of customers that the findings apply to them.

With Prolific’s pool of 300k+ participants spanning 40+ countries, the team can reach the geographies they need and ensure their findings are genuinely representative. "It's a requirement for us,” explains Dr. Sendra. “Otherwise, when we present research, people in the room ask, 'Does this relate to me?’ You can’t make the case that results are relevant and applicable if no one from that specific part of the world was included."

The results: Hundreds of responses in days, not months

Dr. Sendra used Prolific to study the experience of early-talent workers and job seekers as AI reshapes entry-level roles. Using Prolific's built-in demographic filter for professional experience, combined with a custom screener question, she gathered roughly 1,800 responses from early-talent workers and job seekers around the world.

Dr. Park also used the platform to validate findings from a series of qualitative interviews and workshops on strategic workforce planning ahead of a conference paper deadline.

With data coming back in days rather than months, the team has moved away from their previous approach of including every possible question in a single survey. Research can now run program by program, with a targeted sample and a thematically consistent survey for each specific question.

Thanks to Prolific, the team can now:

• Reduce study timelines from months to days, allowing them to react to fast-moving topics like AI adoption while the findings remain relevant. The team has seen an 88% decrease in study timelines, from survey kick-off to survey data in hand.  
• Significantly reduce costs, with a 67% decrease in survey costs. 
• Add open-text, qualitative questions to surveys, with greater visibility into participant verification and quality checks.
• Target precise populations, such as HR professionals, early-talent workers, and people managers, at no more cost than a general population sample.
• Access representative samples across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, ensuring that findings are globally relevant.

What's next: New research into how AI is reshaping work

With survey research now running smoothly, the Future of Work Research Lab is looking at newer methodologies that Prolific can unlock.

• AI-moderated qualitative research: The team is preparing to pilot an integration with a focus-group platform that pairs AI moderation with participants sourced through Prolific.
• Experiments with SAP's AI tools: Another area they’re considering is sourcing Prolific participants for experimental tasks using SAP's proprietary research tools, logging keystrokes and interactions with an experimental LLM, and recording participants' subjective experiences with it.
• Longitudinal research: Moving beyond one-shot, large-scale surveys, the team wants to move toward longitudinal studies that track the same population over time.
• Experimental work on AI autonomy: Building on Dr. Gibbard's PhD research on AI trust, the team aims to test how comfortable people are with varying levels of autonomous AI processes.
• A flagship report, powered by Prolific: The team's Future of Work Predictions report, published ahead of Success Connect at SAP Connect on October 5 - 7, will use Prolific to gather global survey data for the first time this year.

There’s also a broader question that the lab wants to explore: as the nature of work changes, what does it even mean to be a successful worker?

"We have the opportunity to use Prolific to understand from employees how the definition of success is changing,” Dr. Sendra explains.

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