2026 Theme: The People Strategy for Successful AI Implementation

Discover our signature event categories designed for HR leaders navigating AI-driven workplaces. Each format fosters innovation, dialogue, and connection.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how work gets done, and its influence will only accelerate. Yet realizing AI’s potential requires more than experimentation with new tools—it demands deliberate transformation of work, roles, skills, and culture. This transformation places people at the center and positions HR leaders as critical architects of change.

Throughout 2026, HRSF will focus on equipping HR leaders with the frameworks, insights, and guardrails needed to lead responsible, people-centered AI adoption. Our programming is designed to support HR leaders as strategic advisors—helping organizations integrate AI in ways that are effective, ethical, and aligned with both business and human outcomes.

AI Collaboratory

Join HRSF in a year-long collaboratory that will help you identify the people considerations that must be addressed to successfully implement artificial intelligence-enabled tools and processes in your company.

We will convene four events, including an all-day Summit, to create a user guide you can use to lead your company through four stages of people-centered AI adoption and integration:

1. Opportunities and Awareness

2. Mobilization and Implementation

3. Expansion and Optimization

4. Maturity and the Future

We will not focus on AI tools per se, but instead on how best to create organizational readiness for the implementation of AI tools. Events will feature insights from experts in AI and its implementation, real-world advice from HR leaders and their peers (CEO, IT and other business leaders) based on their AI implementation experiences, and dialog with your HR leader peers to delve into topics related to stages of adoption.

We’ll engage with the AI integration topic through expert advice, case studies and hands-on learning labs. At the end of the year we’ll have drafted an open-source blueprint to enable strategic HR leaders to take the lead in AI integration and, through an effective people strategy, increase the likelihood of the success of those efforts.

Innovation Hours

Innovation Hours are one-hour learning sessions that explore how HR leaders are shaping people-centered AI adoption across the employee experience. Rather than focusing on tools alone, these sessions highlight the change management, storytelling, and experience design required to integrate AI responsibly and effectively—while reinforcing the critical human dimension of HR’s evolving role.

Think & Talk Sessions

These informal, peer-to-peer conversations create space for HR leaders to unpack the real-world challenges and opportunities shaping the future of work. Think & Talk sessions often extend themes introduced in our regular programs and focus on how HR leaders are acting as change agents, experience curators, and internal communicators as organizations adapt to AI-enabled ways of working.

Thought Leader Sessions

Featuring leading academics, consultants, and HR visionaries, these sessions examine the evolving role of HR in a rapidly changing workplace. Speakers focus on people-centered AI integration, ethical leadership, organizational change, and the future HR capability set, helping attendees re-imagine HR’s impact in 2026 and beyond.

Networking Events

Designed to strengthen connection and community, networking events bring HR leaders together to build relationships, exchange insights, and co-create the future of the profession. These experiences are intentionally aligned with shared learning, sponsorship engagement, and experience design—reinforcing our belief that community is essential to sustainable change.