Collect your lanyard, grab a fresh barista coffee, and connect with peers in the HR & Talent Tech Expo at Zinc, Fed Square.

ATC2026’s Main Stage is in the beautiful architectural building known as The Edge, built on the banks of the Birrarung.

Welcoming 400+ Talent Leaders & Teams from across Australia & New Zealand.

At NAB, workforce transformation is on a deliberate journey, from a focused capability to an enterprise‑wide way of designing and delivering work.

In this session, Meg O’Sullivan shares how NAB is moving beyond traditional, job‑based workforce models to an enterprise‑wide, skills‑based approach to redesigning work in an AI era. Rather than focusing solely on forecasting headcount, NAB is focussing on what work needs to be done, how it should be delivered, and where skills, technology and AI can be combined to drive productivity and resilience.

Sitting at the intersection of workforce strategy, skills intelligence, and AI‑enabled work redesign, NAB’s approach positions skills intelligence as the critical data layer connecting work design, talent strategy and strategic workforce planning. This enables leaders to shift from asking “how many people do we need?” to making deliberate, evidence‑based decisions about “what work gets done, by whom, and how.”

Meg will unpack how NAB is operationalising skills as a strategic asset, using skills intelligence to support enterprise workforce decisions, guide work redesign, and build capability for roles and tasks that are rapidly evolving.

This is not a theoretical discussion about the “future of work.” It is a practical, tactical walkthrough of how a large organisation is using skills intelligence today to redesign work, support AI adoption, and build a workforce that can adapt as technology continues to change.

Before organisations pour energy into AI, skills, workforce transformation, operating model redesign, and new ways of working, they must first answer four seemingly simple questions:

• What is the future of their industry category?
• What is the new business strategy?
• Who owns that direction?
• How will we lead our people and functions through this change?

Without a clear answer, HR & Talent Teams are left trying to operationalise for a future that has not yet been defined.

Drawing on more than twenty years leadership inside Amazon (AWS), Unilever, Coles, L’Oréal and Quantium, Robyn Hill shares the leadership lessons and disciplines most worth keeping as we lead people through real change and anxiety about AI.

She looks at how an inspiring, accountable business direction sets up everything that follows: how we work, how we use technology, and how we treat the people whose growth makes the strategy real.

For HR and TA leaders, this will help you ask the right questions that helps to unlock everything else.

Enjoy a gourmet morning tea and barista coffee while you explore the Expo Hall.

Session details to come.

Stepping into an APAC Talent role sounds like a natural next move for many ANZ leaders. In practice, it often requires an entirely different leadership capability set.

Managing Talent across Asia means navigating vastly different labour laws, hiring expectations, communication styles, timezones, workforce risks, and cultural dynamics, often all within the same week.

This session explores what changes when your remit expands beyond ANZ, and what Talent leaders need to unlearn, relearn, and adapt to operate effectively across the region.

Tosh will unpack:

• What your first 90 days in an Asia-focused regional role should actually focus on
• Leadership style and communication norms market-by-market
• How to build trust and alignment across distributed Talent teams
• The employment law and compliance issues you cannot afford to overlook
• The local market dynamics that influence candidate behaviour, trust, and hiring outcomes across Asia
• The unique hiring challenges emerging across Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam
• Why candidate engagement strategies that work in ANZ can fail in Japan
• What separates effective regional Talent leaders from strong domestic operators

This session is designed for those looking to step into multi-region responsibility, or those already operating across Asia-Pacific who want a more practical understanding of the complexity, trade-offs, and opportunities involved in leading Talent in Asian Markets.

Many organisations invest heavily in uncovering and defining a compelling EVP but fail to move beyond the marketing exercise.

This session will explore a practical question many organisations grapple with: If your EVP is to remain authentic and consistently experienced across the organisation ongoing, what needs to change to make it part of how the organisation operates?

Melissa and Simone will show you how to turn EVP promises into everyday experiences regardless of an individual’s role, function, or location and in the midst of possible organisational change and leadership turnover. During the discussion we’ll cover real examples of:

• How to embed an EVP into your organisation’s operating model
• Communication rhythms
• Key learnings from real examples we’ve delivered

You’ll leave with practical insight into how to operationalise an EVP so that it becomes a durable part of how leaders lead, decisions are made, and employees experience your organisation, rather than only a candidate attraction message.

By embedding your EVP into the systems, behaviours, and practices that shape the employee experience, you’ll create stronger strategic alignment, build trust, and maintain cultural continuity through growth, change, and leadership transitions.

Skills-based transformation is easy to support in principle. The real test is whether it changes how workforce decisions are made.

Almost four years into its global transformation, Arcadis is delivering on the commitments made to executive sponsors and business stakeholders, but progress has required more than introducing a skills platform or building a common skills language.

In this candid case study, Arcadis will revisit the ambitions behind its transformation and examine what it has taken to move from design into operation. The session will explore where expectations met organisational reality, which elements proved harder than anticipated and what the team would approach differently if starting again.

You’ll learn:

• What changed between the initial design and the reality of implementation
• Where Arcadis encountered challenges with skills data, adoption and stakeholder expectations
• How the team maintained a multi-year transformation
• What it takes to embed skills into workforce and talent decisions
• Which early decisions helped or hindered progress
• Practical lessons for organisations beginning or recalibrating their own skills transformation

This is not a session about the promise of becoming skills-based. It is an examination of what it takes to make the model useful inside a complex global organisation.

Everyone has an AI strategy. Almost nobody has left the whiteboard. This session left the whiteboard two years ago. AB has been putting AI agents to work inside live talent functions – and he’s bringing the proof, outtakes included.

What agents are actually good at right now. Where they fall flat. What happened when a team met their new digital colleague and felt underwhelmed. And what it all means for your function, your structure, and your next conversation with your exec team. Real deployments. Real numbers. Real awkward moments. Because everyone’s talking about this. Almost no one’s done it. The never normal rewards the never still – come get restless.

When AI handles sourcing, screening, and early matching, everything about how you’ve structured your team needs to shift. So what work should remain human? How do you restructure your function to deliver it, and how do you assess capability in a way that actually predicts performance? Drawing on work with Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Nike, Monique Richards will present a strategic framework for deciding where AI, augmentation, and human judgment should sit and how to decide what stays human in your TA function.

Leave with tools you can use immediately:

• The Human Decision Blueprint
• The Capability Engine Operating Model
• Role redesign templates
• A workshop-ready framework for your executive team

Enjoy lunch overlooking the banks of the Birrarung, catch up with industry friends, and take time to explore the Tech Expo in the hall.

In this revealing experiment, one person applied for an advertised role at each of Australia’s 100 largest companies and documented their journey. The results ranged from seamless and memorable to the inability to even complete the initial application stage. From contradictory communications, duplicate rejections to forms and tools that just didn’t work.

For contrast, a dozen smaller but highly recommended and award-winning Talent Teams were also tested

This session will cover:

• The top 6 areas where process and experience fell down
• The small moments that created trust, delight and memorability
• The practices that separated the strongest experiences from the hot messes

One standout organisation will also join James on stage to unpack how it designed its process, the operational choices behind it and what it takes to deliver a consistently seamless experience.

For years, many Talent teams were measured on hiring activity: time-to-fill, agency reduction, stakeholder satisfaction, and recruitment delivery. Executive teams, however, assess Talent through a very different lens: revenue impact, productivity, workforce risk, scalability, operating leverage, and margin performance.

This session explores the Commercial Uplift required for Talent leaders to operate credibly in financially driven environments.

Derek will unpack how boards and executive teams think about workforce investment decisions, why EBITDA matters to Talent leaders, and how hiring conversations change when vacancies are framed in terms of lost revenue, utilisation constraints, customer impact, and operational bottlenecks.

Using practical examples, Derek will contrast “old Talent thinking” versus modern commercial Talent leadership, showing how the same workforce challenge can be positioned very differently at executive level.

Session details to come.

Session details to come.

How to capture your expertise, protect your IP, and turn your knowledge into an AI-enabled asset

AI is moving beyond simple task support and into something more personal, where it can help professionals capture the way they think, communicate, decide, and deliver work. For individuals, years of expertise, frameworks, methodologies, decision-making patterns, and ways of working often remain trapped inside their heads. For organisations, there is a growing need to capture that expertise before it walks out the door.  In this session, Marrin will help you:

• Understand digital twins versus avatars, agents, assistants, and bots
• Start identifying and capturing your unique intellectual property
• Document frameworks, methodologies, and decision-making approaches
• Map repeatable workflows and processes
• Define the context AI needs to operate effectively
• Create boundaries, guardrails, and quality controls

A digital twin helps you to enable your knowledge, judgement, and experience but ownership matters.  A true digital twin may contain not only role, industry, and organisation-specific knowledge, but also your own personal expertise, judgement and methods you have developed across your entire career, not to mention your voice and image.

Jo and Edan will wrap up the day and let you know what’s next and what you can expect from Day 2 of ATC2026.

Enjoy social drinks, eats and catching up with the Talent Community overlooking the banks of Birrarung.