2027 Agenda

• How tightening immigration policy across multiple jurisdictions is reshaping where and how organizations hire
• Building a global mobility strategy that is resilient to political and regulatory shifts
• Balancing remote-first hiring, cross-border employment, and entity-of-record models at scale
• Positioning global mobility as a competitive talent advantage — not a compliance obligation — in the war for global talent
• Real lessons from a global employer that rebuilt its talent geography around new realities

• How one organization moved beyond AI experimentation into enterprise-wide deployment
• The use cases that have proven ROI, and the ones that quietly didn’t
• Establishing AI governance inside HR without slowing down innovation
• Working with IT, Legal, and Privacy as true co-owners of the AI agenda
• Practical lessons on data quality, model selection, and change management

• Why corporate-centric talent strategies are failing the 70%+ of employees who work the frontline
• Designing recruitment, development, mobility, and rewards specifically for hourly and frontline populations
• Closing the technology gap: giving frontline workers the same digital experience as corporate employees
• Measuring frontline engagement, retention, and capability with the rigour they deserve
• Inside one large employer’s frontline-first talent strategy and the business outcomes it has delivered

• Why culture transformation continues to fail when treated as a communications exercise
• Designing the moments that matter, onboarding, manager check-ins, exits, to reinforce belonging
• Aligning leadership behaviour with stated values when no one is watching
• Measuring culture beyond engagement scores: behavioural, longitudinal, and predictive signals
• What it really takes for inclusion to live in the everyday, not just on the wall

• Why traditional change management methodologies are failing in an era of compounding, simultaneous transformation
• Designing change capability as an enduring capability, not a one-time project investment
• Diagnosing and addressing transformation fatigue before it derails your strategy
• Equipping managers and front-line leaders as the real engines of change adoption
• Lessons from one organization that has run multiple major transformations in parallel — and lived to tell the story

For years, people analytics promised to make HR more strategic and too often delivered another dashboard nobody acted on. At Kraft Heinz, the mandate flipped: build AI and analytics capability that doesn’t just describe the workforce, but actively shapes decisions about performance, talent, and where the organization invests its people.

In this case study, Ryan Hurcombe, Global Head of People Strategy, Performance & People Analytics, walks through how his team moved from measurement to momentum — including the in-house build of KHAI, Kraft Heinz’s internal AI assistant, developed end-to-end in under 180 days. He’ll share what it took to ship fast inside a $25B global enterprise, where the early wins came from, and the harder questions that surface once AI is embedded in everyday people decisions: data trust, adoption, the shifting skill set of the HR team itself, and how you keep human judgment at the center.

• How to reframe people analytics from a reporting service into a decision-driving capability
• Lessons from building an enterprise HR AI tool in-house, fast — what to own vs. buy, and how to compress the timeline
• The organizational and skill shifts required for an HR team to work alongside AI
• A practical lens for evaluating where AI adds real value in people strategy versus where it’s noise

In fast-moving consumer goods, the pace of business change routinely outpaces traditional talent structures. This session explores how senior HR leaders are redesigning talent management frameworks to stay ahead of shifting commercial priorities, capability gaps, and organizational complexity — while keeping people at the center.

• Aligning talent pipeline strategy with evolving business units and geographic scope
• Moving from periodic succession planning to continuous talent mobility and readiness
• Building internal capability in an environment where skills requirements shift faster than hiring cycles
• Balancing global talent standards with the nuances of regional markets
• The role of HR business partners in translating business strategy into proactive people decisions

• Diagnosing where engagement is genuinely declining, and where it isn’t
• Designing rituals, rhythms, and rooms that create real connection in distributed teams
• Why one-size-fits-all engagement strategies are losing relevance
• Equipping managers as the primary architects of team belonging
• Engagement metrics that actually predict retention and performance

Almost every HR function has been redesigned in the last five years, and many of them more than once. Some of that work has held. Some has been quietly adjusted, reversed, or absorbed into the next reorganization before the original value case was ever tested.

This panel brings together senior HR leaders who have led structural change and stayed long enough to see what happened next. The conversation is about craft rather than verdict: what they would sequence differently, how they knew when structure was genuinely the lever and when it was covering for a leadership or capability problem, and what it took to make a redesign hold once the announcement energy wore off.

• What separated the redesigns that held from the ones that quietly unwound inside eighteen months
• The HR operating model itself: centers of excellence, business partners, shared services, and where the current configuration is genuinely delivering versus where it is still being tuned
• The discipline to say no: recognizing when structure is the wrong lever, and making that case to a leadership team that wants a visible move
• Change capacity and sequencing: how much structural disruption an organization can absorb before performance starts to suffer
• Proving it worked: measuring a redesign against the value case that justified it, rather than against whether it shipped

Every organization has spent the last two years rolling out AI and productivity tools on the promise of transformational efficiency. The harder question, the one the CFO is now asking, is whether any of it actually worked. Are people genuinely more effective, or just busier with new tools? Where did the promised gains show up in the numbers, and where did they quietly evaporate into license costs and change fatigue?

This panel case study goes inside organizations’ honest reckoning with the productivity question: how they cut through the tool sprawl, where they found real and measurable gains, and how they built a credible way to prove (or disprove) impact to a skeptical finance function.

• Separating genuine productivity gains from activity, novelty, and tool sprawl
• Building a measurement approach the CFO actually trusts — beyond self-reported time savings
• Where AI and productivity tools have delivered real workforce effectiveness, and where the ROI quietly didn’t materialize
• Rationalizing an overgrown tool stack without disrupting the workflows people depend on
• What HR uniquely owns in the productivity equation that IT and procurement cannot

Total rewards packages have long been designed around the employer’s judgment of what employees should value. That assumption is eroding. Flexible benefits, lifestyle spending accounts, and weightable rewards menus all shift the allocation decision toward the individual — and a growing number of employees, given the option, would rather have the cash than the coverage.

This panel brings together total rewards leaders who have moved real decisions into employees’ hands and lived with the consequences: how much choice is too much, what a rewards function owes employees who choose badly, and how a flexible design holds together across collective agreements, regulated populations, and multiple countries.

• Where the standard package has stopped fitting: which parts of the mix employees genuinely value, and which are carried forward because they always have been
• How far to take choice: flexible benefits, lifestyle spending accounts, weightable rewards menus, and where each panelist has drawn the line
• What happens when employees choose badly: under-insuring, over-weighting near-term cash, and how much paternalism a total rewards function should keep
• Holding a flexible design together across collective agreements, regulated populations, and a multi-country footprint
• The complexity they underestimated, and what each would design differently a second time

• Why manager effectiveness has overtaken every other lever as the #1 driver of engagement, performance, and retention
• Redefining the manager role for an AI-augmented, hybrid, multi-generational workforce
• Equipping managers to coach, inspire, and develop, not just deliver and report
• Holding managers accountable for outcomes without piling on more administrative burden
• Inside one organization’s wholesale reinvention of its manager model — and the measurable results that followed