By the third day of this year’s Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo™, the crowd was quite literally cheering when they learned a discussion wasn’t going to be about AI.
It didn’t feel like resistance to technology, but rather a desire to get underneath it and into the more human questions:
The fatigue extended beyond AI. HR teams, managers, and employees are absorbing continuous change while facing relentless pressure to move faster and produce more.
Few conversations focused explicitly on engagement, performance, development, or recognition—yet all four threaded through nearly everything we heard. Changing the work changes the employee experience—and what people need to thrive.
Here are five takeaways we brought home from this fantastic event.
Gartner’s opening keynote, Productivity Isn’t the Prize—Expanding What’s Possible for Your Organization, was presented by CV Viverito and Arj Bagga.
They dove into a familiar promise: AI will take on routine work so people can spend more time on strategy, innovation, and customer experience.
But that shift doesn’t happen automatically. Time saved often disappears into email, meetings, and the next task in the queue. Capacity is created, but who’s deciding what to do with it?
Under pressure to show a return, leaders may be too quick to cut roles before they understand how the work actually needs to change. Gartner reports that 97% of organizations cannot achieve their desired cost savings through productivity alone. It also predicts that 30% of employees terminated and replaced by AI will be rehired by 2029, often at a higher cost.
Together, those findings point to a costly sequencing problem: organizations are making hasty workforce decisions before they’ve purposefully redesigned the work.
The keynote offered a useful frame for getting the order right: value, speed, and capacity.
Start with value. Concentrate AI investment where it can make the greatest difference to the strategy.
AI may create capacity, but leaders determine whether it accelerates growth.
Quantum Workplace and Scooter’s Coffee led a session called “Cut Through the Noise: Turning Scattered Signals into Confident People Decisions.” In the session, they shared this scenario:
A critical leadership role opens. Two internal candidates appear ready. One has stronger performance ratings, longer tenure, and a completed leadership program. The other has less experience and no formal leadership training. Most leaders would naturally choose the first.
But when addition signals such as feedback, recognition, and engagement come into play, the decision changes. You learn the second candidate is already leading: colleagues trust her, she shares her expertise, and the people around her are more likely to stay. The first is a strong individual performer, but that doesn’t necessarily make him the stronger leader.
Most organizations already have these same signals. But they usually live in separate systems and never reach the people making the decision.
This is where critical talent decisions often break down. When data is disconnected and siloed, leaders rely on whatever is easiest to find rather than what gives them the clearest view.
Scooter’s Coffee offered a practical example. By bringing together survey findings, talent reviews, and retention risk, its leaders better understood future talent, focused development where it mattered most, and responded when restructuring created new concerns among critical talent segments.
The takeaway from both examples is to start with the decision, not the data. Taking a more connected approach can start with one question leaders are struggling to answer, such as:
From there, platforms like Quantum Workplace can bring together the signals that sharpen the answer, surfacing a more complete view across systems. Leaders still need to interpret what they see, question what may be missing, and decide what to do next.
A fuller picture matters when it helps someone make a better call—and take the right action at the right time.
To see this session live, join our webinar on November 12.
A performance process can run on schedule, earn strong participation, and still do little to improve performance. Completion rates tell us whether people followed the process. They don’t tell us whether priorities became clearer, feedback became more useful, or teams executed more effectively.
High performance needs to account for three things:
A strong result doesn’t tell the whole story. Someone can produce impressive work while excluding colleagues, skipping valuable input, or creating more review and rework for others. So collaboration and innovation belong in the definition of performance.
Rewarding output alone can discourage the same behaviors organizations say they value.
AI is making it even more important to redefine high performance. Producing more work—and work that looks polished—is now easier than ever. Leaders need to be clear about the quality standards behind that output. Is it accurate? Can the employee explain and stand behind it? Does it solve the right problem? Is it useful to the people who depend on it?
Once high performance is redefined, the way it is measured needs to follow:
The skills people need to succeed today look very different than they did even a few years ago. Roles are changing, AI is reshaping how work gets done, and employees are being asked to navigate more ambiguity, technology, information, and cross-functional work.
Gartner reports that the number of skills required for the average job is growing 4.8% each year, while 34% of the skills required in 2025 will no longer be relevant by 2030. The challenge is deciding which emerging skills matter most to the organization’s future—and which existing skills are too important to lose.
Trying to account for every possible skill can quickly become an exercise in maintaining a list. A more useful starting point is the organization’s strategy:
Those are the skills to prioritize in hiring, development, talent reviews, and workforce planning.
Gartner described three skill sets that increasingly need to work together:
Technology becomes more valuable when people bring the context, relationships, and judgment it lacks. Those human skills deserve the same deliberate investment as AI fluency.
Organizations also need to protect the experiences that build key skills. Some routine work gives people the repetition they need to recognize patterns, catch problems, and develop sound judgment.
The opening keynote offered a memorable warning: “As AI takes work away, we have to make sure it doesn’t take the learning with it.”
Before automating a task, ask:
A strong skills strategy makes deliberate choices about what to build, what to protect, and what can safely fade—all grounded in the value the organization wants to create.
Managers were at the center of many conversations at Gartner. They are expected to translate strategy, steady anxious teams, coach new behaviors, recognize progress, and help people find their place in changing work.
Those expectations are rising as the pace of change accelerates. The average employee experienced 22 enterprise changes in 2025, up from 10 in 2022. Managers are helping teams navigate more than twice as much change while still being expected to maintain performance. It’s no surprise that 79% of CHROs say managers are overwhelmed.
That pressure extends beyond managers. HR teams and employees are also absorbing continuous change alongside ongoing demands to improve productivity. At that pace, people have less room to make sense of new expectations, adapt thoughtfully, and sustain performance.
Managers also absorb friction created elsewhere in the organization. Competing priorities, outdated policies, communication gaps, and inconsistent role modeling often originate above them. A manager can listen well and communicate clearly but cannot coach a team around every systemic problem.
That’s why support needs to come from several places:
With that support, managers can focus on the work only they can do: acknowledge what people are worried about, share what is known, connect the change to why it matters, and make the next step manageable. They also need a clear path to escalate what they cannot control.
Managers are where leadership decisions become daily experiences. If senior leaders expect them to carry change, they also need to own the conditions managers are leading through.
The human contribution isn’t simply what remains after technology has done its part. It is what turns technology into value: judgment, context, creativity, connection, and the willingness to own a decision.
Technology can bring information together, reduce friction, and make support easier to access. Human expertise determines what the information means, what matters most, and what should happen next.
HR’s opportunity is to bring the two together—helping leaders make better people decisions and take action in ways that help teams thrive.