Hello Community,
Last Friday, we wrapped up the AI Experience Summit, and what an incredible experience it was. More than 10,000 HR and business leaders and professionals registered to join us for three days of conversations on AI readiness, execution, governance, leadership, and the future of work.
Across 18 panels and a hands-on workshop, we explored one of the most important questions facing organizations today: How do we move from AI experimentation to meaningful, sustainable impact? The discussions reinforced that AI success is not about technology alone. It requires leadership alignment, work redesign, governance, trust, and the capabilities to help people and organizations thrive together.
Whether you attended every session or missed part of the event, you can now access everything on demand through the Hacking HR LAB (see details below).
A heartfelt thank you to our speakers, moderators, sponsors, and the 10,000+ professionals who helped make this Summit such a remarkable global learning experience!
Inside this Edition
The hidden workforce skills most organizations can't see
5 Lessons from the AI Experience Summit
Build practical AI skills this summer
Upcoming Mini Masters and Micro-Certificate Programs
Next up: Workforce Strategy & HR Budget Planning Summit
Workforce planning breaks down when you are flying blind on your manager layer.
Who is carrying too much. Where teams are quietly disengaging. Which gaps will cost you before the next review cycle.
Workleap gives HR continuous visibility into manager and team health so workforce decisions are based on real signals, not last quarter's exit interviews.
WORKFORCE READINESS
The Workforce Readiness Gap Widens When Workforce Skills Remain Invisible
What if the skills your organization needs are already there, but you simply can't see them?
Many organizations believe they have a skills gap. Yet the challenge is often visibility. Employees develop capabilities through projects, collaboration, problem-solving, mentoring, and stretch assignments, but much of that growth never becomes visible at the organizational level.
When leaders cannot clearly see workforce capability, they struggle to connect people to opportunities, build internal talent pipelines, and make informed workforce planning decisions.
Why does human potential remain hidden?
Job titles capture the past. Most employees do far more than their job description suggests, yet titles often become the primary lens through which organizations assess talent.
Skills emerge through work. Some of the most valuable capabilities are developed and demonstrated through projects, collaboration, mentoring, and solving problems that were never part of the original role.
Potential is difficult to measure. New strengths often appear when people take on stretch assignments, navigate change, or step into unfamiliar situations. Those moments rarely fit neatly into traditional talent systems.
Workforce data is fragmented. Evidence of skills and capabilities is scattered across learning systems, HR platforms, performance tools, collaboration applications, and everyday work, making it difficult to see the full picture.
Historically, organizations have relied heavily on documentation such as resumes and credentials, as well as 1:1s, to demonstrate people skills. However, even if the manager and employee recognize growth and strengths together, it's still locked within that relationship and isn't usable for broader talent decisions or workforce strategy.
Improving workforce readiness starts with a clearer understanding of workforce capability. Today, agentic AI can capture and identify workforce signals where work is happening (Slack, Teams, Asana, CRMs), surfacing skills, capabilities, and patterns that might otherwise remain invisible.
Recently, Cornerstone OnDemand launched Cornerstone Workforce AI™, a workforce intelligence platform designed to help organizations build workforce readiness. By connecting workforce data, skills intelligence, labor market insights, and AI, it helps organizations build a clearer picture of workforce capability and support more informed talent, mobility, and workforce planning decisions.
👉 Explore Cornerstone Workforce AI™ and discover how greater skills visibility can help connect talent to opportunity.
The same visibility challenge applies to AI transformation. Organizations often struggle to scale AI not because they lack technology, but because they lack visibility into skills, workflows, decision-making, and readiness.
AI EXPERIENCE SUMMIT
What 10,000+ Leaders Learned about Scaling AI
"AI has not changed the purpose of leadership, but it has fundamentally changed what leaders need to do and how we spend our time."
One of the strongest themes across the Summit was that AI success depends less on the technology itself and more on the organizational conditions surrounding it. Leaders must redesign work, build trust, strengthen governance, and help people adapt to new ways of working. The organizations creating value with AI are focusing as much on readiness as they are on adoption.
5 Lessons We Heard again and again throughout the Summit:
AI exposes existing organizational weaknesses. The biggest barriers to AI success are often leadership alignment, fragmented processes, poor data quality, and unclear accountability.
Automating a task is not the same as improving a workflow. Organizations create value when they redesign work around outcomes, not when they simply layer AI on top of existing processes.
Leadership readiness matters as much as technology readiness. Scaling AI requires trust, governance, workforce capability, and leaders who can guide organizations through change.
Human judgment remains essential. While AI can accelerate analysis and execution, people remain central to decision-making, oversight, ethics, and accountability.
Measuring adoption is not enough. Success must focus on business outcomes, workforce impact, customer value, and responsible governance.
Did you miss the panels? No worries!
Now you can log in to the Hacking HR LAB and visit the Learning Center >Event Videos>2026>AI Experiece Summit and:
Access all the post-event recordings, including the workshop Pick Tools. Pick Mindset. Pick Humanity. The HR Playbook for Thriving in the AI Era, led by Paola Carranco and Amaya Grünenberg
Download your digital diploma of attendance
Download a copy of the summit ebook, gathering the key insights, plus resources for HR leaders and teams
If you are a Premium or Premium+ member, get a Pearson’s digital badge and claim HR recertification credits (13.5 SHRM + HRCI + IHRIM)
UPCOMING LEARNING EXPERIENCES
☀️ Three Summer Bootcamps to Build AI Skills
Online, live, and hands-on. Click on each link to learn more and register.
🎓 Mini Masters
🌐 Micro Certificate Programs
🔥 IN SPANISH Liderazgo Estratégico en IA para los Negocios
🔥 IN PORTUGUESE People Analytics para Decisões Estratégicas
UPCOMING EVENTS
September 08-10 | 07:00 AM - 11:25 AM PT | 100 % Virtual & Free
Workforce Strategy and HR Budget Planning Summit
Across three days, participants will engage with forward looking ideas, proven practices and practical frameworks that address workforce strategy, capacity and productivity planning, performance and rewards alignment and learning and development investment. The summit creates space for deep exploration of how workforce assumptions are formed, how trade offs are made across people investments and how organizations balance near term execution with long term capability needs.
📜 Certifficate of attendance
👑 Premium members gain 13.5 HR Credits + Pearson badge
Partner Events
September 3 · London
HR Analytics Summit is People Strategy Hub's annual summit for HR analytics and people strategy leaders | Register now | Discount code: HACKINGHR (20% off all passes – single passes, group bookings, and Business Passes (for vendors)
October 7-8, Amsterdam
HRCore Academy Summit | 2 Conferences, 1 venue: Learning & Development and Talent Transformation | Register here.
JUST RELEASED · AVAILABLE NOW ON AMAZON
AI for Beginners. A practical path from curious to confident
Enrique Rubio, founder and CEO of Hacking HR, has just released AI for Beginners, a practical guide for those who want to actually use AI well. The book treats AI as your first hire: a capable new teammate you have to brief.
Across multiple short chapters, Rubio walks readers through the moves that compound: building a small library of reusable context, prompting that actually works, projects and memory, simple agents, and the personal charter that keeps the judgment yours.
Published by Hacking HR Press. Available now.
SPONSORSHIPS
If you are a CMO in the HR Tech space, we’d love to have a conversation with you to understand your goals and how we can serve you, so our community can learn more about your solutions.
Next Friday (and every Friday), we will host a Hacking HR Live Webinar Planning session with Q&A. Join us!
📅 When: June 26, 2026, 08:30 AM Pacific Time
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details to join the meeting.