Hear from thought leader Kevin Oakes, author of the bestselling book Culture Renovation®, as he offers his vision for the year ahead and outlines the challenges (and opportunities) HR leaders face.

For generations, when we’ve needed to innovate and grow, we’ve been told to “think bigger”—it’s now time to Lead Bigger.

Drawing from over three decades of experience, former CEO of AT&T Business Anne Chow shares how to lead bigger by leveraging inclusion beyond DEI, to elevate your work, workforce, and workplace.

All attendees will receive a free copy of Anne's new book LEAD BIGGER.

In Peter Cappelli's latest book, Our Least Important Asset, he catalogues the most pressing human resources and people management issues of our time.

There’s at least 80 years of evidence that managing people better matters to performance. The problem comes in part from the fact that we assume—particularly everybody who took an economics class in college—that companies are always trying to be efficient because if they were not, they would not be profitable. The problem with that is that in the contemporary environment, companies are not trying to maximize profits. They're trying to maximize share price, and that's not the same thing.

Join Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, Chief Diversity Officer and Corporate Vice President, Talent and Learning, Microsoft, to explore how diversity and inclusion, talent management, and learning and skilling are converging in the era of AI to unlock potential and uplevel an employee experience that includes everyone.

DE&I programs have faced immense scrutiny over the last year, posing risks to the progress made since 2020. Despite media attention and well-publicized examples of companies backing away from certain DEI commitments, i4cp's research has found that the vast majority of companies are moving ahead as planned.

In this session, professor Kenji Yoshino offers his perspective on the current climate, what to expect in the year ahead, and how to continue to advance DEI.

We're celebrating our 12th year in partnership with Best Buddies International. In this short session, you'll hear about Best Buddies' mission to support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. An estimated 81% of adults (18+) with developmental disabilities do not have a paid job in the community, yet i4cp's research shows that these people represent an untapped talent pool who can contribute to the workforce in a myriad of ways.

Hear from several leading CDOs as they discuss the current challenges DEI face and how they see DEI evolving to meet future needs of the business.

M&As can be incredibly fruitful—or incredibly costly and painful. They often fail due to culture mismatches between the two organizations, and HR is brought in way too late in the process. In this session, hear from longtime CHRO Dimitra Manis, who has been intimately involved in 65+ M&A deals during her career. She'll share why conventional approaches to bringing two companies together often fail or metastasize—and discover a better way to find synergy faster and more effectively.

In an era where digital transformation reshapes industries, artificial intelligence (AI) presents unprecedented opportunities to enhance learning and development strategies. This presentation dives into how AI-powered solutions can unlock human potential, driving employee growth, skill development, and organizational effectiveness.

As human-AI collaboration reshapes the workforce, leaders face a pivotal challenge: helping their teams see AI as an ally in their daily work rather than a threat. In this fireside chat, we’ll discuss how to cultivate a culture of trust, encourage experimentation, and provide clear guidance for integrating AI into the workplace. Avani will share strategies for empowering your people to not just adopt AI but truly leverage it to transform the way they work.

Ana will talk about Lumen’s Culture Renovation, highlighting how Lumen is rebuilding from the people up and disrupting the telecommunications industry through radical transformation. Together, Ana and Lumen’s CEO have hired a new SLT, infused new cultural behaviors into their renovated people programs, and fostered a workplace that supports well-being, growth, and innovation. They also offer differentiated training and experiences to bring the culture to life with daring leadership, ensuring that everyone at Lumen thrives together.

Connect with other attendees to discuss and debate key takeaways from today's session.

Join a powerful, closed-door session exclusively for CHROs and CPOs—a two-hour forum dedicated to exploring the most critical topics shaping the future of work, from agentic AI’s impact on the workforce to new approaches in organizational agility and talent strategy.

• Interactive brainstorming and peer discussions
• Direct access to i4cp’s Chief Research Officer and senior analysts
• Collaboration with participants from i4cp’s regional CHRO Forums and CHRO Board

Exclusively for Chief HR Officers and Chief People Officers, we present an additional opportunity to network with your peers in a private setting.

Don your purple, green, and gold for i4cp's Mardi Gras celebration! Join your peers for a unique evening at the Fairmont's Princess Pool, taking advantage of the beautiful Scottsdale weather while enjoying dinner, drinks, and fun activities. Laissez les bons temps rouler !

Participate in the 12th i4cp/Best Buddies Friendship Walk, in support of inclusion and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It’s a great opportunity to stretch your legs, soak in a beautiful Arizona sunrise, and learn more about Best Buddies. RSVP here. (opens in a new tab)

Enjoy breakfast with your peers and get ready for the day's events. If you haven't already checked in to receive your badge, registration also opens at 7:30am.

Also, take advantage of the Connextion Cafe, a unique opportunity where you can schedule in-person or virtual appointments with fellow attendees.

Workplace flexibility, generative AI and five generations in the workforce add up to a lot of stress on employees and leaders. 64% of people at work are burned out by the pace of change. Some leaders are resorting to top-down commands: mandates to return to offices and adapt new generative AI tools to get more efficient that only add to that stress – and inhibit performance.

But there’s a better way forward. Join Brian Elliott for a conversation about how leading organizations are building new ways of working that can lead to better outcomes for people and organizations. He’ll leverage the latest research on the impacts of workplace flexibility, technology and inter-generational dynamics combined with best practices gleaned from his work with hundreds of executives.

Bring your questions, your perspectives, and your own engagement in building a better future of work.

Many companies say their employees don't have the skills to meet future needs, amplified by the common issue of high school and college graduates entering the workforce lacking the necessary skills to immediately contribute to their full potential. But what if that didn't need to be the case? In this session, Kim Cockrell, Group Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer at Toyota Motor North America, discusses the importance of partnering with schools to align educational focus to corporate need, how her company puts this into practices, and the benefits gain—including broadened and ready talent pools.

ServiceNow is driving an AI transformation across its Global HR Organization.  We’ll share our AI operating model, how we are building the technology and data foundation, where we are investing and what use cases we’re prioritizing.  We’ll also share our enablement strategy and our plan for creating the skills we need to use and build AI.

We think of change and disruption as the building blocks of innovation and success. But what if the opposite is true—and what does that mean about how we should run our organizations?

In this eye-opening presentation, leadership expert and former Deloitte and Cisco HR executive Ashley Goodall draws from his new book “The Problem with Change,” to illustrate the psychological costs of constant change, to reveal the true essence of human performance, and, in the light of these, to frame a new mission for HR.

In this panel, you'll hear from three forward-looking CHROs on what's next for the HR profession amidst the increasingly accelerating change many organizations are facing.

Lunch isn't just lunch at an i4cp event! Since we don't allow HR vendors or consultants to attend, each table is jam-packed with people you'll want to meet. Further, we'll reserve some tables for specific topics or functions so you can connect with others who have similar interests or responsibilities.

In this session, i4cp's chief research officer Kevin Martin highlights the key business and talent trends he and his team of analysts are observing—and recommendations he has for the HR leaders in the room.

With planetary scale computing power, coupled with incredibly sophisticated models, how people engage with AI will forever change the human experience. As AI powered assistants and agents work together with people, what considerations do individuals and organizations need to adapt to a new frame of mind to harness such powerful tools? The session will explore practical scenarios where human judgment will be critical to shaping and creating outcomes in a world where AI will be everywhere. Join Christopher Fernandez as he shares insights and perspectives drawing from his close working partnerships with the engineers and leaders who are building the technology that will transform humanity and how we think about the future of work and life.

For decades, it's been talked about that "HR leaders need a seat at the table." While significant progress has been made, simply being at the table is not nearly enough. High-performance HR and talent leaders—and their teams—work, act, and operate differently. They are not building people strategy to support business strategy—they play an integral role in shaping the business strategy from the start.
In this hard-hitting session, hear from Jeremy Broome, Global Head of Talent at Visa, as he gives an inside look at how the HR and talent teams function within his company and offers a vision for what every people department—and people leader—should strive for to ensure they are meeting the modern demands of the business.

Let's tap into the power of the i4cp community! In this dynamic, high-energy session, you'll engage in a unique opportunity to gain fresh and actionable insights and form new connections... all in 30 minutes.

Through a structured interactive approach designed to empower you with valuable, work-ready takeaways and meet other human capital professionals, you'll meet four conference attendees to exchange insights and best (or next!) practices.

Here's how it will work:

• Rotating Conversations: You'll pair up with four new people for brief, guided exchanges.
• Insight Sharing: Choose from curated HR topics and share a challenge, success, or lesson learned.
• Actionable Takeaways: Walk away with at least two practical ideas you can apply to your work immediately.

Companies spend $60B annually on leadership development programs, but only 27% of HR executives rate leadership effectiveness a strength. Be the first to see key findings from i4cp's new study, which examines what leaders do differently to deliver success in distributed work environments and how high-performance organizations develop better leaders.

More details coming soon!

About Lisa: Lisa Bryant serves as Chief Human Resources Officer for Dow. She is responsible for developing and implementing human resources policies and practices to support the Company’s global workforce, which includes talent, recruiting, compensation, benefits, and employee experience.

Connect with other attendees to discuss and debate key takeaways from today's session.

Join us for the star-studded i4cp 2025 Awards Ceremony, where we’ll celebrate HR excellence Hollywood style, with red carpet moments, sparkling champagne, and coveted awards. Dress to impress if you like—we look forward to seeing you in your most glamorous style.

Following the Red Carpet Arrival from 5:00 - 5:30 PM, don’t miss i4cp’s Award Ceremony (staring at 5:30 PM) where we hand out several prestigious honors to individuals and organizations that are driving real change. During the ceremony we’ll announce the winners of our Next Practice Awards, and recognize recipients of our High-Performance Award and Member of the Year Award, among others. See last year's winners.

And of course there will be an afterparty! Dress up or dress down, whatever your preference may be, and see you there!

Join us for more fun at our Hollywood-style Awards Afterparty, where we further celebrate our award winners and each other with food, drinks, and entertainment. It’s a great way to cap off the i4cp conference in glamorous style.

Kick off the final day of the conference with your peers, where you'll hopefully make connections that last for years.

Also, take advantage of the Connextion Cafe, a unique opportunity where you can schedule in-person or virtual appointments with fellow attendees.

According to a Charles Schwab survey, only 12% of wealth management firm CEOs are women. In this session—you'll hear from one of those CEOs, Kristen Bauer of Laird Norton, and the challenges she's faced (and overcome) in a male-dominated industry. Further, Kristen will discuss a new model for uniting corporate culture in an acquisition that unites the DNA of the converging organizations. This session will provide a unique lens on HR from the perspective of a CEO, and takeaways that any HR leader can leverage.

Many companies have leadership principles, but few companies embrace them the way Amazon does. In this session, you'll hear how Amazon brings its leadership principles to life and uses them not only as anchor for everything they do—but to dive deep into building detailed, goal-driven products, programs, and initiatives. More specifically, you'll learn how the people experience is guided by these principles, which allows the company to build HR programs that deliver business results—and ultimately for HR to operate as a true value driver within the business.

Most HR leaders rate their company's ability to upskill and reskill employees to meet future needs as inadequate, and yet finding better, more effective ways to do so remain elusive. Hear from several heads of talent and/or learning as they discuss and debate the best approaches.

See the latest findings from i4cp's latest study on generative AI. This study is designed to help CHROs address a significant CEO need: guidance on what needs to happen with the workforce due to disruptive technologies—most notably GenAI.

We seek to surface how high-performance organizations are ensuring a future-ready workforce, and what their HR teams are doing differently.

With planetary scale computing power, coupled with incredibly sophisticated models, how people engage with AI will forever change the human experience. As AI powered assistants and agents work together with people, what considerations do individuals and organizations need to adapt to a new frame of mind to harness such powerful tools? The session will explore practical scenarios where human judgment will be critical to shaping and creating outcomes in a world where AI will be everywhere. Join Christopher Fernandez as he shares insights and perspectives drawing from his close working partnerships with the engineers and leaders who are building the technology that will transform humanity and how we think about the future of work and life.

Carol Dweck’s multi-million-copy bestseller Mindset has transformed our view of individual success, coining the terms “fixed” and “growth” mindset: in a “fixed” mindset, talent and intelligence are viewed as predetermined traits, while in a “growth” mindset, talent and intelligence can be nurtured through dedication, the right strategies, and resilience.

But we’ve only understood mindset as solely about individuals.

In this session, you'll hear from Dweck’s protégé, Mary Murphy, social psychologist at both Stanford and Indiana University, as she presents a groundbreaking take on mindset, showing how to transform any group, team, or classroom to reach breakthroughs while also helping each person achieve their potential.

Kevin Oakes will wrap up the conference with closing remarks and an actionable send-off for every individual in the room.