{"id":7918,"date":"2026-09-28T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T02:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/?p=7918"},"modified":"2026-09-28T12:37:37","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T02:37:37","slug":"auckland-hr-tech-fest-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/auckland-hr-tech-fest-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Brought Home from Auckland"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>By <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/team\/stacey-kelly\/\">Stace<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/team\/julia-fiore\/\">Jules<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-size: 19px; line-height: 1.5; color: #555555;\">Two days at the HR &amp; L&amp;D Innovation &amp; Tech Fest, a lot of good food, and some ideas worth bringing back to Newcastle!<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s something about travelling together that sharpens how you think. In July, Stace and Jules flew across the Tasman to Auckland for the 2026 HR &amp; L&amp;D Innovation &amp; Tech Fest: two packed days of sessions on the future of work, people practice, and technology.<\/p>\n<p>Between keynotes, we explored beautiful Auckland, found the good food and wine, and talked through what we&#8217;d heard.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s rare that the two of us get to step out of the day-to-day and simply learn together. We came home with pages of notes, a few new connections, and a genuine sense of what&#8217;s shifting in our field.<\/p>\n<p>Read on for our recap and key insights\u2026<\/p>\n<h2>AI is only as powerful as the people experience around it.<\/h2>\n<p>If there was one idea threading through almost every session over those two days, it was reinforcing for us: successful AI adoption starts with trust, clarity and genuine engagement.<\/p>\n<p>Speaker after speaker came back to the same points: trust, transparency, <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/specialties\/culture-change\/\">change management<\/a>, and the psychological experience of people whose roles or tasks are shifting.<\/p>\n<p>Organisations will get further with AI when they treat it as a people change, not just a technology rollout. People need to understand why you&#8217;re introducing new technology, how it will affect their work, and what the plan is for them inside that new reality. Clarity gives people a better chance to <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/leading-through-change\/\">lean in, rather than quietly step back<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>We were also grateful for the honest conversation about where the &#8220;AI boomerang&#8221; is landing: companies that laid people off ahead of AI rollouts are now quietly recruiting them back, because it turns out customers and employees still need humans in the room! One speaker called it well: &#8220;AI is a capability multiplier, not a headcount reducer.&#8221; The organisations getting this right are asking how to release human capacity for richer work, not how to reduce their people costs.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center; font-size: 24px; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; color: #ec7325; padding: 20px 0; border-top: 1px solid #ec7325; border-bottom: 1px solid #ec7325; margin: 30px 0;\">&#8220;AI is a capability multiplier, not a headcount reducer.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>IKEA&#8217;s story came up twice across different sessions. Rather than letting go of their call centre teams when chatbots could handle basic queries, they retrained those people as interior designers. That team is now worth over $1.7 billion. It&#8217;s the right question that we all need to be asking: what can our people do with the capacity that AI frees up?<\/p>\n<div style=\"background-color: #f5f5f5; padding: 24px; border-left: 4px solid #1A9E8F; margin: 30px 0;\">\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0;\"><strong>Our Key Takeaway<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0;\">Before you start exploring AI tools, start with the human story. What work would your people most love to be freed from? What would they do with that time? If you can answer those questions first, the tech choices become much clearer, and the buy-in comes a lot more naturally.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h2>Changing workforce demographics are making retention a business-critical issue.<\/h2>\n<p>One of the most informative and engaging sessions was a keynote on global demographics. We are not, by nature, statistics people, but this session gave us plenty to grab onto.<\/p>\n<p>The picture for New Zealand mirrors what&#8217;s playing out across Australia and much of the developed world: an ageing workforce, a stagnant under-18 population, and a steady exodus of 25-year-olds seeking opportunity elsewhere. By 2041, the number of people over 85 will double. The aged care sector alone faces a profound skills shortage. It&#8217;s not a future problem &#8211; it&#8217;s already here.<\/p>\n<p>The message for organisations was direct: there simply aren&#8217;t enough workers coming through the pipeline to replace the ones who are leaving. So the game has shifted. Recruitment is harder, and attrition is more expensive than it&#8217;s ever been. The speaker&#8217;s point was blunt: be nice. Create an experience worth staying for.<\/p>\n<p>There was also a really useful discussion about <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/multi-generational-team-development\/\">generational expectations in the workforce<\/a> right now. Gen Z, shaped by technology and the pandemic, are native systemic thinkers who expect seamless onboarding, clear purpose, and work that feels worth their time from day one. They&#8217;re also the generation most likely to need more explicit &#8220;workforce 101&#8221; support, particularly around face-to-face communication and navigating uncertainty. Getting this generation engaged and retaining them is one of the most urgent HR challenges we&#8217;re hearing about in our own client work.<\/p>\n<div style=\"background-color: #f5f5f5; padding: 24px; border-left: 4px solid #1A9E8F; margin: 30px 0;\">\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0;\"><strong>Our Key Takeaway<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0;\">Your people strategy is only valuable if it&#8217;s aligned with your business strategy and what&#8217;s happening in the broader talent market. If you haven&#8217;t taken a hard look at your retention data recently, and at what&#8217;s driving the decisions people make to leave, now&#8217;s a good time to start.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h2>Leadership hasn&#8217;t become less human. It&#8217;s become more demanding.<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/specialties\/leadership\/\">Leadership development<\/a> was a major theme across the conference. The core skills (empathy, clarity, trust-building, coaching and genuine human connection) remain as important as ever. What has changed is the context leaders are operating in: faster pace, higher ambiguity and more cognitive load. It&#8217;s a harder job than it was a decade ago.<\/p>\n<p>A few ideas from across the sessions really stuck with us.<\/p>\n<h3>The identity shift from technical expert to leader of technical experts.<\/h3>\n<p>Moving from technical expert to leader of technical experts takes more than a new title. It is an identity shift. We tend to promote people based on their performance in the previous role, not for their potential in the new one, then wonder why the transition is so hard. We see this constantly in our own work, so it was validating to hear it named so clearly.<\/p>\n<h3>Development becomes real through habits, not just workshops.<\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/stepadvantage-landing\/\">Programs and workshops<\/a> can create a spark, but new behaviour embeds through what happens after: in real conversations, real moments and real teams. One panellist put it simply: the habit is the thing. If the skills learned in a program aren&#8217;t practised day-to-day, they fade. There was also exciting discussion about AI-enabled coaching tools creating safe spaces for leaders to practise <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/how-to-have-difficult-conversations\/\">difficult conversations<\/a> before having them for real, and we&#8217;re watching this space closely.<\/p>\n<h3>Coaching is a leadership superpower.<\/h3>\n<p>Across multiple sessions, coaching came up as the leadership capability most worth investing in right now because the problems leaders face today often don&#8217;t have clear answers. Leaders who know how to ask great questions, sit with complexity, and develop the people around them are going to navigate uncertainty far better than those who rely on having all the answers themselves.<\/p>\n<div style=\"background-color: #f5f5f5; padding: 24px; border-left: 4px solid #1A9E8F; margin: 30px 0;\">\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0;\"><strong>Our Key Takeaway<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0;\">When you&#8217;re next developing a leader in your organisation, ask: what identity shift is this transition asking of them, and how are we supporting that, not just the technical skill transfer? The mindset shift is likely where the real work is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h2>The next shift in workforce planning is less about position titles and more about skills.<\/h2>\n<p>Skills-first thinking came up several times, and we think it&#8217;s one of the most practically significant shifts heading toward organisations in the next few years (it&#8217;s been coming for a while, and now well here!).<\/p>\n<p>The static job description is losing its usefulness; roles are changing faster than the documents that define them. Many larger organisations are moving toward is a &#8220;skills marketplace&#8221; model: people are selected for projects based on their actual capabilities rather than their job title, and they return to a home role when the work is done. It&#8217;s a more dynamic, responsive way to deploy talent, and it requires a completely different approach to how you <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/9-box-grid-alternatives-succession-planning\/\">map and track what skills actually exist<\/a> in your business.<\/p>\n<p>The panellists were refreshingly candid that most organisations, including their own, are a long way from executing this well. The current reality for many is &#8220;rough and ready.&#8221; But the direction of travel is clear, and the organisations that start paying attention to the gap between the skills they have and the skills they need will be in a far stronger position to adapt.<\/p>\n<div style=\"background-color: #f5f5f5; padding: 24px; border-left: 4px solid #1A9E8F; margin: 30px 0;\">\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0;\"><strong>Our Key Takeaway<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0;\">Have you mapped the skills that actually exist in your team against the skills you&#8217;ll need in two to three years? Even a rough and imperfect skills picture is more useful than no picture at all. It&#8217;s a good conversation to have, and a great starting point for any capability strategy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h2>Coming home<\/h2>\n<p>Some of the best thinking happened outside the conference venue. After years of working, travelling and talking about people and <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/specialties\/culture-change\/\">culture<\/a> together over more coffees and wines than either of us should probably admit, Auckland gave us a fresh setting for familiar conversations.<\/p>\n<p>The quality of thinking over those two days was high, not because every idea was fresh, but because the questions being asked were good ones. What are the enduring needs of our people, not just the current ones? How do we build trust as the nature of work shifts? What does it mean to lead well when nothing is certain?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center; font-size: 24px; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; color: #ec7325; padding: 20px 0; border-top: 1px solid #ec7325; border-bottom: 1px solid #ec7325; margin: 30px 0;\">&#8220;What can our people do with the capacity that AI frees up?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Those questions sit at the heart of what we do at <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/about\/\">Seed People Consulting<\/a>, working with organisations across Newcastle, Sydney and the Hunter Region on <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/specialties\/leadership\/\">leadership<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/specialties\/teams\/\">teams<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/specialties\/culture-change\/\">culture<\/a>. We came home with pages of notes, a few ideas we&#8217;re excited to explore, and a renewed appreciation for the work we get to do alongside our clients every day.<\/p>\n<p>If any of this is landing close to home for you, we&#8217;d love to talk. The people challenges are getting more complex, and that&#8217;s exactly where we do our best work.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/seedpeopleconsulting.com.au\/contact-us\/\"><strong>Get in touch with the team<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two days at the HR &#038; L&#038;D Innovation &#038; Tech Fest in Auckland. What Stace and Jules took away on AI adoption, workforce demographics, leadership and skills-first planning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7920,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-adv":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-title":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-description":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter-title":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter-description":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[177,94,97,228,96],"team_author":[26,18],"class_list":["post-7918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-coaching","tag-hr","tag-leadership-development","tag-multi-generational-workforce","tag-organisational-change","team_author-julia-fiore","team_author-stacey-kelly"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>What We Brought Home from Auckland: HR &amp; L&amp;D Innovation &amp; Tech Fest 2026 | Seed People Consulting<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Two days at the HR &amp; L&amp;D Innovation &amp; Tech Fest in Auckland. 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