Summary

HR Event 2026

Looking to be part of next year’s event?
Join our waiting list to stay informed—we’ll only reach out twice a year with key updates.

Leaders in Finance HR Event 2026

For the second edition of this event, CHROs, HR professionals and transformation leaders from across the financial sector gathered around one central question: how do you lead workforce transformation in the era of AI, without losing the human touch along the way? The day moved between global research, hard numbers and hands-on case studies, but the same tension kept surfacing: AI is levelling the playing field on technology, so what increasingly separates organizations is how well they protect and grow what is distinctly human, trust, judgment, culture and purpose.

This document summarizes the speeches, interviews, panels and cases at the event. It is not a verbatim transcript, but a paraphrased synopsis of the key points made. It has been prepared and published by Leaders in Finance. Please note that this summary was created with the help of AI tools. While care has been taken to ensure accuracy, the content may contain errors or omissions. For full clarity or specific details, please feel free to contact us.

Key takeaways

“Human advantage” is becoming a leadership discipline, not a slogan. As AI gives every organization access to the same tools, the multiplier effect of human creativity, judgment and empathy combined with AI is what will differentiate winners. Getting there requires deliberately designing how humans and machines collaborate, rather than layering AI onto existing roles and hoping for the best.
HR earns its seat at the table by speaking the language of strategy, not training. Several speakers argued that starting from “what training do we need” keeps HR in a support role, while starting from “what capabilities does our strategy require” puts HR at the center of business transformation, alongside finance and technology.
Trust is becoming harder currency than pay. From boardroom discussions on AI accountability to the EU Pay Transparency Directive forcing organizations to explain, not just set, compensation differences, the day’s throughline was that transparency, psychological safety and honest communication now do more to retain people than salary alone.

Scaling AI adoption takes incentives and hands-on practice, not top-down mandates. The most striking results came from organizations that tied AI use to performance and rewards, built prompt libraries and functional training, and let employees build their own agents, turning a CEO’s ambitious target into tens of thousands of tools actually used weekly.
Reward, benefits and workforce planning are shifting from age and tenure to life phase and future skills. Whether it’s sabbaticals and part-time retirement tied to life stage, or strategic workforce planning built around emerging skill gaps, organizations are redesigning HR fundamentals around what people and the business actually need next, not fixed career ladders.

Opening – Marije Tolsma-Groen (Moderator)

Marije, host of the day, opened the second edition of the event by framing AI as one of the most important shifts CHROs and HR professionals are navigating today: how to work with AI without losing the human touch. She shared a playful example from a dog-themed Instagram account (“artificially intelligent” instead of “artificial intelligence”) to illustrate the tension between excitement and unease around AI, and argued that HR’s role is to hold the balance between speed and trust, data and human judgment. She thanked partners Deloitte, AFAS Software, the Dutch Banking Association and Lepaya before introducing the opening keynote.

Keynote – Nicole Scoble-Williams

Nicole Scoble-Williams, Global Future of Work and Agentic Workforce Leader, Deloitte, joined virtually from Tokyo to present highlights from Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report. She opened with a live word cloud of attendees’ hopes for the future of work (energy, balance, human connection, purpose), using it to argue that the future of work is fundamentally about making life better for humans, not just about productivity. She presented data showing high attrition risk, low engagement, and even 75% of C-suite executives considering leaving their role over well-being concerns, all intensified by AI: 80% of organizations are piloting agentic AI, but only 20% feel talent-ready for it. Her core argument was that AI is levelling the technology playing field, making human advantage, the multiplier effect of human creativity and judgment combined with AI, the real differentiator. She illustrated this with three shifts: from humans-plus-machines to humans-times-machines, from cost efficiency to value creation, and from static to dynamic orchestration, using examples including Save the Children (which quadrupled value-creating AI use cases by focusing on people, not technology), BAE Systems (decision-making simulations), Liberty Mutual (keeping the human adjuster accountable for AI-informed decisions), DBS (rewarding and protecting time for AI experimentation) and Levi’s (rapid human-AI teams boosting sales by 15% in three months). She closed by citing Cisco and Gallup research showing that the single biggest driver of AI adoption is whether an employee’s direct leader visibly uses and champions AI, and challenged HR to shift from managing employment to orchestrating work.

Fireside chat – Isabel Workel and Nathalie Amador-De Vries

Isabel Workel-Tijhuis, Group Director Human Resources, Triodos Bank, & Nathalie Amador-De Vries, CHRO, Alpina Group, discussed what keeps them up at night in workforce transformation. Both agreed HR’s opportunity to shape this era doesn’t require a formal board seat, but does require actively co-building AI strategy with IT and the business. Isabel described Triodos Bank’s values-driven approach to AI, including explicit “not-to-do’s” such as never monitoring co-workers, always keeping final accountability for decisions with humans, and being deliberate about the energy consumption of different AI models via its internal TrioBot. Nathalie described Alpina Group’s more locally rooted, less digitally native workforce, and the change fatigue that comes from years of integrating 70 formerly separate organizations, stressing the need for practical, bottom-up experimentation and visible leadership vulnerability around failure. Polling the room, both found strong agreement that trust is becoming a bigger competitive advantage than technology itself, and closed on an optimistic note about AI creating room to redesign work entirely, potentially enabling more varied, multi-role careers.

Case study – Giorgia Calabria

Giorgia Calabria, founder, Human Factor Consulting, challenged the common pattern of organizations reflexively requesting “a leadership program” without first diagnosing the underlying business problem. Drawing on recent work with Ferragamo, Prologis and BDR Thermea, she showed how each request for a leadership program actually masked a different root issue, siloed functions, missing succession planning, and a leadership model nobody understood, and how starting instead from strategy and required capabilities led to more effective, tailored interventions. Her core message: HR should stop starting conversations with “what training do we need” and start with “what capabilities does our strategy require,” connecting capability-building explicitly to leadership behaviors and performance, rather than treating learning as an isolated HR initiative.

Speech – Karlijn van den Berg

Karlijn van den Berg, Head of Talent, ABN AMRO, used the provocative comparison of ECB president Christine Lagarde and Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky, both highly respected leaders, to illustrate that talent is only meaningful in the context of strategic fit, not intelligence or personality alone. She challenged the audience on whether their talent management practices pivot quickly enough as strategy changes, and offered a contrarian take that focusing purely on strengths can actually weaken high-potential employees by creating false confidence, arguing organizations must also deliberately develop weaknesses. She questioned the framing used by some peers, such as a competitor’s public statement about replacing “lower-value human capital” with AI, using the parable of blind men describing an elephant to argue that no single perspective, including HR’s, sees the whole picture. Her closing message, echoing ABN AMRO’s own approach, is to “keep humans on top” and use AI as an amplifier for humanity, while being deliberate and explicit about how talent strategy adapts as AI reshapes what valuable talent looks like.

Speech – Micha Hoofien

Micha Hoofien, Head of Reward and Pensions, ING, walked through two major shifts reshaping reward: the EU Pay Transparency Directive and the lifting of the Dutch bonus cap. He explained that the directive will force organizations to justify, not just set, pay differences between men and women in equivalent roles, which will require much greater transparency in recruitment and compensation structures, and trigger difficult conversations about what counts as an acceptable justification, such as tenure. On the bonus cap, he was skeptical it will meaningfully change reward for the broad population, since major Dutch banks already rarely use their full 20% allowance, but expects it to help with individual, exceptional rewards for scarce AI skills. He was candid that measuring the “added value” of AI-skilled employees is genuinely difficult, and pushed back gently against the idea that pay doesn’t matter, arguing it has become a hygiene factor: people may not always cite it as their top motivator, but removing it has an outsized negative impact. He closed by proposing more active benchmarking and collaboration between reward leaders across financial institutions, an idea audience members embraced on the spot.

Case study – Laureen Rwatirera

Laureen Rwatirera, Vice President of Talent and Learning at Prosus, shared how her organization scaled AI adoption after its CEO publicly committed, with little internal warning, to deploying 10,000 AI agents within months. Her team responded by tying AI agent creation directly to performance ratings, building a prompt library so employees didn’t have to start from scratch, and layering generic AI training with deep functional training led by finance, legal and other subject-matter experts. Using a framework built around six sources of influence (personal and structural motivation and ability, plus social motivation and ability), her team combined competitions, visible leaderboards, hands-on hackathons and executive site visits (including to the Golden State Warriors) to build genuine enthusiasm rather than compliance. The results: roughly 157,000 AI agents were built across training sessions, with about 14,000 still used weekly, one of which alone has generated over $60 million in revenue. She emphasized that the goal was never simply headcount reduction, citing an executive assistant who used seven AI agents to automate her routine work and was subsequently promoted into a program manager role, and closed by invoking IKEA’s well-known transformation of call center agents into interior designers as a model for redeploying, not just replacing, people.

Speech – Desirée Molman

Desirée Molman, Van Lanschot Kempen, presented the bank’s approach to designing benefits around life phases rather than age or generation. Examples included a sabbatical available every five years (one month paid), a performance and reward system that gives faster salary growth to employees earlier in their career band, expanded and inclusive leave arrangements (including care leave and support during menopause or miscarriage), flexible hybrid work policies being reset as the bank moves offices, a “Charlie Care” childcare budget for high-pressure periods, extended remote work options often used by international staff, and part-time work with full pension accrual for employees approaching retirement. She stressed that these policies require genuine two-way trust with managers and ongoing negotiation with the business to balance flexibility with client service, and that co-creation through employee focus groups, rather than top-down age-based assumptions, shapes which benefits actually get used.

Interview – Dantaya Williams

Dantaya Williams, Chief Human Resources Officer, RTX, a global aerospace and defense company with roughly 180,000 employees, discussed leading workforce transformation at scale. She described strategic workforce planning as a personal obsession and the core mechanism connecting HR to business strategy, requiring close partnership with finance and engineering leaders to anticipate future skills gaps and inform talent investment. On transformation and trust, she argued that culture erodes fastest when people don’t understand where the organization is headed, and shared how her team used AI to analyze workforce sentiment data in days instead of weeks, confirming that employees who feel informed and involved in transformation report significantly higher engagement. Quoting Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, she argued that focusing only on AI-driven productivity and automation is “a failure of imagination,” since humans remain responsible for envisioning what doesn’t yet exist. Asked what remains distinctly human as AI advances, she pointed to judgment in ambiguous situations, trust-building, navigating conflict, ethical decision-making and inspiring others around shared purpose, closing on an optimistic note that the future of work is an opportunity to innovate, provided organizations balance it with these irreplaceable human skills.

Wrap-up & Closing

The morning closed with thanks to the event’s partners, AFAS Software, the Dutch Banking Association and Lepaya, ahead of a networking lunch.

Lunch & Networking

See you at the HR Event 2027!

Looking to be part of next year’s event? Join our waiting list to stay informed—we’ll only reach out twice a year with key updates.

Uniting the financial sector by discussing pressing topics and enhancing cooperation. That’s what we love to do at Leaders in Finance. By listening, learning, and connecting with others, we accelerate the sharing of ideas, thus powering (upcoming) leaders and organizations to shape the future of financial services.

Want to explore how we can benefit your organizational goals? We’re happy to meet and discuss opportunities. Each part of the Leaders in Finance Group has its unique approach. Want to explore how we can benefit your organizational goals? We’re happy to meet and discuss opportunities.