2026
Conference Program

Learning organizations outperform their competitors—but building a true learning culture remains elusive for most. This session explores how leading organizations have moved beyond episodic training to create environments where continuous learning drives measurable business outcomes. You’ll discover how award-winning L&D teams have shifted from order-takers to strategic partners, embedding learning into the daily workflow and proving their impact in terms executives care about.

The most effective learning cultures share common elements: they make learning accessible and relevant to employees across all career stages and generations, they leverage technology including AI to scale personalized experiences, they create inclusive environments and psychological safety where people feel comfortable experimenting and failing, they integrate wellness considerations that prevent burnout while building capabilities, and they use social and collaborative learning to break down silos.

These organizations prioritize upskilling and continuous capability development, build talent agility that enables rapid adaptation to changing business needs, create talent readiness for emerging roles and responsibilities, and support talent mobility through integrated learning and career pathways. They’ve cracked the code on making learning stick—through innovation labs that test new approaches, manager enablement, and integration with career development. You’ll leave with practical strategies for transforming your learning culture and the metrics to prove your success.

What You’ll Learn

• Evidence-based approaches to building learning cultures that drive upskilling, talent agility, and readiness across multi-generational workforces using technology, including AI, social learning, and innovation labs
• How to create inclusive environments with psychological safety that integrate wellness considerations and enable talent mobility while preventing burnout
• Measurement frameworks that connect learning culture investments to business outcomes and proven strategies from Excellence Award-winning organizations

Session Objectives

• Design strategies for embedding continuous learning, upskilling, and capability development into business operations while building talent agility across multi-generational and diverse workforces
• Learn to leverage AI, social learning, innovation labs, inclusion, and wellness principles to scale learning impact and enable talent mobility
• Build measurement frameworks and business cases demonstrating the learning culture’s strategic value and create action plans for transformation

Your CFO sees learning as a cost. Your CEO views it as necessary but not strategic. You know it’s more—now prove it. This session, featuring insights from UVA Darden’s world-class client sponsors, including AARP, PBS and Money Management Institute, will work to transform how you think about, design, deliver and measure learning initiatives. This panel, facilitated by Darden’s Chief Client Officer, will highlight how these experienced practitioners of Brandon Hall award-winning programs engage on the content and context of these value creating efforts.

While to many talent development leaders are stuck playing defense, justifying budgets with low-impact metrics like completion rates and satisfaction scores, learn how some organizations have repositioned learning as a strategic lever for revenue growth, market expansion and competitive advantage.

What you’ll learn:

1.  Measuring and Proving Impact: Connect targeted training programs for key talent directly to measurable business results and show the financial value created.
2.  Designing Strategic Blended Learning:Create blended and scalable learning programs that build essential, high-level skills needed for organizational success and industry leadership.
3.  Best Practices and Success Stories:Gain insights and powerful examples from award-winning experts on how they designed these effective solutions, successfully engaged participants and fostered professional growth within their organizations.

Learning Objectives

1. Design & Delivery Mastery: Apply new skills, frameworks and tools to efficiently design and deliver highly effective learning solutions specifically tailored for high-potential and key talent within your organization.
2. Innovation & Value Creation: Implement and share lessons from innovative, proven learning programs that have successfully created measurable value and driven positive change.

L&D and talent leaders are increasingly responsible for driving enterprise-wide transformations—from new technology implementations to cultural shifts to operating model redesigns. Yet most change initiatives fail, not from poor strategy but from poor execution and people factors. This session delivers battle-tested strategies for leading successful transformations, with unvarnished truth from practitioners who’ve experienced both spectacular successes and instructive failures.

Today’s change leaders face unprecedented complexity: managing change fatigue across five generations, implementing new technologies including AI while maintaining productivity, building inclusive change processes that bring everyone along, protecting employee wellness during stressful transitions, building new capabilities while running current operations, and sustaining momentum through implementation.

Whether you’re launching innovation labs, implementing new talent processes, rolling out social and collaborative learning platforms, driving upskilling initiatives, building talent agility for organizational transformation, preparing talent readiness for new ways of working, enabling talent mobility through new systems, shifting organizational culture, or driving adoption of new technologies, this session provides the frameworks and strategies you need. You’ll learn how leading organizations build change capabilities that become organizational strengths.

What You’ll Learn

• Proven frameworks for leading successful transformations across five generations including technology adoption (AI), innovation labs, upskilling initiatives, talent mobility systems, and cultural shifts
• Strategies for identifying and neutralizing resistance, building change momentum through social learning and inclusive practices, and protecting employee wellness during transitions
• Real stories from both successful and unsuccessful change initiatives with stakeholder engagement strategies and metrics for tracking adoption and business impact

Session Objectives

• Build comprehensive change management plans for current and upcoming initiatives tailored to your organizational culture while addressing generational differences, inclusion needs, and wellness impacts
• Learn to integrate AI, social learning, innovation labs, upskilling, talent agility, talent readiness, and capability building into change strategies
• Create communication plans and measurement frameworks that sustain momentum from launch through full adoption across diverse populations

The future of talent development is skills-based. Forward-thinking organizations are moving beyond job titles and career ladders to skills-based approaches that unlock internal mobility, reduce external hiring costs, and keep high-performers engaged. This session explores how leading L&D and talent teams are building the systems, processes, and culture that make skills-based talent management work.

The shift to skills-based approaches solves critical business problems: reducing regrettable attrition, cutting expensive external hiring, building organizational agility, and creating career opportunities people didn’t know existed. Technology including AI enables inclusive matching of people to opportunities based on capabilities rather than credentials, revealing paths that traditional career frameworks miss across all generations.

Award-winning organizations have built skills taxonomies, created transparent internal talent marketplaces, integrated skills development into learning strategy through social and collaborative learning, and designed career experiences that support wellness by preventing stagnation and burnout. They prioritize upskilling to close critical skills gaps, build talent agility through cross-functional development, ensure talent readiness for emerging roles, and accelerate talent mobility through visible opportunities and clear pathways. Innovation labs serve as proving grounds where people develop new capabilities. You’ll see real systems, honest implementation challenges, and measurable results.

What You’ll Learn

• How to build skills taxonomies and leverage technology including AI to enable inclusive talent mobility, matching people to opportunities across multi-generational workforces based on capabilities rather than credentials
• Strategies for integrating upskilling, social learning, innovation lab experiences, and wellness considerations into career development to build talent agility and readiness while preventing burnout
• Real implementation examples with measurement frameworks proving internal mobility’s ROI in retention, hiring costs, capability development, and methods for overcoming political and cultural barriers

Session Objectives

• Design inclusive skills-based talent development strategies with skills frameworks that connect learning to career opportunities appropriate for your organization
• Learn to leverage AI, social learning, innovation labs, upskilling, and wellness principles to accelerate talent mobility, build agility, and ensure readiness
• Create talent mobility programs that reduce turnover and hiring costs with measurement frameworks proving ROI and implementation roadmaps you can execute immediately

Strategic workforce planning has evolved from annual headcount exercises to dynamic talent intelligence that informs every major business decision. Forward-thinking organizations now predict skills gaps before they impact business, identify flight risks among critical talent, and make data-driven decisions about where to build, buy, or borrow capabilities. This session reveals how L&D and talent leaders are using advanced analytics to become indispensable strategic advisors.

The game has changed: sophisticated HR teams leverage analytics and AI to surface patterns and predictions that were previously invisible. They can forecast which capabilities will be needed in 18 months, identify which upskilling programs actually build business-critical skills, predict where burnout and wellness risks are highest across multi-generational populations, assess talent readiness for critical roles, measure talent agility across the organization, track talent mobility patterns and barriers, and optimize talent investments for maximum ROI.

These insights reveal how inclusive practices impact retention, how social and collaborative learning builds capabilities, and which innovation lab experiments should scale. You’ll learn from practitioners who transformed their teams from reactive problem-solvers to proactive strategic partners through better workforce intelligence.

What You’ll Learn

• How advanced analytics and AI enable predictive insights about talent risks, upskilling needs, talent readiness for critical roles, talent agility, and talent mobility patterns across multi-generational populations
• Methods for measuring the business impact of social learning, innovation labs, wellness programs, and inclusive practices using data visualization and storytelling techniques that influence executives
• Practical approaches for evolving workforce planning from static headcount to dynamic capability forecasting with technology platforms that deliver actionable intelligence

Session Objectives

• Build strategic workforce planning capabilities scaled to your maturity level and identify high-value metrics relevant to your business context
• Learn to leverage analytics and AI to measure wellness, inclusion, innovation, social learning, upskilling effectiveness, talent agility, mobility, and readiness impact
• Develop data storytelling skills and measurement frameworks that prove talent development’s strategic business impact and establish yourself as a strategic advisor

Less than 10^% of organizations have achieved meaningful financial impact from AI. What are they doing differently? While most companies spend 90% of their AI investment on technology, those who invest equally in people and technology are 3.5x more likely to realize value from AI. AI is a people problem, and the HR & L&D teams are poised to be a strategic partner in unlocking value. This session explores how organisations are rethinking their approach to talent in the age of AI and offers early examples of how companies are unleashing the wisdom of their teams to reinvent how they work. Attendees will leave with an energizing perspective on the 4 ways HR and talent leaders can drive real value out of AI from the top down, and the bottom up.

AI is transforming work faster than organizations can keep up—and the teams that thrive will be those who know how to combine human potential with machine intelligence. In this dynamic keynote, Absorb CEO Kimberly Williams reveals how AI, skills, and mentorship work together to create a performance-first culture where people at every level can learn faster, grow stronger, and contribute more meaningfully. Kimberly breaks down the new blueprint for workforce readiness: Build the Bench → Train the Bench → Coach the Bench—a model any organization can use to strengthen skills, accelerate development, and boost performance.

You’ll walk away inspired, equipped, and ready to help build a workforce that’s prepared for what’s next—no matter your role.

Technology’s power comes with profound responsibilities that could destroy your employer brand, create legal liability, and damage employee trust if you get it wrong. As advanced technology including AI becomes embedded in hiring decisions, promotion recommendations, learning personalization, and performance management, ethical implementation and governance aren’t nice-to-haves—they’re existential requirements. This critical session provides practical frameworks for preventing bias, protecting privacy, and ensuring technology serves all employees equitably.

Biased algorithms can undo years of work to ensure fair access to opportunities, systematically disadvantage specific generations or demographic groups, perpetuate inequities that exclude talent from opportunities, limit upskilling access to certain groups, block talent mobility for protected populations, undermine talent readiness by restricting development opportunities, reduce organizational talent agility by creating barriers, undermine wellness by creating unfair stress, damage the psychological safety needed for innovation labs to function, and erode the trust essential for social and collaborative learning. Privacy violations and opaque decision-making expose you to legal action.

Yet most organizations racing to implement HR technology including AI are dangerously unprepared for these complexities. Here’s what makes technology ethics so challenging: the bias often isn’t obvious. A system might systematically disadvantage older workers, working parents, or certain demographic groups without anyone noticing. You’ll learn from organizations that thoughtfully implemented technology with strong ethical guardrails ensuring inclusive outcomes across multi-generational workforces.

What You’ll Learn

• How bias enters technology systems including AI through data, algorithms, and implementation—and strategies to prevent it
• Privacy protection requirements when using employee data for system training and decision-making
• Ethical frameworks for technology-enabled decision-making in HR, learning, and talent management contexts
• How to ensure AI and other systems work fairly across multi-generational and diverse workforces
• How technology ethics connects to wellness (preventing unfair stress), inclusion (ensuring equity), and innovation (maintaining trust)
• Transparency and explainability requirements ensuring employees understand and trust technology-driven systems
• Governance models ensuring responsible technology use that protects social and collaborative learning cultures
• How to maintain psychological safety in innovation labs when implementing new technologies
• Real examples of both responsible implementation and cautionary tales of failures
• Legal and regulatory considerations for AI and technology in employment and development contexts

Session Objectives

• Build ethical frameworks for technology implementation including AI appropriate for your organizational values
• Identify and mitigate bias risks in HR technology systems before they cause harm to any group
• Establish governance ensuring responsible use that supports wellness, inclusion, and innovation across generations Balance innovation and competitive advantage with ethical responsibility and legal compliance Create employee trust in

Exceptional employee experience is the ultimate competitive advantage—and L&D plays a central role in creating it. This session explores how leading organizations design holistic employee experiences where learning, development, career growth, and culture work together to make people choose to stay, grow, and contribute their best work. You’ll discover how the most successful talent strategies integrate multiple elements into cohesive experiences that drive both engagement and retention.

Award-winning organizations understand that retention isn’t about any single program—it’s about everything working together. They create development opportunities people value through upskilling and continuous learning, provide career paths people can see and reach through talent mobility, build inclusive cultures where people feel they belong across all generations, offer flexibility and wellness support that fits their lives, design innovation lab opportunities that engage top talent, enable talent agility that helps people grow in multiple directions, ensure talent readiness for future opportunities, and leverage social and collaborative learning to build connection.

L&D and talent leaders are uniquely positioned to orchestrate these integrated experiences. You’ll learn how leading organizations use technology including AI to personalize development at scale while maintaining equity, integrate wellness into how people work and learn, and create experiences where diverse talent thrives.

What You’ll Learn

• How integrated strategies across upskilling, talent mobility, career development, wellness, inclusion, and culture drive retention across multi-generational workforces with technology including AI, enabling personalized experiences at scale
• The specific role of social learning, innovation labs, talent agility, and talent readiness in building engagement and how to identify root causes of turnover to design targeted solutions
• Real implementation stories from Excellence Award-winning organizations with measurement frameworks connecting experience investments to retention outcomes in financial terms

Session Objectives

• Assess your current employee experience and design integrated talent strategies across learning, upskilling, talent mobility, wellness, inclusion, and culture
• Learn to leverage AI, social learning, innovation labs, talent agility, and wellness to create experiences where diverse talent thrives and retention improves
• Build compelling business cases for employee experience investments and create measurement frameworks tracking both experience quality and retention outcomes

Learning technology should enable great experiences and free your team for strategic work—but most L&D teams are drowning in platform complexity, disconnected systems, and administrative overload. Instead of focusing on high-value initiatives like building innovation labs, designing inclusive programs, supporting wellness, enabling talent mobility, or driving upskilling at scale, teams spend time managing systems and processes rather than advancing strategy.

This practical session explores how leading L&D organizations have redesigned their technology ecosystems and operations to deliver better learner experiences while achieving significant efficiency gains. These high-performing teams have moved beyond accumulating platforms to building strategic technology architectures. They eliminate redundant tools, integrate systems for seamless experiences across multi-generational workforces, automate administrative tasks, and free their teams to focus on strategic priorities.

Modern learning technology, including AI, creates new possibilities—from automating content creation to personalizing learning at scale, enabling inclusive and equitable experiences, and generating insights about what truly works. Streamlined operations reduce friction, support social and collaborative learning, enhance wellness by minimizing complexity, and give teams the space to innovate.

This session includes real practitioner stories with before-and-after comparisons showing how transformed learning ecosystems improve operations, experience, and organizational impact.

What You’ll Learn

• How to evaluate and integrate learning technology strategically, using AI and automation to support upskilling at scale, talent mobility, talent agility, talent readiness, innovation labs, social learning, and inclusive practices
• Service design principles and process-optimization strategies that improve learner experience across multi-generational populations while reducing administrative workload
• Real examples of L&D teams that transformed their technology and operations, including metrics demonstrating operational improvements, efficiency gains, and connections to wellness, inclusion, and innovation

Session Objectives

• Map your current learning technology ecosystem, identify improvement opportunities, and build strategies aligned to your organizational context and budget
• Leverage AI and automation to enable upskilling, talent mobility, talent agility, talent readiness, innovation labs, social learning, and inclusive practices at scale
• Design learner experiences that reduce friction across generations, create business cases for technology investment, and develop modernization and implementation roadmaps

Leadership development is at an inflection point. The capabilities that made leaders successful five years ago are insufficient for today’s challenges—and what leaders need for tomorrow is evolving even faster. This session explores how leading organizations are fundamentally rethinking leadership development to prepare leaders for unprecedented complexity: managing multi-generational teams, leading through constant change, balancing technology adoption with human connection, and creating cultures where diverse talent thrives and innovation flourishes.

The best leadership development programs are being redesigned around emerging realities. Leaders must now guide teams through digital transformations including AI adoption, make decisions with new forms of data and intelligence, build inclusive cultures where psychological safety enables innovation labs to generate breakthrough thinking, support employee wellness while driving performance, foster social and collaborative work in distributed environments, and develop talent across five generations with vastly different perspectives.

They must also drive upskilling initiatives at scale, build talent agility across their organizations, ensure talent readiness for future challenges, and enable talent mobility through effective succession and development. These challenges require new capabilities—and new approaches to developing them. You’ll learn from organizations that have successfully evolved their leadership development strategies, with practical approaches you can adapt to your context.

What You’ll Learn

• New leadership competencies required for leading through digital transformations including AI adoption, managing multi-generational teams, building inclusive cultures with psychological safety, and supporting wellness while driving performance
• How leaders must drive upskilling at scale, build talent agility, ensure talent readiness, enable talent mobility, foster social learning cultures, and run innovation labs that generate value
• Real examples of organizations successfully evolving leadership development with approaches to building technology literacy including AI understanding without requiring technical expertise

Session Objectives

• Assess leadership readiness gaps and design leadership development programs integrating AI, multi-generational leadership, inclusion, wellness, upskilling, talent agility, talent mobility, and innovation
• Build leaders’ capability to drive technological change, foster social and collaborative cultures in distributed environments, and balance data-driven decisions with human judgment
• Develop implementation roadmaps for evolving leadership programs with measurement demonstrating strategic value and preparing leaders for competitive success in a technology-driven world