HR Summit and Expo Day One - 14 October 2026Wednesday, 14 October 2026 - GT (Gulf Time, GMT+04:00)

As Dubai continues to set the benchmark for innovation and public service excellence, government entities are rethinking how they attract, engage, and empower their workforce. This session explores the strategies, technologies, and cultural shifts driving a new standard of employee experience across Dubai's government sector, from smart HR solutions and digital transformation to leadership practices that foster engagement, wellbeing, and productivity. Attendees will gain practical insights into how forward thinking government entities are building more agile, motivated, and future ready teams to better serve their communities.

The CHRO role is undergoing its most significant transformation in decades and is no longer sufficient to be just "people experts". This session reveals how pioneering CHROs are earning board seats and CEO trust by proving HR's financial contribution and driving business outcomes. Learn how to transform from support function to profit center, build board-level credibility, and position HR as indispensable strategic growth driver by:

• Positioning HR as the primary catalyst for business transformation and growth

• Developing frameworks for aligning people initiatives with enterprise-wide business objectives

• Building executive influence by demonstrating HR's measurable impact on bottomline and market position

• Designing sustainable change management approaches that balance business agility with employee wellbeing

Parenthood doesn't follow a one-size-fits-all model, and neither should workplace support. This session explores how forward-thinking employers are building adaptive support systems that recognise the evolving needs of working parents across different life stages, enabling them to balance work and family responsibilities while continuing to progress in their careers.

Key Learning Takeaways:

• How the needs of working parents evolve across different stages of parenthood, and how employers can adapt their support accordingly.
• How flexibility and everyday workplace practices can help employees navigate the realities of balancing work and family responsibilities.
• The role of managers and organisational culture in creating an environment where parents feel supported while continuing to progress and develop their careers.

Join Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X and bestselling author, for a transformative exploration of how HR leaders can navigate and shape the rapidly evolving future of work. In this compelling session, Mo will share insights from his unique perspective at the intersection of technology, innovation, and human potential, drawing on his experience engineering moonshot projects and understanding exponential change. Discover how HR can move beyond reactive disruption management to become proactive architects of organisational transformation in an era defined by AI, automation, and unprecedented technological advancement. Learn practical strategies for reimagining talent development, fostering adaptability, and creating human-centric workplaces that thrive amid constant change. This session will challenge conventional thinking and equip you with a visionary framework to lead your organisation confidently into 2030 and beyond.

The world of work is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the skills organisations need, traditional hiring practices are being challenged, continuous learning is becoming a business necessity and multiple generations are redefining expectations of the workplace.

But while these forces are changing the talent landscape, the real question is how organisations and their leaders choose to respond.

Drawing on research and insights from Indeed, this keynote explores the forces reshaping how we attract, develop and retain talent - and why the decisions leaders make today will determine their organisations' ability to thrive tomorrow.

Key Learning Takeaways:

1. The shift towards skills-first hiring: Why traditional qualifications and experience are no longer sufficient indicators of talent and how organisations can rethink the way they identify potential.
2. AI's impact on the future of skills: How generative AI is transforming existing skills, changing the nature of work and creating new opportunities for human capability.
3. Learning as a business imperative: Why continuous learning and reskilling are becoming essential for organisational competitiveness rather than simply attractive employee benefits.
4. The power of a multigenerational workforce: How organisations can turn generational diversity into a competitive advantage while overcoming stereotypes and changing employee expectations.
5. The leadership decisions that matter: How leaders can rethink hiring, embrace AI responsibly and build a workforce equipped for the future.

As Gen Alpha begins to join the workforce, senior leaders face the challenge of uniting generations under a shared vision. This session explores advanced strategies to harness generational diversity as a competitive advantage, fostering collaboration, driving performance, and reducing friction in AI-augmented workplace environments.

Key Learning Takeaways:

• Develop sophisticated communication frameworks tailored to generational preferences, enhancing collaboration and streamlining decision-making at the executive level

• Design flexible career development strategies that align with the unique motivational drivers of each generation, ensuring sustained engagement and retention

• Adopt leadership methodologies that capitalise on generational strengths to build high-performing, future-ready teams

• Navigate generational perspectives on AI adoption and human-machine collaboration

You’ve spent hundreds of thousands on Claude, ChatGPT and other AI-enabled tools. Invested large amounts of time on knowledge bases and tool training. Created working groups and taskforces to bring AI to life in your organisation. Listened to the board drill you on how AI needs to transform the business to be competitive.

The problem: AI isn’t producing the results you need.

That’s because the gap between AI adoption and business outcomes isn’t with the tech - it’s with leadership execution.

During this short interactive session, you’ll:

• Learn why this is more than a tech adoption problem and what needs to be done differently to realise a return.
• Diagnose where the AI leadership execution gap is in your organisation and what it will take to close it.
• Go beyond the tool skills and explore the human capabilities - fluency, judgement, change leadership and agency - that leaders need to turn the potential of AI into better decision-making, new behaviours and new ways of working.

The session will leave you with Alchemist’s practical framework for identifying where your organisation is getting stuck in AI implementation, where to focus your leadership development and how to connect your learning strategy more directly to the business outcomes expected from AI investment.

Discover how cutting-edge technologies and personalized strategies are transforming workplace learning. This session explores how advanced visualization and gamification create immersive experiences that boost engagement and retention, while data-driven analytics enable personalized learning pathways and optimized outcomes. Learn how to shift from generic, human-centric models to truly person-centric approaches that honor individual purpose and potential, unlocking talent and building a more agile, future-ready workforce.

Key Highlights:

• Engage Deeply with Advanced Visualization & Gamification: Harness immersive tech to boost retention and shift learning from passive to active.
• Make Smarter Decisions with a Data-Driven Approach: Leverage analytics to personalize pathways, optimize outcomes, and scale impact.
• Shifting from Humna-Centric to Person-Centric Approach: Move beyond generic content to tailored experiences that resonate with individual purpose and potential

AI transformation succeeds when HR and IT function as strategic partners. This conversation explores how CHROs and CTOs can collaborate effectively, featuring real-world examples of successful partnerships and actionable frameworks to overcome integration challenges.

Key Learning Takeaways:

• Align AI transformation initiatives with business objectives

• Conduct joint tech stack audits to eliminate redundancies

• Build cross-functional governance for responsible AI deployment

• Create shared accountability frameworks for AI ROI

As skills become obsolete faster than ever, organisations need systematic approaches to workforce transformation. This session examines how companies are implementing upskilling and reskilling programs that address capability gaps, reduce hiring costs, and build internal talent pipelines.

Key Learning Takeaways:

• Use AI-powered assessments to identify critical skills gaps and prioritise reskilling investments by business impact

• Design accelerated learning through micro-learning, simulations, and mentorship that delivers measurable skill development

• Create internal mobility frameworks that reduce recruitment costs while boosting retention through career advancement

Every organisation says it manages talent by potential. Very few can agree on what the word means. The moment you ask hundreds of managers to assess it, you are not collecting data, you are collecting hundreds of private definitions of the same word and calling it a dataset. This session draws on a group-wide talent review of more than 2,500 senior employees, assessed by over 700 managers launched in eight weeks, to show what it actually takes to make potential a judgment you can trust: defining it as observable behaviour, designing the tool so managers cannot override the answer they dislike, and defending every rating in calibration. In an era rushing to automate talent decisions, it asks the harder question first: if you cannot trust the human judgment, why would you trust the algorithm you train on it?

Key Learning Outcomes:

• Separate performance from potential, and understand why the highest performer is so often not the highest potential
• Turn a vague, bias-prone potential rating into observable behaviour that hundreds of assessors can apply consistently
• Design assessment and calibration so individual bias is caught and corrected before it reaches a decision
• Prepare talent data to be trustworthy before it feeds AI-driven and automated talent systems

This session takes a different approach to retention. Rather than revisiting traditional retention strategies, incentives, or stay initiatives, it explores a critical question grounded in behavioural science research: can organisations identify the intention to leave before an employee actually resigns, and can we use employee perceptions and behavioural indicators to intervene earlier and more intelligently?

Drawing on research into turnover intention and employee behaviour, this session challenges HR leaders to move beyond lagging indicators like turnover rates and exit interviews and instead focus on the perceptions and signals that precede the decision to resign.

Key Learning Takeaways:

• Understand the perceptions and behavioural signals that may precede an employee's decision to resign, moving beyond traditional lagging indicators towards earlier indicators of retention risk.
• Explore why employees experiencing the same employment offering may perceive its value very differently, and why those perceptions can influence turnover intention and retention outcomes.
• Consider how organisations can move from generic retention programmes to more targeted, evidence-based interventions that address the actual drivers of an employee's intention to leave before resignation occurs.

Achieving substantial productivity improvements requires moving beyond experimentation to strategic execution. This session equips leaders with proven methodologies for designing AI-human partnerships that generate documented performance gains through targeted opportunity analysis, intelligent tool deployment, and accelerated scaling.

Key Learning Takeaways:

• Identify high-impact zones for 30-50% efficiency gains through AI integration

• Design AI-human models that amplify expertise while preserving judgment

• Build ROI-focused cases demonstrating quantifiable returns and competitive advantage

• Deploy rapid strategies that produce measurable results within 90-180 days

• Build governance frameworks that align stakeholders around business outcomes and maintain executive support