Relationship Design: From AI Tools to AI Teammates

For decades, digital products have been built around a simple premise: people are users who operate tools. But the emergence of generative AI is breaking that paradigm entirely. What if the right model isn't a tool to be operated, but a teammate to be collaborated with? And what would that shift demand from the people responsible for culture, change, and workforce experience?

This panel brings together design thinkers and human behavioral researchers to explore why so many AI rollouts show early promise but fail to drive real adoption — and what separates the organizations that get real adoption from those that get a dashboard full of low engagement metrics.

We'll examine what it actually takes to build AI that people collaborate with rather than simply operate, why the cultural and behavioral factors driving adoption are rarely visible in the usage data leaders rely on, and how to move organizations from "AI for me" — individual productivity hacks and private prompting — to "AI for us," where teams redesign how they work together.

Who Are You Now?

Every cognitive job is being permanently altered by AI. That's a fact most leaders are quietly reckoning with right now. The question isn't whether your role will change. It's whether you'll lead that change or be overtaken by it.

This session is a candid, unscripted conversation between two practitioners who are watching this unfold in real time inside their own organizations and across the clients they serve. We'll explore what it actually looks like when people have to let go of the skills that built their careers, why the leaders who adapt fastest tend to share a specific set of qualities that have nothing to do with technical skill, and what HR's role is when the change management challenge isn't a new software rollout.

What happens to the Gen Z employee who just realized there's no such thing as a junior engineer anymore? What does an org chart look like when some of your direct reports are agents? And what do you keep, as a leader, when AI can do most of what you spent 20 years of your career getting good at?

The Generic Chatbot Era is Over

You've invested in the benefits. The 401(k) match, the student loan repayment, the FSA, the tuition program. Your employees have access to more financial resources than any generation before them. Most of them aren't using any of it. Not because they don't care — but because no one has connected the dots for them.

In this session, Candidly Founder and CEO Laurel Taylor introduces a new category: the workplace-connected financial advisor. One that meets employees at every financial life stage — from a 22-year-old trying to figure out whether to contribute to a Roth or traditional 401(k), to a 45-year-old carrying $303K in student debt while trying to save for retirement — and delivers personalized, plan-specific guidance at scale.

For HR and benefits leaders, the implications are significant. When employees actually use what you've built, the ROI of your benefits program changes. So does your ability to attract and retain talent, reduce financial stress that bleeds into productivity, and demonstrate that your benefits program does something more than exist.

This isn't a pitch for another point solution. It's a new answer to a question HR leaders have been asking for years: how do we get employees to engage?

Connecting the Dots: HR’s Role in AI Strategy, Governance, and Adoption

AI is no longer a future-state conversation. It’s happening right now, in every function, often without a coordinated plan behind it — and HR is increasingly being asked to make sense of what it all means for people, culture, and how work gets done.

This session pulls back the curtain on the conversations happening at the top — what boards are asking about AI governance, how CEOs are framing the transformation, and the very real pressure CFOs are under to contract while CHROs and CIOs are being asked to build something new, all while shaping the talent strategy and cultural tenor that determine whether the transformation takes hold or stalls. Understanding those dynamics matters at every level of HR, because they shape the decisions, budgets, and priorities that land on your desk — and reveal where you have more influence than you might think.

We’ll dig into the partnerships that turn vision into execution, how to think about governance without slowing your team down, and how to avoid the disjointed approach that emerges when there isn’t a firm-wide strategy.