Talent Acquisition Is Changing.Come Build What’s Next.

Why this voice

Will Ducey has spent more than a decade in Recruiting Operations, designing the systems, processes, and feedback loops that help Talent Acquisition teams work better. Across companies including Automattic, Kraken, Ashby, and now ElevenLabs, his focus has been on treating recruiting as an operating system, not a collection of disconnected activities. His work on structured hiring, recruiter feedback, and the HERO Index gives him a practical lens on what should be redesigned before AI is layered on top.

Why attend

AI is forcing Talent Acquisition to rethink more than tools. It is exposing where workflows are fragmented, where decision-making is weak, and where old operating assumptions no longer hold. Will will help you look beneath the technology and ask: Which parts of the recruiting system still create value? Where is friction hiding? What should be redesigned? And what needs to change before AI can genuinely improve the function? If you’re deciding how AI should reshape your recruiting system, this session will help you ask better questions before you make the wrong changes.

Why this voice

He works where AI capability meets the reality of work. At Microsoft, Anirudh helps build AI-powered workforce products that help organizations understand people’s skills and rethink how work gets done. His independent research goes after the harder question: why doesn’t technical capability automatically become real-world adoption? His PRIME framework identifies the forces that can stop AI from moving from possibility to practice, including policy, resources, inertia, market acceptance, and error tolerance. He is not just building what AI can do. He is helping make sense of what determines whether organizations will actually use it.

Why attend

The biggest mistake in your AI strategy may be assuming that capability equals adoption. “Can AI do this?” is becoming easier to answer. The harder question is whether your organization will actually allow AI to do it. A recruiting task can be technically automatable and still fail to move into practice because of risk, candidate acceptance, internal resistance, cost, policy, or the consequences of getting the decision wrong. This session will help you see where AI can realistically enter the recruiting workflow, where adoption is likely to break, and where human judgment may remain more durable than the technology suggests.

Why this voice

Chosen for leading global Talent Acquisition and AI fluency at Zapier as the company prepares its workforce for an AI-native future.

Why attend

Hear why Zapier made every TA team member an AI builder, how they approached it, and what changed because of it.

Why this voice

Chosen for leading multi-million-dollar AI and digital transformations inside a Fortune 15 organization.

Why attend

Learn why AI initiatives stall, what leaders often get wrong, and the management disciplines that turn pilots into measurable results.

Why this voice

Chosen for building and transforming Talent Operations across Google, Meta, Bloomberg, MongoDB, and Gong, and for his practical work redesigning recruiting around technology, data, automation, and AI.

Why attend

Bring one real recruiting workflow, redesign it through the lens of data, automation, AI, human judgment, and measurement, and leave with a practical Recruiting Engine Blueprint you can take back to your organization. 90-Minute Lab See how Gong is rethinking recruiting, then use the same approach on one of your own workflows. Robert will share how Gong is building a more modern recruiting engine, including why the Talent Engineer role was created and how systems, data, automation, AI agents, and human judgment work together. Then you’ll pick one recruiting workflow from your own organization and work through it using a simple framework: Map the Workflow → Connect the Data → Automate the Work → Deploy the Agent → Apply Human Judgment → Measure the Impact You’ll look at where the friction is, what work can disappear, where automation or an agent could help, what still needs a human, and what needs to be in place for the workflow to actually work better. The lab ends by pressure-testing a few participant workflows together and identifying practical next steps.

Why this voice

Anna brings a perspective rarely available at Talent Acquisition events: a global Bain advisor helping major organizations rethink workforce strategy, operating models, and talent in the age of AI.

Why attend

AI alone will not shape the future of work. How organizations redesign work will. In this collaborative lab, senior talent leaders will explore what that means for Talent Acquisition, including which capabilities to build, buy, borrow, or redeploy. Through practical scenarios, you’ll examine how TA needs to work differently with business leaders, workforce planning, HR, learning, internal mobility, and technology. Leave with a clearer view of what TA should own, how collaboration needs to change, and what capabilities matter next.