Explore past conference sessions, keynote tracks, and interactive workshops below. We are currently curating an extraordinary 2027 program featuring 6 specialized tracks, 8 SHRM & HRCI credits, and hands-on strategy sessions in South San Francisco.
The West Coast's premier HR conference returns March 23-24, 2027 with high-impact, practical learning.
Browse through keynotes, sessions and roundtable discussions below.
Welcome to HRWest 2026! In this opening session, Yael Schy and Jason Averbrook will welcome attendees and set the tone for a conference built on community, learning, and shared growth as we work together to Rise Above the Fog.
This is an immersive, hands-on workshop for HR leaders to gain the education and inspiration needed to produce a clear vision and scalable strategies for enabling AI for workforce and business outcomes. Attendees will get a clear understanding of the different types and applications of AI in workforce technologies, a framework for deployment, success, and a scaled approach for realizing business value.
Take this time to visit the exhibit hall to learn about the latest HR solutions, grab some coffee, and hear a brief demo from Replit. It’s the perfect opportunity to reconnect with HR friends and make new connections.
Most organizations don’t have a retention problem—they have a leadership blind spot. Leaders often make assumptions about why employees stay or leave without ever truly understanding their people.
In this session, Natalie Grabher challenges common misconceptions around retention and performance, showing why hiring is not a quick fix but a long-term investment with delayed return. She will break down the real cost of hiring, the importance of structured performance management, and how SMART goals create clarity and accountability.
Natalie also explores how AI can eliminate time-consuming administrative work, allowing leaders to reinvest that time where it matters most—building genuine relationships with their teams. Attendees will leave with practical strategies to lead more intentionally, improve retention, and turn people management into a measurable business advantage.
This interactive session will tackle some of the most challenging areas for in-house counsel and HR professionals in 2026, including the latest developments on remote-work accommodations and leave requests, as well as updates on new “stay-or-pay” restrictions that every practitioner should know. In addition, we will discuss the newly issued independent-contractor guidelines and what to watch out for under the newly constituted NLRB.
The future of work will not follow a single path—multiple, competing futures are already emerging. This session explores predictions across the Future of Working and also examines diverging future scenarios—from AI-driven productivity to AI-enabled human amplification. Attendees will be provided with tangible next steps to help them craft a future of work where both humans and organizations can thrive.
This session explores how AI is reshaping people management and provides a practical playbook HR leaders and managers can apply immediately. Rather than revisiting what’s already known, we focus on what actually works now: how to lead people more effectively in an AI-enabled workplace.
We’ll cover five critical challenges redefining HR and leadership today, including:
• Rebuilding leadership competencies for an AI-augmented workforce
• Using AI to scale coaching, feedback, and development
• Bridging generational expectations through modern mentoring approaches
• Redefining performance management in a data-rich environment
• Maintaining human connection, trust, and culture amid automation
A core focus will be servant leadership as a competitive advantage—where leaders shift from directing work to enabling growth, removing barriers, and personalizing development at scale using AI tools. For example, leading organizations are now equipping managers with AI-driven coaching assistants that analyze employee feedback and suggest tailored development actions, allowing leaders to spend less time on administration and more time on meaningful engagement.
Attendees will leave with a clear, actionable framework for integrating AI into leadership development, mentoring, and daily management while strengthening the uniquely human skills that matter most. This session is designed for HR and business leaders who want to move from awareness to execution in building the next generation of leaders.
Kick off the HRWest AI Hackathon by exploring real HR and workplace challenges where AI can create meaningful impact. No AI experience is required — this session is designed for everyone. Participants will form teams, choose a challenge track, and develop solution ideas while learning practical AI skills they can apply in their HR roles. By session end, teams will have a defined problem, solution concept, and development roadmap prepared for the next time they meet at Let’s Build! Part 2.
Discover great local restaurants in the area for a lunch break.
Meg & Amy are going to do a live podcast for the HRWest audience focusing on how the HR domain is changing in the AI era and how the role of HR needs to expand to meet the moment. As decades long HR product innovators and operators Meg & Amy have spent the last two years on the podcast talking to futurists, innovators, business and thought leaders and will share both what they have learned and what is still unclear. They balance deep curiosity with product expertise and intellectual humility in search of how to invent a future that is abundant and rich with opportunity and how to build the systems to thrive in the now of work.
The employment law and HR landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace. With major news headlines seemingly each week, it’s more critical than ever to stay current. In this 30-minute session, Elizabeth Bille delivers a quick-hit briefing on key legal and policy developments affecting HR professionals today.
Designed for busy leaders, this session offers a high-level, targeted overview of workplace developments, highlighting what's changing, what matters now, and where to focus next.
Topics include:
1. EEOC priorities and reporting requirements, including the latest enforcement trends around “reverse discrimination” claims and developments related to EEO reporting
2. The current state of the DEI legal landscape, and what it means for employer programs and training
3. State workplace violence prevention laws and evolving employer obligations in California and beyond
4. AI in the workplace, including implications for workplace discrimination and harassment
5. Politics at work, including state restrictions on workplace communications and strategies for fostering inclusion across differences
For each topic, we'll cover:
- The headline update you need to know
- A practical takeaway
- Direction on where to go deeper for additional guidance
This session will ensure you leave with the latest developments firmly on your radar.
Work is accelerating — hybrid realities, new tech, shifting expectations, and increasing diversity are making “old school” leadership models less effective by the day. In this fast, practical 30‑minute session, you’ll learn how modern leaders lead without needing to be the expert in the room — by creating clarity in ambiguity, empowering people to do their best work, and building cultures where innovation and trust thrive.
You’ll leave with five immediately usable leadership micro‑practices you can apply in your next meeting or 1:1: lead with curiosity (not certainty), build psychological safety on purpose, communicate with radical clarity, strengthen agility through quick experiments, and humanize the work experience so people feel seen. Expect simple prompts, phrases, and routines you can take straight back to your organization — no theory overload, just “do this on Monday.”
What attendees will take away
- A set of curiosity-led questions (plus the 70/30 listening rule) that surface better ideas and reduces blind spots.
- Practical ways to build psychological safety (including a closing question that unlocks what’s unsaid).
- A clarity + agility toolkit: explain the “why,” confirm understanding, and make decisions with ~70% of the info to keep momentum.
"The R&D guy who knows our product inside out is about to retire." "Our new hires need more support after formal onboarding." "Our execs are tired of answering the same questions hundreds of times.”
The most valuable knowledge in an organization — the judgment, context, and unspoken rules your most in-demand people carry — rarely lives in a document. It lives in their heads, and it becomes unreachable when they’re on the road, in a new role or time zone, or headed to retirement.
Learn how Digital Twins can capture that tacit knowledge and make it accessible to any teammate who needs it, subject to appropriate access controls — so progress doesn’t stall when key people step away, and everyone can help their teammates even when they’re not physically available.
For decades, hiring has followed the same seven-stage funnel — job posting, application, resume screen, phone screen, assessment, interview loop, offer. Most of those stages exist to manage scarcity and friction. But candidates are no longer scarce, and AI can now handle the busywork end to end. When that happens, the stages don't get faster. They stop being necessary — and that collapse is already underway.
Have you ever looked closely at your employee handbook?
Unwary employers may have terms that serve as traps, creating legal liability and employment claims. This presentation will address common red flags in employee handbooks and highlight the policies that employers that can serve as shields and swords when dealing with employment claims and disciplining employees.
Organizations routinely plan for financial, legal, and operational risk, yet one of the most significant and least addressed threats to leadership continuity and organizational stability often remains unspoken: untreated substance use and co-occurring mental health challenges aamong executives and key personnel whose roles may be critical to organizational success.
At the highest level of business, substance use disorder presents a unique paradox. Individuals in executive and key positions often have greater autonomy, resources, and influence, allowing challenges to be minimized, concealed, or accommodated for longer periods. When intervention does occur, it is frequently routed through high-cost, often “luxury” treatment environments that prioritize discretion and comfort, but may lack the accountability and longitudinal care required for sustained recovery. This can result in repeated treatment cycles, inconsistent performance, and ongoing organizational risk.
Drawing on decades of clinical experience treating high-functioning professionals, executives, and key organizational stakeholders, this presentation will examine how these conditions translate into material financial, operational, legal, and reputational liabilities for companies and how those liabilities can be mitigated by timely, skilled intervention.
This session is presented by the clinical team at Recovery Without Walls, an integrative outpatient medical practice specializing in addiction, chronic pain, and complex psychiatric care. The practice is led by Howard Kornfeld, MD, a nationally recognized addiction and pain specialist with more than four decades of clinical experience, including long-standing faculty involvement at UCSF and early leadership in compassionate outpatient treatment models. The broader team includes physicians, psychiatric providers, and care coordinators experienced in working with high-functioning professionals and executives requiring discretion, continuity, and highly individualized care.
Preparing for an HR certification exam can feel overwhelming, but success is achievable with the right strategy, mindset, and preparation plan. This interactive roundtable session is designed for HR professionals pursuing HRCI or SHRM certifications who want practical guidance on how to confidently prepare for and pass their exams.
Attendees will explore proven study techniques, effective time-management strategies, and common mistakes that often derail candidates. The discussion will also provide insight into how certification exams are structured, which competencies are most heavily tested, and how to approach scenario-based questions with confidence.
The session will provide opportunities to share experiences, ask questions, and exchange best practices with peers who are also navigating the certification journey. Whether you are just beginning your preparation or looking for new strategies after a previous attempt, this discussion will deliver actionable takeaways to help you build confidence, reduce exam anxiety, and increase your chances of certification success.
More innovation does not equal more engagement.
Across industries, leaders are navigating increased complexity, information, tools, and
expectations- yet many organizations continue to struggle with disengagement, turnover, and
inconsistent performance.
This session cuts through the noise.
Rather than introducing another program, platform, or trend, this practical and research‐informed
workshop focuses on two human signals that consistently drive motivation, retention, and
discretionary effort - across roles, industries, and generations. When leaders understand and
intentionally manage these signals, engagement improves, workforce challenges simplify, and
performance conversations become more effective and productive.
Designed for senior leaders and HR professionals alike, this session delivers a clear,
human‐centered framework that can be applied immediately - helping leaders strengthen
accountability, align expectations, and create the conditions where engaged people perform at a
higher level, internally motivated to do their best.
If you’re looking for clarity instead of complexity, this session offers a focused perspective that
makes today’s workplace easier to understand and manage.
Many organizations have succession plans, but fewer have confidence that their named successors are truly ready. Readiness is often based on manager opinion, informal calibration, or outdated role assumptions rather than on clear, governed evidence. As leadership expectations shift and workforce risk increases, HR teams need a more defensible way to identify, evaluate, and develop successors.
This roundtable will explore how organizations can strengthen succession planning by defining what readiness means, aligning successors with future role requirements, using evidence to identify gaps, and building governance into talent decisions. Participants will discuss how to move beyond names in boxes toward a more transparent, consistent, and actionable succession process.
The executive suite often wants two things: HR to become more strategic and the organization to better leverage AI. In this roundtable, we'll discuss the intersection of these two trends. We'll start off with some recent HR.com research data, but this will mostly be a chance to chat with fellow HR professionals about how HR strategies are likely to evolve over the next two years.
Hiring tech is being rewritten in real time. Application volume has exploded, AI sits on both sides of the desk, and the old assumptions about how candidates and companies find each other no longer hold. So what are the people actually building these tools seeing from the inside?
In this candid CEO panel, founders of leading talent acquisition platforms sit down to talk about the shifting dynamics reshaping how organizations hire. We’ll dig into where the traditional process is breaking down, how they’re rethinking it from the ground up, and the hard choices they’re making as AI moves from buzzword to baseline. Expect a frank conversation about what’s hype, what’s real, and where hiring goes from here — straight from the people betting their companies on the answers.
As AI rapidly transforms the workplace, organizations are rethinking how they develop and support their people. Traditional job structures are evolving into more dynamic, skills-based models as AI reshapes work, automates tasks, and changes the capabilities companies need from their workforce. Careers are increasingly shifting from static roles to more fluid experiences built around projects, gigs, internal mobility, and continuous learning.
At the same time, the human side of work is becoming more important—not less. As employees navigate rapid change, organizations are investing more heavily in communities, peer learning, and personalized support systems that help people adapt, grow, and stay connected. This session explores how leading companies are redefining careers, skills, and workplace community in the age of AI — and why human connection may become one of the most strategic advantages in an AI-powered future.
Based on my knowledge, experience, and expertise, I wrote and published an article focusing on a different approach to DEI in the current anti-DEI climate. I bring a fresh perspective on how DEI efforts can succeed, while quelling the cries from anti-DEI activists. I encourage my fellow DEI activists to take a leap of faith and assume positive intent behind anti-DEI movements, to arrive at a place where reasoned discussions can lead to positive outcomes. My article will form the basis for the roundtable discussion.
Through first-hand observations and considered references, I journey through the root causes of DEI and anti-DEI activism. I discuss the historical origins of DEI efforts. Importantly, I also discuss some of the failures of DEI efforts which have spawned anti-DEI activism, in order to frame my novel but straightforward approach which is anchored in: Discipline, Honesty and Courage. Finally, I offer practical ways to achieve success.
In my article, I discuss real life examples where a lack of Discipline, Honesty and Courage can fuel DEI or Anti-DEI activism. For the purposes of the session, I will expand on and convert these examples into case studies for discussion and ultimately for participants to share how they would approach each.
Finally, as a takeaway for all attendees, I will provide a copy of Toni Morrison’s short story Recitatif, which explores how beliefs about racial characteristics can color one’s view about a particular individual. This thought-provoking piece remains intentionally silent with regards to the protagonists’ racial identities (though notes that one is white and one is Black) and encourages readers to examine racial stereotypes to hopefully dispel them.
AI tools are rapidly becoming the "co-pilots" for everyday HR decisions, from screening resumes to drafting performance reviews. But when an AI tool flags a candidate or scores an employee, where does the machine's influence end and your judgment begin?
This fast-paced, 30-minute roundtable is designed for HR professionals at all levels who want to look past the marketing hype and understand the real-world friction between human intuition and algorithmic data. We will discuss the invisible risks of over-relying on automated recommendations, such as automation bias: trusting the data over our own judgment, and how to maintain meaningful human oversight. You will walk away with practical, immediate questions to ask your technology vendors and a simple framework to help ensure your team retains the final, compliant say in high-stakes talent decisions.
Payroll sits at the center of the employment relationship, yet the way organizations measure its impact remains narrowly defined. Most leadership teams still view payroll through the lens of cost, efficiency, and compliance. These metrics are at once precise, defensible, and deeply incomplete. This bias toward what is easily measured obscures payroll’s growing influence on trust, retention, workforce stability, and overall organizational performance.
This session challenges the prevailing financial and operational frameworks that limit how payroll’s value is understood. It introduces three practical ways payroll leaders can help executive stakeholders see beyond cost accounting and begin recognizing payroll as a driver of future value:
-> First, we reframe efficiency as a starting point, not an outcome. We do so by exposing how traditional metrics capture immediate financial outputs while missing downstream effects on engagement, performance, and retention.
-> Second, we explore how to translate payroll’s impact into the language of finance without losing its human dimension, bridging the gap between GAAP-aligned reporting and the realities of workforce value creation.
-> Third, we examine how payroll data, when connected to broader workforce and business outcomes, can tell a more complete story about the conditions under which employees do their best work.
Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of why payroll’s most strategic contributions often go unrecognized and how to change that narrative. More importantly, they will gain a practical framework for helping leadership account not just for what payroll costs, but for what it makes possible.
We’re not just leading people. We’re leading humans through one of the biggest shifts in how work gets done in our lifetime, without a blueprint.
This roundtable discussion provides a collaborative space to explore strategies for leading AI integration through a human-centered lens. When implementing AI, many organizations are approaching it as a tech rollout, when it is a significant organizational change event like a merger and/or acquisition with all the big feelings that go along with it.
At the core of successful adoption is a critical truth. Adoption is an emotional decision before it is a logical one. If employees don’t feel safe, informed, and supported, they are less likely to engage with new tools or ways of working. This session will focus on how leaders can address employee concerns, including fear of job loss, while driving performance and innovation while meeting the company's KPIs.
Through shared insights and practical strategies, this session will examine how leaders can balance urgency with empathy, implement phased and sustainable approaches to AI integration, and create environments where employees feel supported, informed, and empowered to adapt.
By reframing AI as a people-first transformation rather than a systems implementation, leaders can create an environment where employees feel secure and engaged, ultimately strengthening adoption, retention, and organizational resilience.
As organizations accelerate their digital transformation journeys, HR is evolving from a process-driven function into a strategic, insight-led partner to the business. This roundtable explores how people analytics and artificial intelligence are reshaping the way HR teams make decisions, design workforce strategies, and deliver employee experiences at scale.
We will discuss how HR leaders can move beyond traditional reporting to build a truly data-driven function, leveraging predictive analytics, AI-powered insights, and real-time workforce intelligence. The conversation will also highlight practical use cases across talent acquisition, workforce planning, performance, and employee engagement, along with the cultural and capability shifts required to make analytics actionable.
Automation and AI feel like they are taking over our processes, but at what cost? It seems as though hiring teams have never had more tools at their disposal from AI screening, automated outreach, scheduling bots, assessments, chat-based candidate experiences, and analytics dashboards for everything. In theory, this should have made hiring faster, smoother, and more consistent. And yet… most teams would still describe their process as slow, messy, and harder than it should be.
This roundtable will debate the assumption that technology always equals better outcomes. When does the automation of screening and evaluating candidates or our employees improve the experience and when are we just accelerating a flawed process? Participants will discuss where automation is improving the candidate and hiring manager experience, and where it is introducing friction and disengagement. How do we leverage the benefits without risking hiring bias, reduced engagement, or a negative impact on quality?
We will take a candid look at where ‘innovation’ is raising the bar and where it is putting a Band-Aid on issues that actually need to be fixed. Instead of whispering about it, this conversation will cover specific examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and aim to identify where the real wins are between all the hype.
Organizations invest heavily in systems, strategies, and transformation initiatives… yet many stall, not because of technology, but because the wrong people are in the wrong seats, or the right people lack shared clarity.
In Do You Have the Right Flight Crew?, Lee reframes organizational transformation as a flight: success depends on who’s in the cockpit, who’s navigating, who’s maintaining the aircraft, and who’s communicating with passengers.
This interactive session invites attendees to examine their own “crew” across HR, Talent, and Technology, identify friction points, and leave with a practical framework they can immediately apply to transformation efforts, implementations, and operating models.
Grab your boarding pass, find your seat, and take flight.
In an era marked by rapid technological disruption, economic volatility, and evolving workforce expectations, HR leaders must cultivate organizational resilience while maintaining employee engagement and business continuity. This roundtable explores how senior HR professionals can develop adaptive leadership strategies that prepare their organizations to not just survive, but thrive amid constant change.
Participants will examine practical frameworks for building psychological safety, fostering agile decision-making processes, and creating communication strategies that maintain trust during turbulent periods. The discussion will delve into real-world case studies where HR leaders successfully navigated major organizational transformations, including restructurings, mergers, and sudden market shifts. We’ll explore how to balance the need for stability with the imperative for innovation, and how to develop leadership capabilities at all organizational levels that embrace ambiguity rather than resist it.
This collaborative session encourages participants to share their own experiences leading through disruption, discuss common pitfalls, and co-create solutions for maintaining organizational coherence when traditional playbooks no longer apply. Together, we’ll explore how HR can serve as the strategic anchor that keeps organizations grounded while remaining flexible enough to pivot quickly when circumstances demand it.
HRWest 2026 is themed around “Rising Above the Fog” — finding clarity and purpose in turbulent times — at a time when HR leaders are being asked to do more with less and make smart calls on critical issues like AI.
This facilitated roundtable gives HR, Talent and L&D leaders a structured way to compare what’s working (and what’s risky) as GenAI and emerging “agentic AI" capabilities enter HR workflows. Participants will share real examples, pressure-test governance and adoption approaches, and leave with a simple, immediately usable “AI readiness” plan grounded in the priorities many HR teams are focusing on for 2026 (workforce readiness, operating model changes, and AI fluency).
Let's be honest, most culture change efforts don't fail because of a bad strategy. They fail because nobody stopped to ask whether the organization was ready before the initiative launched.
I've seen it happen more times than I can count. Leaders get energized, a new values framework gets rolled out, the engagement survey goes live, and a year later, nothing has really shifted. Not because people didn't care, but because the hard questions never got asked upfront.
That’s what this roundtable is about — not a framework, not a presentation, but a real conversation among experienced HR leaders about what readiness for culture change looks like, and how the questions we ask (or avoid) early on can make or break the whole effort.
What does it mean for leaders to be truly aligned versus just enthusiastic?
How do you find out what's really going on when people don't feel safe enough to tell you the truth?
And what do we do when the culture we're trying to build is still being undermined by the systems we haven't fixed yet?
Here's what I've learned: culture change doesn't stick unless people feel connected to it, and that means they have to feel like they belong to the organization that's asking them to change. When employees don't see themselves in the future being described, when they don't feel a genuine stake in the outcome, even the best-designed initiative will fall flat. Belonging isn't a feel-good add-on to culture work. It's the foundation that makes change possible.
I've been in these trenches, and I'm guessing you have too. Let's learn from each other.
Everyone who joins will walk away with a Culture Readiness Question Bank: a practical set of diagnostic questions you can use back at work, not just something that sits in your conference folder.
This session explores how to move from fragmented recruiting tools to an integrated, skills aware AI-powered talent ecosystem that supports the full journey from candidate to employee. Critical topics include unifying data across ATS, HRIS, and CRM, embedding AI for sourcing and matching, and setting governance for ethical, explainable automation.
This session explores a common but often unspoken challenge: when an organization’s stated values remain intact, yet day-to-day behaviors quietly drift. Dismissive communication, inconsistent leadership practices, unclear expectations, and unresolved tension rarely appear immediately in engagement surveys, but over time they erode trust, performance, and psychological safety.
In this fast-paced, practical session, attendees will learn how to recognize early warning signs of cultural drift before it escalates into disengagement, turnover, or performance problems. Drawing on real-world leadership experience, this session reframes a “culture reset” not as a morale initiative or rebranding effort, but as a behavioral and leadership alignment process.
Participants will be introduced to clear, actionable tools people leaders can use immediately, including expectation-setting frameworks, feedback standards, and leader accountability practices that reinforce clarity, respect, and consistency. The focus is on helping leaders reset norms without overcorrecting, creating fear, or defaulting to punitive approaches, especially during periods of pressure or change.
Attendees will leave with practical strategies to stabilize culture, realign leadership behaviors with stated values, and support leaders in modeling the behaviors the organization truly expects.
Population and generational shifts will create demand for agentic technology use at an accelerated pace. Human Resources is traditionally slower to adapt to change as a function, but over the next two years HR will need to be at the forefront of that change or find that it is an obsolete function in the Agentic Age.
We will look at the changes ahead globally and an exploration of how the end of the Industrial Age, driven by AI agents, will lead to a more human-centric world of work. This shift will redefine how organizations operate, placing greater emphasis on creativity, empathy, collaboration, and uniquely human skills as automation takes on more routine and transactional tasks.
1. The "Flexibility Stigma" & The Return-to-Office (RTO) Backlash
While over 60% of women cite workplace flexibility as the single biggest factor for their career sustainability, companies are aggressively rolling back hybrid and remote policies. Crucially, recent data reveals a massive "flexibility stigma": women who work remotely are being penalized with fewer promotions and sponsorships, while men who work remotely face no such penalty. *
The Angle: How to maintain visibility, secure sponsorship, and advance while utilizing flexible work models.
2. GenAI and the "AI Upskilling Gap"
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly reshaping job functions, but an unexpected gender gap has emerged. Men are currently receiving more encouragement and structured training to use generative AI tools at work, while entry- and mid-level women are being left out.
The Angle: Ensuring women are not left behind in the tech revolution and actively leveraging AI to automate routine tasks.
3. Disrupted "Superwoman" Narratives & Burnout
The data is staggering: nearly 6 in 10 senior-level women report frequent burnout—significantly higher than their male peers. A massive theme at conferences this year is "Disrupting the Superwoman Narrative" and prioritizing nervous system regulation and rest as actual leadership skills, rather than over-functioning until collapse.
The Angle: Redefining leadership as shared power and sustainable boundaries rather than self-sacrifice.
4. The Declining DEI Commitment & The "Broken Rung"
For the first time in a decade, corporate commitment to gender diversity is stalling or actively rolling back (e.g., cutting formal mentorship, scaling back bias training). Meanwhile, the "broken rung"—the barrier preventing women from making the first step from entry-level to manager—remains firmly in place, particularly for women of color.
The Angle: How to advocate for yourself and others when formal corporate diversity programs are shrinking.
Take some time to visit exhibit tables and connect with other attendees!
We live in a very divided world. One of those divisions is the generation gap. Today’s workplaces can include 3 or 4 generations, who often struggle to understand each other, creating tension at work that is counterproductive. This workshop uses innovative, interactive exercises to help participants explore their hidden biases and discover new ways of connecting across generational and cultural barriers. Participants will leave with increased understanding of generational differences, as well as insights about finding common ground and concrete tools for connecting across the age spectrum in the workplace.
Wrap up the first day of HRWest 2026 at our Opening Reception! After a full day of learning, join fellow attendees, speakers, exhibitors, and industry leaders for more networking and conversation. Enjoy complimentary drinks and light appetizers while making new connections, sharing insights from the day, and preparing for another exciting day of sessions ahead.
Good morning! Let’s check in on Day 1 highlights, key takeaways, and lessons learned. Then we’ll look ahead to an exciting final day filled with presentations, collaborative roundtables, innovative AI creations, and an inspiring closing keynote panel.
You have repeatedly heard the employment attorney mantra “document, document, document." The reasons should be obvious: Documentation can be compelling evidence of what occurred during the employment relationship and can support nondiscriminatory reasons for employer actions. However, having poor documentation–documentation that is ambiguous or biased or that lacks specificity–is worse than having no documentation. This session will highlight the most common documentation mistakes, reveal how your documentation will be viewed by a jury or judge, and provide tips for creating documentation that will assist you in court.
Agentic AI isn't just a future concept. It's already here, and a growing legion of HR professionals must orchestrate workforces that leverage autonomous agents to meet strategic needs. This 60-minute interactive workshop presents a scenario of how one organization accomplishes this. You'll learn practical ways to shift from managing people who use tools to leading hybrid human-AI teams. We'll explore how to leverage AI, identify hidden skills in your workforce, restructure traditional roles for strategic impact, and tackle the culture shock of resistance head-on.
Then you'll step into the scenario yourselves. After watching a live demonstration on how to use AI to help design new job architectures, you'll collaborate to solve a real-world integration crisis. (It'll be fun!)
Cancer is increasingly affecting employees during their working years, impacting productivity, caregiving responsibilities, absenteeism, presenteeism, and overall workforce well-being. As cancer incidence continues to rise among working-age adults, employers are being challenged to think beyond traditional benefits strategies and better support employees navigating complex and often fragmented care journeys. This session will explore the growing workforce impact of cancer, the hidden burdens placed on employees and caregivers, and practical ways organizations can improve support through more thoughtful benefits, care coordination, and navigation resources.
The relationship between HR and IT has been broken for years. HR submits a ticket. IT prioritizes something else. The initiative stalls. That dynamic was always inefficient. In 2026, it's become a genuine risk.
Agentic AI, embedded analytics, and workflow automation are now standard features inside modern HCM platforms. These tools make autonomous decisions that affect real employees, their schedules, their performance records, their access to pay and benefits data. Neither HR nor IT can govern those decisions independently. HR doesn't own the infrastructure. IT doesn't own the people strategy. When no one owns the intersection, organizations end up with AI tools that are technically functional but strategically ungoverned.
This session draws from more than a decade of hands-on HRIS implementation experience across enterprise environments to address that gap directly. The speaker has sat in both chairs: designing integrations, building workflow automation, and architecting enterprise HCM environments, while simultaneously owning HR data strategy and people analytics at the senior leadership level. That dual fluency shapes every practical structure presented here.
Attendees will work through a model for building productive, trusting HR-IT partnerships that can actually govern AI tools affecting people decisions. The session covers the five most common misalignments between HR and IT that derail technology projects before they produce value, how to establish joint governance structures that give both functions real decision-making authority, and how to build roadmaps that serve both the people agenda and the technical infrastructure at the same time.
Every attendee leaves with a practical collaboration structure grounded in real implementation experience, not consulting theory.
What if the most powerful performance management tool available to HR leaders isn't a system, a framework, or a metric — it's a mindset?
This evidence-based session dismantles the myth that optimism is a soft skill and makes the business case with hard data: employees with positive leaders are 31% more productive, solve problems 3× faster, and deliver 37% higher sales results. But this isn't a cheerleading session. It's a science-backed, practically grounded deep dive into how HR professionals and people leaders can use optimism as a deliberate, learnable strategy for driving performance, engagement, and organizational culture.
Drawing on neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and decades of research from Seligman, Fredrickson, Achor, Dweck, and others, attendees will first understand why most people default to negativity — and then learn exactly how to change it. We'll explore the brain's negativity bias, the mechanics of neuroplasticity, and what it actually takes to rewire default thinking patterns in ourselves and the people we lead.
You'll leave with clear distinctions between positivity, optimism, happiness, and wellbeing — and why conflating them leads to toxic positivity, disengagement, and cultures of pretense rather than performance. You'll explore the critical difference between healthy, realistic optimism and learn how to hold difficulty and possibility at the same time.
The HR technology landscape is entering a new phase—one shaped less by static systems of record and more by interconnected, AI-powered ecosystems capable of orchestrating work, workflows, decisions, and experiences across the enterprise. In this fireside chat-style conversation, HR.com’s Brent Skinner joins Rajan Sahni for a forward-looking discussion about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the future of HR technology, governance, and workforce operations.
Together, they will explore whether organizations are beginning to move beyond traditional UI-driven HR systems toward conversational, agentic, and automation-centric environments where employees and managers increasingly interact with AI rather than software interfaces themselves. The session will examine what this shift could mean for the future role of large HCM vendors, the growing rise of citizen development within HR teams, and the expanding need for HR, IT, and cybersecurity leaders to work in far closer partnership.
The discussion will also address one of the defining tensions of the AI era: balancing innovation and experimentation with governance, compliance, and security. As organizations grant AI systems greater access to sensitive workforce data, concerns around PII exposure, data lifecycle management, and offboarding risk become increasingly critical.
Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how HR technology may evolve over the next five years, what capabilities are likely to differentiate future platforms, and which new skills HR technology leaders will need to navigate an increasingly intelligent, decentralized, and rapidly changing digital workplace.
Let’s be honest: performance management isn’t working. Despite decades of effort, it remains a frustrating, compliance-driven process that few people find valuable, and even fewer see as a driver of performance.
So why are we still doing it?
In this fast-paced session, Edie Goldberg, Ph.D., challenges the status quo and offers a better way forward. Based on research from her book Performance Enablement, she introduces a fundamentally different approach—one that shifts the focus from managing employees to enabling them.
Instead of ratings, reviews, and rigid cycles, performance enablement emphasizes clarity, alignment, support, and continuous development—what people actually need to perform at their best.
This session isn’t about tweaking performance management; it’s about replacing it. You’ll leave with a clear understanding of the shift, why it matters now, and a practical tool to assess where your organization stands.
Take some time to visit exhibit tables and connect with other attendees!
The conversation around AI in the workplace has evolved, but many organizations haven’t kept pace. While most companies have focused on building AI literacy by teaching employees how to use tools like ChatGPT to improve individual productivity, the next frontier is fundamentally different. Leading organizations are no longer just using AI to enhance work; they are redesigning how work gets done altogether.
In this session, Caitlin Kamm introduces the concept of AI-native teams: a new operating standard for 2026 and beyond. Drawing on real-world examples and emerging data, she will explore how HR leaders can move beyond incremental efficiency gains and instead reimagine workflows, decision-making, and organizational design with AI at the core.
Attendees will see what this looks like in practice through examples such as end-to-end AI-driven hiring workflows, where tasks like job description creation, approvals, and publishing are orchestrated through AI agents rather than completed manually. Rather than asking how AI can assist a process, this session challenges HR leaders to rethink the process entirely.
Caitlin will outline three core capabilities that define AI-native teams: workflow design, decision design, and data literacy. These capabilities enable organizations to increase speed, improve quality, and unlock scalability across the enterprise. She will also address the common misconception that AI transformation is primarily a training initiative, emphasizing instead that it requires leadership alignment, cultural change, and a shift in how organizations operate day-to-day.
This session is designed for HR leaders ready to move from experimentation to transformation, offering a practical yet forward-looking framework for building AI-native organizations that are prepared for the future of work.
Attendees will have the opportunity to learn practical strategies for managing stress and preventing burnout. These strategies will not only benefit the attendees directly but will also provide them with strategies to implement within their workplaces, thus benefitting the employees where they work.
Like the cobbler’s children who have no shoes, HR sometimes neglects itself while taking care of everyone else. Nowhere is this more evident than in succession planning. HR builds pipelines for key leadership positions throughout the organization but often fails to prepare its own staff for potential promotions. The consequences are costly: HR leadership gaps, reactive hiring, and institutional knowledge walking out the door.
This session provides a clear picture of why this happens in HR (of all places!) and how to create or strengthen HR leadership pipelines by identifying and developing the next generation of HR leaders before they are needed.
A 30-minute deep dive into the top legal and compliance risks facing HR teams in global operations—wage and hour exposure, data privacy, multi-country labor laws, leave management, and more. For each challenge, we cover financial impact and proven scalable solutions. You’ll walk away with a practical framework for prioritizing compliance investments and reducing risk.
Discover great local restaurants in the area for a lunch break.
Part 2 is where you turn your ideas into real, working concepts, prototypes, workflows, or demonstrations using AI tools and technologies. You’ll also pick up practical skills you can take back to work to make things a bit easier day-to-day. And who knows, your team might even come out on top in the challenge.
Afterward, HR.com Advisory Board members will review the concepts online and choose standout entries. Winners will be announced and shared through a press release and social media.
How do you determine when to accommodate and when to discipline an employee with a known disability? Learn the 6 easy steps for engaging in an interactive dialogue with an employee to identify effective reasonable workplace accommodations. Using case law examples, participants will also learn when an accommodation may be denied or employment terminated due to: 1) misconduct or safety threats related to a psychosocial condition; 2) the employee’s inability to perform essential job functions; and 3) situations where an accommodation is not feasible or would create an undue hardship.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming embedded within HR through copilots, assistants, workflow automation, and increasingly autonomous AI agents capable of generating recommendations, routing decisions, interpreting policy, and shaping employee experiences. Yet while adoption is accelerating, governance often remains unclear. Many organizations still lack defined operating models, approval structures, accountability frameworks, and guardrails for how AI should be implemented when decisions affect people, careers, compensation, compliance, and trust.
This session provides HR leaders with a practical executive playbook for implementing AI responsibly inside the HR function. Through a fireside chat-style discussion, attendees will explore what responsible AI governance actually means beyond broad ethical principles and why HR cannot leave ownership solely to IT, legal, cybersecurity, or vendors. The conversation will focus on the real-world structures organizations need to put in place, including cross-functional governance models, role clarity, escalation paths, approval mechanisms, monitoring processes, and human oversight requirements.
Special attention will be given to the growing distinction between traditional automation and AI agents that operate with greater autonomy, contextual awareness, and decision-making influence. The session will examine where human judgment must remain central, which HR decisions should never be delegated entirely to AI, and how organizations can establish accountability when AI shapes people outcomes.
Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how to scale AI in HR responsibly while balancing innovation, operational efficiency, employee trust, compliance obligations, and human accountability in an increasingly AI-enabled workplace.
Today's workforce expects leaders to take clear positions on social, environmental, and political issues that previous generations considered outside the workplace sphere. HR leaders find themselves at the intersection of employee expectations, corporate values, legal considerations, and business realities, tasked with guiding executives through this complex terrain while maintaining organizational cohesion.
This session tackles one of the most challenging aspects of modern leadership: how to lead authentically when your workforce, customers, and shareholders may hold dramatically different views on contentious issues. Attendees will learn proven frameworks for helping leaders develop their authentic voice while representing organizational values, and discover practical tools for deciding when, how, and whether to take public stances on social issues.
Through real-world case studies, this presentation will showcase organizations that successfully navigated employee activism, as well as cautionary examples where missteps damaged employer brands and employee trust. The session will provide actionable answers to critical questions: How do you coach executives to communicate with authenticity while avoiding polarization? What governance structures help organizations make principled decisions about social issues? How can HR create space for diverse viewpoints while maintaining an inclusive culture? Attendees will learn concrete approaches for helping leaders move beyond performative statements toward meaningful action that aligns with stated values. The presentation will also reveal how to build leadership accountability mechanisms that ensure consistency between what leaders say publicly and how they actually lead, complete with templates and tools you can implement immediately.
Automation and AI feel like they are taking over our processes, but at what cost? It seems as though hiring teams have never had more tools at their disposal from AI screening, automated outreach, scheduling bots, assessments, chat-based candidate experiences, and analytics dashboards for everything. In theory, this should have made hiring faster, smoother, and more consistent. And yet… most teams would still describe their process as slow, messy, and harder than it should be.
This roundtable will debate the assumption that technology always equals better outcomes. When does the automation of screening and evaluating candidates or our employees improve the experience and when are we just accelerating a flawed process? Participants will discuss where automation is improving the candidate and hiring manager experience, and where it is introducing friction and disengagement. How do we leverage the benefits without risking hiring bias, reduced engagement, or a negative impact on quality?
We will take a candid look at where ‘innovation’ is raising the bar and where it is putting a Band-Aid on issues that actually need to be fixed. Instead of whispering about it, this conversation will cover specific examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and aim to identify where the real wins are between all the hype.
Based on my knowledge, experience, and expertise, I wrote and published an article focusing on a different approach to DEI in the current anti-DEI climate. I bring a fresh perspective on how DEI efforts can succeed, while quelling the cries from anti-DEI activists. I encourage my fellow DEI activists to take a leap of faith and assume positive intent behind anti-DEI movements, to arrive at a place where reasoned discussions can lead to positive outcomes. My article will form the basis for the roundtable discussion.
Through first-hand observations and considered references, I journey through the root causes of DEI and anti-DEI activism. I discuss the historical origins of DEI efforts. Importantly, I also discuss some of the failures of DEI efforts which have spawned anti-DEI activism, in order to frame my novel but straightforward approach which is anchored in: Discipline, Honesty and Courage. Finally, I offer practical ways to achieve success.
In my article, I discuss real life examples where a lack of Discipline, Honesty and Courage can fuel DEI or Anti-DEI activism. For the purposes of the session, I will expand on and convert these examples into case studies for discussion and ultimately for participants to share how they would approach each.
Finally, as a takeaway for all attendees, I will provide a copy of Toni Morrison’s short story Recitatif, which explores how beliefs about racial characteristics can color one’s view about a particular individual. This thought-provoking piece remains intentionally silent with regards to the protagonists’ racial identities (though notes that one is white and one is Black) and encourages readers to examine racial stereotypes to hopefully dispel them.
As organizations accelerate their digital transformation journeys, HR is evolving from a process-driven function into a strategic, insight-led partner to the business. This roundtable explores how people analytics and artificial intelligence are reshaping the way HR teams make decisions, design workforce strategies, and deliver employee experiences at scale.
We will discuss how HR leaders can move beyond traditional reporting to build a truly data-driven function, leveraging predictive analytics, AI-powered insights, and real-time workforce intelligence. The conversation will also highlight practical use cases across talent acquisition, workforce planning, performance, and employee engagement, along with the cultural and capability shifts required to make analytics actionable.
Let's be honest, most culture change efforts don't fail because of a bad strategy. They fail because nobody stopped to ask whether the organization was ready before the initiative launched.
I've seen it happen more times than I can count. Leaders get energized, a new values framework gets rolled out, the engagement survey goes live, and a year later, nothing has really shifted. Not because people didn't care, but because the hard questions never got asked upfront.
That’s what this roundtable is about — not a framework, not a presentation, but a real conversation among experienced HR leaders about what readiness for culture change looks like, and how the questions we ask (or avoid) early on can make or break the whole effort.
What does it mean for leaders to be truly aligned versus just enthusiastic?
How do you find out what's really going on when people don't feel safe enough to tell you the truth?
And what do we do when the culture we're trying to build is still being undermined by the systems we haven't fixed yet?
Here's what I've learned: culture change doesn't stick unless people feel connected to it, and that means they have to feel like they belong to the organization that's asking them to change. When employees don't see themselves in the future being described, when they don't feel a genuine stake in the outcome, even the best-designed initiative will fall flat. Belonging isn't a feel-good add-on to culture work. It's the foundation that makes change possible.
I've been in these trenches, and I'm guessing you have too. Let's learn from each other.
Everyone who joins will walk away with a Culture Readiness Question Bank: a practical set of diagnostic questions you can use back at work, not just something that sits in your conference folder.
Uncertainty is no longer temporary — it is structural. Artificial intelligence is reshaping core HR functions. Economic pressures are forcing organizations to do more with less. Workforce expectations are evolving faster than policies can adapt. Many HR professionals feel stuck reacting instead of leading. How can HR rise above the fog? In this session, Adilen Valentina, SHRM-CP, introduces a practical leadership framework designed to help HR professionals move from reactive administration to strategic clarity. Drawing on 15+ years of cross-sector HR and leadership development experience — and a municipal leadership initiative that produced 100% measurable competency improvement within 12 weeks — this session provides a clear, actionable path forward. Participants will explore how to: • Clarify HR’s strategic value in times of disruption and lead change. Rather than offering theory alone, this session equips attendees with a concise leadership framework they can immediately apply inside their organizations. Attendees will leave with a renewed sense of direction — and practical tools to reposition HR not as a back-office function, but as architects of culture, resilience, and long-term organizational performance.
The executive suite often wants two things: HR to become more strategic and the organization to better leverage AI. In this roundtable, we'll discuss the intersection of these two trends. We'll start off with some recent HR.com research data, but this will mostly be a chance to chat with fellow HR professionals about how HR strategies are likely to evolve over the next two years.
Payroll sits at the center of the employment relationship, yet the way organizations measure its impact remains narrowly defined. Most leadership teams still view payroll through the lens of cost, efficiency, and compliance. These metrics are at once precise, defensible, and deeply incomplete. This bias toward what is easily measured obscures payroll’s growing influence on trust, retention, workforce stability, and overall organizational performance.
This session challenges the prevailing financial and operational frameworks that limit how payroll’s value is understood. It introduces three practical ways payroll leaders can help executive stakeholders see beyond cost accounting and begin recognizing payroll as a driver of future value:
-> First, we reframe efficiency as a starting point, not an outcome. We do so by exposing how traditional metrics capture immediate financial outputs while missing downstream effects on engagement, performance, and retention.
-> Second, we explore how to translate payroll’s impact into the language of finance without losing its human dimension, bridging the gap between GAAP-aligned reporting and the realities of workforce value creation.
-> Third, we examine how payroll data, when connected to broader workforce and business outcomes, can tell a more complete story about the conditions under which employees do their best work.
Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of why payroll’s most strategic contributions often go unrecognized and how to change that narrative. More importantly, they will gain a practical framework for helping leadership account not just for what payroll costs, but for what it makes possible.
We’re not just leading people. We’re leading humans through one of the biggest shifts in how work gets done in our lifetime, without a blueprint.
This roundtable discussion provides a collaborative space to explore strategies for leading AI integration through a human-centered lens. When implementing AI, many organizations are approaching it as a tech rollout, when it is a significant organizational change event like a merger and/or acquisition with all the big feelings that go along with it.
At the core of successful adoption is a critical truth. Adoption is an emotional decision before it is a logical one. If employees don’t feel safe, informed, and supported, they are less likely to engage with new tools or ways of working. This session will focus on how leaders can address employee concerns, including fear of job loss, while driving performance and innovation while meeting the company's KPIs.
Through shared insights and practical strategies, this session will examine how leaders can balance urgency with empathy, implement phased and sustainable approaches to AI integration, and create environments where employees feel supported, informed, and empowered to adapt.
By reframing AI as a people-first transformation rather than a systems implementation, leaders can create an environment where employees feel secure and engaged, ultimately strengthening adoption, retention, and organizational resilience.
In an era marked by rapid technological disruption, economic volatility, and evolving workforce expectations, HR leaders must cultivate organizational resilience while maintaining employee engagement and business continuity. This roundtable explores how senior HR professionals can develop adaptive leadership strategies that prepare their organizations to not just survive, but thrive amid constant change.
Participants will examine practical frameworks for building psychological safety, fostering agile decision-making processes, and creating communication strategies that maintain trust during turbulent periods. The discussion will delve into real-world case studies where HR leaders successfully navigated major organizational transformations, including restructurings, mergers, and sudden market shifts. We’ll explore how to balance the need for stability with the imperative for innovation, and how to develop leadership capabilities at all organizational levels that embrace ambiguity rather than resist it.
This collaborative session encourages participants to share their own experiences leading through disruption, discuss common pitfalls, and co-create solutions for maintaining organizational coherence when traditional playbooks no longer apply. Together, we’ll explore how HR can serve as the strategic anchor that keeps organizations grounded while remaining flexible enough to pivot quickly when circumstances demand it.
AI tools are rapidly becoming the "co-pilots" for everyday HR decisions, from screening resumes to drafting performance reviews. But when an AI tool flags a candidate or scores an employee, where does the machine's influence end and your judgment begin?
This fast-paced, 30-minute roundtable is designed for HR professionals at all levels who want to look past the marketing hype and understand the real-world friction between human intuition and algorithmic data. We will discuss the invisible risks of over-relying on automated recommendations, such as automation bias: trusting the data over our own judgment, and how to maintain meaningful human oversight. You will walk away with practical, immediate questions to ask your technology vendors and a simple framework to help ensure your team retains the final, compliant say in high-stakes talent decisions.
Many organizations have succession plans, but fewer have confidence that their named successors are truly ready. Readiness is often based on manager opinion, informal calibration, or outdated role assumptions rather than on clear, governed evidence. As leadership expectations shift and workforce risk increases, HR teams need a more defensible way to identify, evaluate, and develop successors.
This roundtable will explore how organizations can strengthen succession planning by defining what readiness means, aligning successors with future role requirements, using evidence to identify gaps, and building governance into talent decisions. Participants will discuss how to move beyond names in boxes toward a more transparent, consistent, and actionable succession process.
Preparing for an HR certification exam can feel overwhelming, but success is achievable with the right strategy, mindset, and preparation plan. This interactive roundtable session is designed for HR professionals pursuing HRCI or SHRM certifications who want practical guidance on how to confidently prepare for and pass their exams.
Attendees will explore proven study techniques, effective time-management strategies, and common mistakes that often derail candidates. The discussion will also provide insight into how certification exams are structured, which competencies are most heavily tested, and how to approach scenario-based questions with confidence.
The session will provide opportunities to share experiences, ask questions, and exchange best practices with peers who are also navigating the certification journey. Whether you are just beginning your preparation or looking for new strategies after a previous attempt, this discussion will deliver actionable takeaways to help you build confidence, reduce exam anxiety, and increase your chances of certification success.
More innovation does not equal more engagement. Across industries, leaders are navigating increased complexity, information, tools, and expectations — yet many organizations continue to struggle with disengagement, turnover, and inconsistent performance.
This session cuts through the noise. Rather than introducing another program, platform, or trend, this practical and research‐informed workshop focuses on two human signals that consistently drive motivation, retention, and discretionary effort - across roles, industries, and generations. When leaders understand and intentionally manage these signals, engagement improves, workforce challenges simplify, and performance conversations become more effective and productive.
Designed for senior leaders and HR professionals alike, this session delivers a clear, human‐centered framework that can be applied immediately — helping leaders strengthen accountability, align expectations, and create the conditions where engaged people perform at a higher level, internally motivated to do their best. If you’re looking for clarity instead of complexity, this session offers a focused perspective that makes today’s workplace easier to understand and manage.
HRWest 2026 is themed around “Rising Above the Fog” — finding clarity and purpose in turbulent times — at a time when HR leaders are being asked to do more with less and make smart calls on critical issues like AI.
This facilitated roundtable gives HR, Talent and L&D leaders a structured way to compare what’s working (and what’s risky) as GenAI and emerging “agentic AI" capabilities enter HR workflows. Participants will share real examples, pressure-test governance and adoption approaches, and leave with a simple, immediately usable “AI readiness” plan grounded in the priorities many HR teams are focusing on for 2026 (workforce readiness, operating model changes, and AI fluency).
As AI rapidly transforms the workplace, organizations are rethinking how they develop and support their people. Traditional job structures are evolving into more dynamic, skills-based models as AI reshapes work, automates tasks, and changes the capabilities companies need from their workforce. Careers are increasingly shifting from static roles to more fluid experiences built around projects, gigs, internal mobility, and continuous learning.
At the same time, the human side of work is becoming more important—not less. As employees navigate rapid change, organizations are investing more heavily in communities, peer learning, and personalized support systems that help people adapt, grow, and stay connected. This session explores how leading companies are redefining careers, skills, and workplace community in the age of AI — and why human connection may become one of the most strategic advantages in an AI-powered future.
This keynote will redefine the strategic role of the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) as the key architect orchestrating the complex, blended workforce of human employees and intelligent AI agents. It will explore how HR leaders can drive innovation, productivity, and urgency by moving beyond administrative overload to become strategic enablers. The discussion will center on the critical pivots required to prepare organizations for the future, including establishing AI governance, building a future-ready workforce, and measuring the value of uniquely human capabilities, known as the "EPOCH Index" (empathy, judgment, creativity, and vision). Attendees will gain an action plan for leveraging AI to boost collective efficiency and deliver tangible business outcomes.
