Agenda
Tuesday, 13 October 2026
“The Human in the Loop & Managing Digital Colleagues”
Please note that 1:1 meetings will be running throughout the day.
Registration & Check-in
Secure your seat in the keynote room for the day.
Welcome to the 3rd People & AI Edge: "The Human in the Loop & Managing Digital Colleagues"
Jim Berry - CEO & Founder at ADAPT
The world of work is being rewritten - not gradually, but all at once. Agentic AI is moving from pilot to practice, digital colleagues are entering the workforce, and the people function is being asked to lead a transformation it was never designed for.
In this opening address, ADAPT CEO Jim Berry sets the stakes for the day - why the decisions people leaders make in the next 12 months will define the organisations they work for over the next decade, and why the human in the loop has never mattered more.
What are the Top Performers Doing Differently?
Gabby Fredkin - Head of Analytics & Insights at ADAPT
The gap between ambition and execution is widening - and the people function sits at the centre of it.
Drawing on ADAPT’s proprietary research across 1000+ Australian C-suite leaders, Gabby Fredkin unpacks what separates the organisations closing that gap from those falling further behind.
What are top performers doing differently on workforce readiness, capability-building, and AI adoption? Where are the hidden bottlenecks - and which of them sit squarely on the CHRO’s desk?
This session gives the room a data-anchored baseline before the day’s conversations begin, so every discussion that follows is grounded in what is actually happening across Australian enterprise - not what the headlines suggest
Get an Edge: Making the Most of Your Day
Shannon Barry - Senior Community Success Manager at ADAPT
A Fireside Chat with Catherine Walsh, Chief People Officer at Qantas
Catherine Walsh - Chief People Officer at Qantas Dom Price - Work Futurist at Be Luminous
Qantas isn’t just Australia’s national carrier, itt’s part of the national identity. When it flies well, the whole country feels it. When it doesn’t, the whole country hears about it. That’s an extraordinary amount of pressure to place on 27,000 people who show up every single day.
So how do you build a workforce that doesn’t just perform, but genuinely cares? How do you turn brand pride into a retention strategy, a customer experience multiplier, and a cultural backbone that holds under pressure?
Catherine Walsh has spent her career building great workplaces inside complex, high-stakes businesses. Dom Price has spent his obsessing over the human operating system; the how of work, not just the what. Together, they’ll pull apart what it really means to put people first in an organisation where the stakes are sky-high and the expectations are higher.
The conversation will explore:
- Why culture is your most durable competitive advantage - At Qantas, every employee impacts the customer experience. Their culture is on display every hour of every day.
- The link between employee experience and customer experience - You can’t deliver a world-class journey at 35,000 feet if the people behind it don’t feel seen, valued, or set up to succeed.
- Brand pride as a people strategy - What it means to work for an icon and how you sustain that sense of meaning and belonging across a workforce as diverse and distributed as Qantas’s.
Upgrading the human OS. Before you reach for the next tool or platform, are your people actually set up to do their best work? The fundamentals of trust, clarity, and psychological safety never go out of fashion.
Less theory, more truth. This is what great people leadership looks like from the inside.
Strategic Insights from Workday
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Workday and your peers
Morning Break: Refreshments, Snacks & Connections
Panel Discussion | The Human in the Loop: Leading the AI-Augmented Workforce
Rebecca Nash - Chief People Officer at AMP Dr Juliette Tobias-Webb - Australia's Leading Behavioral Scientist and Professor at AI & Cyber Futures Centre Peter Hind - Principal Research Analyst at ADAPT
ADAPT sits down with ANZ’s most influential HR and AI leaders go beyond the theory - sharing unfiltered perspectives on what it takes to lead a workforce through the age of intelligent agents, and how the people function itself is being reinvented in the process.
Discussion Points:
- When change is permanent, not episodic - how do you build a workforce that absorbs it as a default?
- When AI adoption outpaces the human operating system, it stalls - so what does genuinely people-led AI transformation look like in practice?
- Agentic AI is already in your workflows - how are you redesigning roles, accountability, and culture without losing momentum?
- HR cannot govern AI alone - what does cross-functional leadership between people, technology, and analytics teams actually look like?
- As digital colleagues and AI agents move from experimentation to low-touch decision-making - who is accountable, and where does the human fit?
Strategic Insights from Cornerstone OD
A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Cornerstone and your peers
Building a Smarter People Function
Thought Leader at ASX100
AI is giving HR the intelligence to move from workforce reporting to real-time enablement - how do you put it work?
- How is AI elevating people analytics from hindsight to genuine workforce foresight?
- What does AI-enabled intelligence actually change about employee experience and enablement?
- How do you get the right workforce insights into the hands of the right people?
Peer Networking Seated Lunch
14:55 - 15:05
Afternoon Break: Refreshments + Snacks
Humans at the Helm: Rethinking Workforce Strategy in the Age of AI
Karen Lonergan - Chief People Officer at PwC Matt Boon - Senior Research Director at ADAPT
In conversation with ADAPT’s Matt Boon, Karen brings a practitioner’s lens to the most pressing people challenge of the decade - how to lead organisations through AI transformation without losing the human elements that make them work. From workforce architecture to leadership culture, she explores what it takes to build organisations where AI amplifies people rather than replaces them, and where the people function earns its seat at the strategy table.
The Workforce Question AI Can't Answer Without HR
David Walker - (former) Group Chief Technology Officer at Westpac & DBS and Chair of the AI Council at UNSW Gerard Florian - ADAPT Advisor and Chair at UNSW Information Technology Committee Lisa Drum - Head of Product at ADAPT
As agentic AI reshapes work, this panel asks whether HR is ready to co-design the operating model, or risk being left managing the consequences.
- How must you rethink workforce strategy when people, process, and technology converge?
- AI is redefining core workflows and operating models; how must organisations decide where human accountability begins and ends?
- How to build the cross-functional accountability model that AI-era work actually demands - and why the CHRO-CIO alliance is the partnership that makes or breaks it
Closing Comments
People Edge Peer Networking Drinks
An opportunity to stay, mingle and meet other attendees over drinks and food and discuss the day.