Beat the rush and join us early for complimentary barista-made coffee and breakfast.

As technology reshapes service industries, the real challenge isn’t adoption, it’s preservation. This session explores how leaders can use digital tools to enhance collaboration, wellbeing and engagement while keeping service deeply human. With a human-first lens, Sarah Derry shows how thoughtful tech design builds trust, belonging and retention, proving that the future of service isn’t high-tech or high-touch, it’s both.

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Today’s workforce wants more than tools. They want meaning, clarity, and support. This keynote explores how technology, when intentionally designed, can strengthen culture, deepen trust, and create an environment where employees feel valued, empowered, and connected to purpose.

• How to use digital platforms to reinforce culture and support psychological safety
• The role of AI in amplifying, not replacing, human capability
• Why purpose, trust, and meaningful design matter in every step of the digital journey

The digital workplace sits at the intersection of technology, HR, and culture. As AI, automation, and hybrid work reshape how we work, who takes ownership? This panel unpacks how IT and HR can co-lead to design a seamless, secure, and human-centred workplace.

• Why IT and HR must share ownership of digital workplace strategy
• Using technology to enhance, not erode, wellbeing and productivity
• The digital workplace is more than tools—it’s culture, governance, and leadership

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Managing a large and complex workforce today requires more than traditional HR systems. Organisations are rethinking how they simplify processes, elevate the employee experience, and align people strategy with business performance.

In this session, discover how organisations are consolidating multiple platforms into unified cloud-based HR systems and using AI to transform recruitment, development, and workforce management.

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Participate in this interactive, guided, real-time simulation that demonstrates how data, technology, and human decision-making intersect in modern HR. This session invites the audience to apply insights, respond to evolving scenarios, and experience how technology supports strategic workforce outcomes.

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Large people technology programs often succeed at: going live but struggle to deliver lasting value. This session shares how a global People Digital team transformed a multi-million dollar investment across core HCM, talent, data, and analytics into measurable savings, productivity gains, and improved decision-making. It covers the operating model, data foundations, and change choices that mattered most. And what we’d do differently next time.

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Australian employees are in a cost-of-living crunch, and businesses are having to do more with less. In this session, Greg Parkes, Founder and CEO of Auto-UX, explores how digitising novated leasing creates a zero-cost opportunity for employers to relieve employee financial stress while also strengthening organisational performance.

• Why digital-first solutions and a seamless employee experience (EX) are critical to attracting and retaining a digital-native workforce (aged 18–49).
• Demonstration of the latest innovations in car benefit technology, including AI- powered vehicle selection, self-guided digital learning, predictive problem-solving and more.
• Case study quantifying the impact of benefit digital transformation, highlighting how employers can transform a traditional perk into a strategic lever for cost- of-living relief, workforce engagement and long-term competitive advantage.

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The average employee toggles between dozens of platforms each day, and the very systems meant to support productivity can end up fuelling stress and burnout. At the same time, HR and IT leaders face the added challenge of ensuring that fragmented systems still work together to meet compliance obligations. This panel explores how organisations can streamline their HR tech stacks, consolidate platforms, and use data-driven insights to reduce digital overload, while also identifying governance gaps early, before they spiral into risk, inconsistency or non-compliance.

• Reduce tool overload: Practical ways to simplify and consolidate the HR tech stack.
• Stay compliant: How to spot system and data gaps early before they become compliance risks.
• Build a healthier digital workplace: Designing tools and workflows that minimise stress and maximise adoption.

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Select a topic of discussion and engage in an interactive roundtable discussion with a group of your like-minded peers.

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Put your knowledge to the test in this fast-paced quiz covering real-world trivia, key concepts, and emerging trends. Compete for bragging rights - and a travel voucher - as the top scorer takes the crown.

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As AI, automation, and HR technology reshape how work gets done, the opportunity for HR isn’t just efficiency. It’s impact.

Digitisation is shifting HR’s centre of gravity. As more processes become automated, HR leaders are able to focus even more deeply on shaping culture, developing leaders, and designing the employee experience. The real competitive advantage will not come from technology alone, but from the human capabilities organisations build alongside it.

In this keynote, May Samali explores how AI is redefining the role of HR and why leadership capability, culture stewardship, and human judgment matter more than ever. She will examine the risks of pursuing efficiency without humanity, and the opportunity for HR to shape workplaces where technology strengthens trust, performance, and belonging. Because AI may change how work gets done, but HR will define how people experience work.

This session will challenge HR leaders to step into their role as architects of the employee experience and to help build organisations where technology amplifies human capability, not replaces it.

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From AI recruiting to digital wellbeing apps, HR leaders are flooded with tools promising efficiency, fairness, and insight. But are these technologies actually improving the employee experience? or creating new challenges like tool fatigue, bias, and data overload?

This interactive session puts these questions directly to the audience. Participants vote live on a series of real-world scenarios, explore the results together, and vote again as perspectives shift through the discussion.

• Which area of HR technology currently delivers the most real business value in your organisation?
• How confident are you that your HR technology stack is fully adopted by employees and managers?
• What’s the biggest barrier to demonstrating ROI on HR technology investments?
• How do you see AI changing HR in the next 12 months?
• When it comes to the ‘Right to Switch Off’, what’s the biggest role technology should play?

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Unwind with your peers for a couple of drinks on us!