HCM Excellence 2027
Conference Program

Stop guessing where to start with AI—get a proven roadmap instead. Brandon Hall Group’s latest Awards Survey shows that 63.7% of respondents prioritize artificial intelligence in the workplace and 63.0% prioritize AI adoption and implementation, signaling a shift from exploration to execution. Organizations are at radically different stages of AI readiness, yet most guidance treats AI adoption as one-size-fits-all. This intensive working session, led by Brandon Hall Group’s research leaders, provides a framework that meets you where you are. You’ll work with Brandon Hall Group’s exclusive AI Progression Model—a five-phase framework covering AI readiness, people capabilities, process requirements, technology infrastructure, organizational state, and governance structures at each maturity stage.

Whether you’re exploring how AI could personalize learning across your multi-generational workforce, predict wellness risks before they become crises, power innovation labs with data-driven insights, enable social and collaborative learning at scale through intelligent matching, or ensure inclusive talent decisions free from bias, this session shows the path forward. Built on research across hundreds of organizations, the model provides a practical planning tool for assessing AI maturity, identifying next steps and understanding the people challenges that can derail adoption across different generations.

What You Will Learn

• Brandon Hall Group’s five-phase AI Progression Model and the dimensions that define each phase
• How to assess your organization’s current AI maturity and readiness across multiple dimensions
• Specific people, process, technology, and governance requirements for each AI progression phase
• How AI progression differs across multi-generational workforces with varying technology adoption rates
• Governance frameworks supporting responsible, inclusive, and ethical AI use over time
• How to build stakeholder support and secure resources for AI initiatives at each maturity phase
• Common failure patterns at each AI maturity stage and how to avoid them
• How AI enables personalized experiences, powers collaboration, and drives innovation

L&D and talent leaders increasingly drive enterprise-wide transformations—from new technology implementations to cultural shifts to operating model redesigns. The urgency is clear in Brandon Hall Group’s latest Awards Survey, where 64.7% of respondents selected change management and digital transformation—the highest-rated topic across the major HCM polls. 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 Will 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

Financial wellness has become an increasingly important part of the employee experience as people navigate economic uncertainty, changing benefit expectations and financial stress that can affect focus, engagement and overall well-being. In this fireside chat, leaders will discuss what employees need most from financial wellness programs today and how organizations can move beyond isolated benefits toward practical support that improves confidence and resilience.

The conversation will explore the role of education, communication, personalization and access to resources, along with how employers can better understand employee needs and connect financial wellness to the broader talent and employee experience strategy.

What You Will Learn

• How employee expectations for financial wellness are changing
• What makes financial wellness programs relevant, accessible and actionable
• How financial stress can affect employee experience, engagement and performance
• How to connect financial wellness with a broader approach to employee well-being and talent strategy

Organizations can no longer depend on external hiring as the primary answer to every capability gap. Brandon Hall Group’s latest Awards Survey shows a clear shift toward building talent from within: 60.8% of respondents prioritized career development and internal mobility, 59.8% succession planning and high-potential employees, and 56.8% employee retention and talent mobility—compared with 28.9% for talent acquisition and recruitment. As business needs shift faster, talent leaders must make smarter choices about when to build, buy, borrow or redeploy talent – connecting recruiting with internal mobility, development, contingent talent and workforce planning.

AI-enabled matching and better capability data are making it possible to see talent supply more holistically, but technology alone does not create mobility. Organizations need operating practices that connect external pipelines with the talent already inside the business and help leaders deploy capability where it creates the most value.

This session explores how talent acquisition can evolve from a hiring function into a broader talent supply capability without losing the speed, quality and candidate focus that recruiting still requires.

What You Will Learn

• How to decide when to hire externally versus build, redeploy or access talent in other ways
• How to connect talent acquisition with internal mobility and workforce planning
• How to use skills and capability data to improve talent supply decisions
• How to create faster, more flexible pipelines for changing business needs

Learning leaders are under increasing pressure to answer a simple but difficult question: What changed because of the learning investment? Brandon Hall Group’s latest Awards Survey reinforces that pressure: training effectiveness and ROI was the top learning priority at 58.6%, while 50.6% of respondents selected learning measurement and impact. Completions, participation and satisfaction remain useful operating measures, but they are no longer enough to demonstrate value.

This session will introduce Brandon Hall Group’s Learning Performance Convergence model as a framework for connecting learning activity to skill acquisition, behavior and performance, workforce outcomes and business results. The model helps organizations move from isolated learning metrics toward a more complete view of how development contributes to performance.

AI-enabled analytics, continuous feedback and stronger links between learning and operational data are creating new opportunities to measure impact faster and adjust strategy as results emerge. The goal is not measurement for its own sake, but a measurement system that improves decisions, investment and performance.

What You Will Learn

• How to move beyond activity metrics toward evidence of performance and business impact
• How to apply Brandon Hall Group’s Learning Performance Convergence model
• How to connect learning, skill acquisition, performance and organizational outcomes
• How to build a practical measurement strategy that improves learning investment decisions

Organizations are expanding beyond traditional workforce boundaries, accessing capability across employees, contractors, partners, external specialists and AI-enabled systems. The challenge is no longer simply identifying skills; it is orchestrating the right mix of capability around changing work.

That requires visibility into what people and systems can do, clear ways to validate capability, and operating practices that match talent to work with speed and precision. Leaders must also determine when work should be performed internally, externally, collaboratively or with AI support.

Organizations that can orchestrate capability across the extended workforce will be better positioned to increase agility, improve utilization and respond to business needs without relying on fixed workforce structures.

What You Will Learn

• How to think beyond the traditional employee workforce when sourcing capability
• How to match human and AI-enabled capability to changing work
• How to improve visibility and validation across multiple talent sources
• How to build a scalable workforce orchestration model

As work becomes increasingly AI-enabled, leadership development must evolve to keep pace. Leaders must learn and adapt in real time, building capability directly within the flow of work.

This requires moving at speed while applying precision in how development is delivered and targeted. AI-enabled learning and feedback systems are helping organizations scale leadership development while maintaining relevance and impact.

Organizations that embed leadership development into daily work will build more adaptable, capable leaders.

What You Will Learn

• How leadership development is evolving in AI-enabled environments
• How to build capability in the flow of work
• How to scale leadership development with precision
• How to align leadership skills to emerging demands

As AI becomes embedded in how work gets done, organizations must think beyond technology adoption and consider the culture required for people and intelligent systems to perform together effectively. Brandon Hall Group’s latest Awards Survey shows why this matters: 62.8% of respondents prioritized employee engagement and experience, 56.0% workplace culture and belonging, and 51.6% psychological safety and employee wellbeing.

The Human + AI workplace is changing how employees collaborate, make decisions, share knowledge, build trust and experience their organizations. Leaders must intentionally shape the behaviors and norms that support this new environment while preserving the human connections that drive engagement, belonging and performance.

High-performing cultures will not emerge simply because organizations deploy new technology. They will be built by creating clarity around how people work together, encouraging experimentation and learning, strengthening psychological safety, and establishing trust in both human and AI-supported decisions.

This session explores how organizations can intentionally build cultures that enable people to adapt, contribute and perform as work becomes increasingly AI-enabled.

What You Will Learn

• How AI and new ways of working are reshaping organizational culture and the employee experience
• The cultural behaviors that enable effective Human + AI collaboration
• How to strengthen trust, psychological safety, connection and accountability
• How leaders can intentionally reinforce the culture required for sustained performance

As workforce needs evolve rapidly, organizations must move beyond periodic forecasting toward continuous insight. AI-enabled analytics are making it possible to detect patterns, model scenarios and respond as business conditions change.

Continuous workforce foresight can help leaders connect talent supply, capability demand, internal movement and external hiring decisions to business priorities in a more dynamic way.

By shifting from static plans to ongoing insight, organizations can improve agility and make more informed workforce decisions.

What You Will Learn

• How workforce planning is shifting toward continuous insight
• How to respond to workforce changes as they happen
• How to connect talent supply and capability demand to business priorities
• How to improve precision in workforce strategy and decision-making

As work becomes more dynamic, organizations need rewards strategies that reflect contribution and impact rather than relying solely on static job structures. AI-enabled insights and richer performance data are creating opportunities to connect pay and recognition more closely to how value is created.

The challenge is to define contribution clearly, preserve fairness and transparency, and ensure that rewards reinforce the behaviors and outcomes the organization needs.

This session explores how pay, recognition and performance can evolve together as work becomes more fluid and collaborative.

What You Will Learn

• How rewards strategies are evolving as work becomes more dynamic
• How to connect pay and recognition to contribution and impact
• How to improve fairness, transparency and consistency in reward decisions
• How to align performance, recognition and business outcomes

AI is advancing faster than most HR operating models can keep up. While organizations are experimenting with copilots, agents and automation, many are discovering that technology alone will not transform HR. The bigger challenge is building the people, processes, governance, capabilities and business alignment required to put AI to work at scale.

In this interactive breakout, Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group, will introduce Brandon Hall Group’s AI-Enabled HR Operating Model and the five phases organizations move through – from early experimentation and piloting to an optimized HR environment where AI is embedded into organizational strategy.

Drawing on new Brandon Hall Group research, Michael will explore why organizations frequently stall between experimentation and scale, why successful pilots are a critical inflection point, and how HR leaders can evolve their operating models as AI maturity increases. Attendees will examine where their own organizations sit today and what needs to change to move forward.

What You Will Learn

• How to assess the organization’s current stage of AI-enabled HR maturity
• How to align people, process, technology, governance and organizational strategy as AI adoption expands
• How to move beyond disconnected AI pilots toward scalable, business-aligned applications
• How to build an HR operating model capable of continuously learning, adapting and improving

Learning technology is entering another modernization cycle. Brandon Hall Group’s latest Awards Survey found that 48.4% of respondents are considering or replacing LMS/LXP technology—the strongest technology signal in the survey—followed by skills/talent marketplace technology at 31.1% and AI-powered HR technology at 30.2%. Organizations are reassessing LMS and LXP platforms while also evaluating AI capabilities, skills intelligence, talent marketplaces, integrations and new expectations for measurement.

The challenge is no longer choosing a platform based on features alone. Learning leaders need an ecosystem that connects development to capability, internal opportunity, employee performance and business outcomes – while remaining flexible enough to evolve as AI changes how learning is created, delivered and measured.

This session explores what the next generation of learning technology must accomplish and how organizations can modernize without simply recreating yesterday’s learning architecture on newer platforms.

What You Will Learn

• What is driving the next LMS/LXP modernization cycle
• How AI, skills intelligence, talent mobility and measurement are reshaping the learning ecosystem
• How to evaluate platforms based on business and workforce outcomes, not just features
• How to design an integrated learning technology architecture that can evolve over time

As organizations move toward skills-based models, rewards must evolve to reflect changing workforce dynamics. AI-enabled insights are helping organizations align pay and recognition more closely to contribution and impact.

This requires precision in how value is defined and measured, ensuring that rewards reinforce the right behaviors.

What You Will Learn

• How rewards strategies are evolving
• How to redesign pay and recognition systems at speed
• How to align rewards to performance and impact with precision