What is the HR Innovation Roundtable?

A powerful closed-door workshop bringing together 40 Chief HR Officers and Global HR & Talent Executives from leading global
brands for intimate discussions about specific challenges and transferable solutions.

Agenda: Day 1

February 24th, 2026

12:45 - 1:20 PM

Arrival Reception & Welcome

About:

Fontainebleau is one of hospitality’s most iconic brands, with a legacy that began in Miami Beach in 1954. Fontainebleau Las Vegas brings that heritage to the Strip through a bold new expression of luxury, design, and elevated service.

Join us at Fontainebleau Las Vegas for the HR Innovation Roundtable, hosted at one of the city’s most striking new destinations. Opened in December 2023, the $3.7 billion resort features more than 3,600 rooms and suites alongside world-class dining, entertainment, and event space.

Fontainebleau Las Vegas employs 7,000+ people and has quickly earned recognition, including TIME’s World’s Greatest Places 2024 and a MICHELIN One Key in 2025, reflecting its commitment to exceptional guest experience and modern hospitality.

1:20 - 2:35 PM

The People Value Proposition That Scales: Lessons From a $3.7B Launch

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

The strongest People strategies are no longer built around perks alone. They are built around removing the real barriers that stop people from joining, thriving, and staying. For CHROs, that means rethinking the employee value proposition as a business lever, not a branding exercise. In highly competitive labor markets, especially across frontline, hospitality, service, and experience-led businesses, the organizations that win are those that design work around people’s real lives while still delivering speed, consistency, and performance at scale.

This session explores how HR can build a People value proposition that is commercially smart, operationally scalable, and powerful enough to support a major business launch. You will hear how leading organizations can use benefits, flexibility, culture, and workforce support to widen talent pools, strengthen retention, accelerate readiness, and reinforce the brand from the inside out. For CHROs, the upside is clear: stronger hiring outcomes, better workforce stability, and a people strategy that directly supports growth, customer experience, and long-term enterprise performance.

• How to build a People value proposition that expands access to talent and stands out in competitive labor markets.

• How to connect benefits, flexibility, culture, and support to measurable outcomes like hiring speed, retention, readiness, and service quality.

• How to create a scalable People strategy that strengthens employer brand and supports high-performance growth.

2:45 - 4:10 PM

The 24/7 Talent Engine: How Leaders Scale Speed Without Losing the Human

PanelistS:

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

Speed has become one of the most decisive competitive advantages in talent acquisition, especially in high-volume, frontline, and customer-facing environments where demand shifts quickly and great candidates disappear just as fast. But for CHROs, the challenge is no longer simply how to hire faster. It is how to build a hiring engine that delivers speed, consistency, and efficiency without turning the candidate experience into something cold, transactional, or forgettable. The organizations getting this right are not just automating tasks. They are redesigning the hiring journey end to end so candidates can move seamlessly from interest to interview to offer, while recruiters and hiring managers are freed up to focus on judgment, connection, and better decision-making.

This session will explore what it takes to build a modern 24/7 talent engine that balances automation with humanity. It will show how leading organizations are using conversational hiring, intelligent workflow design, and always-on engagement to remove friction, improve conversion, and dramatically reduce time to hire, without sacrificing trust or quality. For CHROs, the upside is far bigger than operational efficiency alone. Done well, this creates a hiring model that strengthens employer brand, improves manager adoption, unlocks recruiting capacity, and directly supports business growth by ensuring the organization can respond to talent demand at the speed of the market.

• How to design an always-on hiring journey that improves speed, conversion, and candidate experience at the same time.

• How to use automation and conversational AI to remove friction for recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates without losing the human touch.

• How to build a scalable talent acquisition engine that strengthens employer brand, improves hiring outcomes, and supports growth.

4:30 - 5:45 PM

The CHRO as Workforce Architect: Rebuilding Structure for Growth

PanelistS:

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

Growth is no longer just a commercial challenge. It is an organizational design challenge. As AI reshapes work, skills become obsolete faster, and business models continue to shift, CHROs are being asked to do far more than manage talent within existing structures. They are being asked to rethink the structure itself. That means questioning whether traditional roles, hierarchies, reporting lines, and ways of working still serve the business, or whether they are slowing execution, hiding capability gaps, and creating unnecessary complexity. The most forward-thinking CHROs are stepping into a new mandate: not simply to support the business strategy, but to actively architect the workforce model that makes future growth possible.

This session will explore how CHROs can rebuild workforce structure around agility, capability, and business need rather than legacy design. It will examine how leading organizations are rethinking roles, redeploying talent, unlocking skills more dynamically, and designing models that better integrate people, automation, and AI-enabled work. For CHROs, the opportunity is profound. Get this right and you create an organization that can move faster, deploy talent more intelligently, and grow with far greater resilience. Get it wrong and the business risks becoming trapped in outdated structures that drain productivity, inflate cost, and make transformation far harder than it needs to be.

• How to redesign workforce structures so they are built for agility, capability deployment, and future growth rather than legacy ways of working.

• How to rethink roles, skills, and talent deployment in a world where AI and automation are changing how work gets done.

• How to build an organizational model that increases flexibility, improves productivity, and gives the business the capacity to scale with confidence.

5:45 - 7:30 PM

Networking, Drinks & Evening Dinner

Get to know your esteemed peers over some hors d'oeuvre and deliciously prepared cocktails. We will then head to IBM’s private restaurant for a three-course evening dinner. Enjoy the relaxed atmosphere in the presence of your peers to learn, share and ponder over the key topics of what was discussed earlier in the day and the exciting conversations in store for you on day 2.

Agenda: Day 2

February 25th, 2026

8 - 8:40 AM

Registration & Breakfast followed by Welcome Reception

PanelistS:

Join us nice and early to grab a tasty bite to eat and your daily dose of caffeine to set you up for a full-on day of learning, sharing and innovating. At 8:30 AM hear a few words from our event chair (Donald), host (Nickle) and event partner (Parker) on what to expect over the course of the day.

8:40 - 9:20 AM

300,000 Applicants. 6,500 Hires. Zero Missed Candidates: Inside the Partnership

PanelistS:

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

Talent Acquisition is no longer a support function sitting downstream from growth. It is part of the growth strategy itself. When an organization is launching at scale, opening a flagship site, or standing up an entirely new operation, the ability to attract, engage, assess, and hire thousands of people quickly can determine whether the business hits revenue, service, and brand targets or falls behind before the doors even open. This session explores how Fontainebleau Las Vegas, in partnership with Paradox, built a hiring engine capable of staffing what felt like a small city: processing 300,000 applicants, hiring 6,500 people, and doing it with the operational precision, candidate visibility, and speed required to ensure no qualified talent was lost in the process.

For CHROs, this is far more than a recruiting success story. It is a case study in workforce execution, cross-functional alignment, and modern talent infrastructure. You will hear how the People and Talent teams used automation, conversational hiring, multilingual engagement, hiring event orchestration, and real-time decision-making to build capacity at extraordinary scale without sacrificing candidate experience or business readiness. The strategic value is clear: when hiring becomes faster, smarter, and more connected to business demand, CHROs can reduce operational risk, improve workforce readiness, strengthen employer brand, and prove that talent is not just enabling growth, but actively accelerating it.

• The core design choices behind a 24/7 hiring engine (process, tech, and governance)

• How to align recruiting, marketing, and operations so volume doesn’t collapse quality

• The KPI set that proves impact: conversion, time‑to‑hire, satisfaction, and early‑tenure signals

9:20 - 10:30 AM

The Culture Strategy Reset: Aligning Expectations Before Engagement Breaks

PanelistS:

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

Many organizations are asking more of their people while giving less clarity in return. Performance expectations are rising, transformation is constant, and pressure on managers and teams continues to intensify, yet the cultural foundations needed to sustain trust, resilience, and discretionary effort are often lagging behind. For CHROs, the risk is not just lower engagement scores. It is a widening gap between what the business expects and what employees experience day to day, leading to burnout, frustration, weakened manager credibility, and a culture that quietly starts to fracture under pressure.

This session will explore how CHROs can reset culture in a way that is practical, credible, and tied directly to business performance. It will unpack how leading organizations are clarifying expectations around performance, flexibility, accountability, and growth, while embedding those expectations into leadership behavior, team norms, and operating rhythms. The opportunity is to build a culture that can absorb change, sustain high performance, and strengthen trust at the exact moment many organizations are at risk of losing it.

• How to run an EVP “reality check” and communicate expectations without damaging trust

• How to embed culture into operating mechanisms so behavior changes without a rebrand

• How to equip leaders to make change a habit — building resilience during uncertainty

10:45 - 11:55 AM

The CHRO’s Guide to AI: Reshaping Work, Teams, and Values

PanelistS:

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

Most organizations are experimenting with AI, but far fewer have translated that experimentation into a clear HR strategy that changes how work actually gets done. For CHROs, the opportunity is no longer just about deploying tools or launching pilots. It is about reshaping the HR operating model so AI, automation, and agents are embedded into core workflows, decision-making, service delivery, and team design. The organizations moving fastest are treating AI as an enterprise capability and a workforce issue at the same time, using it to unlock capacity, improve execution, and reposition HR as a more strategic driver of growth and transformation.

This session will explore how CHROs can build a practical AI playbook for HR that moves beyond fragmented use cases and creates real organizational value. It will examine how leaders are setting an AI North Star, prioritizing the right opportunities, redesigning work around human and machine strengths, and putting the governance, ownership, and adoption structures in place to scale responsibly. The real prize is not just efficiency. It is building an HR function that is smarter, faster, more trusted, and better equipped to help the business navigate change, productivity pressure, and future workforce demands.

• How to define an HR AI strategy that aligns with business priorities and focuses investment on the highest-value opportunities

• How to redesign HR work, roles, and workflows so AI increases capacity and improves execution rather than adding noise

• How to put the right governance, ownership, and adoption model in place so AI scales responsibly across HR

12:55 - 1:25 PM

From 6,500 New Hires to One Standard: Building Luxury Service at Scale

PanelistS:

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

Hiring thousands of people is one challenge. Turning them into one workforce with one consistent standard of service, culture, and execution is another entirely. For CHROs, this is where workforce strategy becomes business strategy. When the employee experience is tightly linked to the customer experience, onboarding, learning, and manager enablement cannot be treated as administrative steps after the hire. They become the mechanism through which the brand is delivered, service quality is protected, and performance becomes repeatable at scale.

This session will explore how leaders can take a newly built workforce and create consistency without flattening the humanity, pride, and energy that make a service culture memorable. It will look at how onboarding, capability building, cultural activation, and frontline leadership can work together to move people quickly from new hire to confident contributor. The real prize is not just faster ramp-up. It is building a workforce that can deliver a premium standard every day, protect brand reputation, and translate rapid hiring into long-term operational success.

• How to design onboarding that builds culture and capability — not just compliance

• How to equip frontline leaders to coach and reinforce standards at scale

• How to measure learning impact with business metrics (quality, productivity, retention, experience)

1:25 - 2:35 PM

Killing AI Workslop: The CHRO Blueprint for Quality, Not Just Speed

panelists:

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

AI is making it easier than ever to produce more work, faster, but volume alone is not value. Across functions, leaders are starting to see the hidden drag created by low-quality output, overreliance on generated content, weak judgment, and the growing amount of time managers spend reviewing, correcting, and cleaning up work that looks productive on the surface but adds little real business impact. For CHROs, this creates an urgent challenge: how to capture the productivity upside of AI without allowing quality, trust, and human capability to quietly erode underneath it.

This session will explore how CHROs can lead a more disciplined, performance-focused approach to AI at work by redesigning workflows, resetting expectations, and building stronger standards around judgment, accountability, and output quality. It will show how the most effective organizations are distinguishing between automation that removes effort and AI usage that simply creates noise. The opportunity is to move beyond superficial efficiency gains and build an operating model where AI genuinely improves decision-making, execution, and workforce performance rather than diluting it.

• How to spot “workslop” and measure effort so you prioritize the right AI interventions

• How to redesign work: roles, workflows, and decision rights that make quality the default

• How to set governance and metrics so AI scales safely across HR and the enterprise

2:50 - 4 PM

The AI-Ready Leader: How to Build Leaders Who Can Orchestrate Humans and AI

Speaker:

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:

As AI reshapes work across the enterprise, leadership expectations are changing just as quickly. It is no longer enough for leaders to drive performance through people alone. They must learn how to operate in environments where humans and AI agents work side by side, where decision-making is augmented by intelligent systems, and where judgment, adaptability, and trust become even more valuable. At the same time, many organizations are at risk of weakening their future pipeline by automating entry-level and mid-level work without redesigning how talent learns, grows, and develops the capabilities needed for long-term leadership.

This session will explore how CHROs can build a leadership and talent strategy fit for a human + AI future. It will examine how organizations are redesigning early-career roles, modernizing development around skills and flow-of-work learning, and building leaders who can orchestrate teams made up of both people and intelligent systems. For CHROs, the opportunity is not simply to make leaders more AI-aware. It is to create a stronger pipeline of talent and leadership that can thrive in a more dynamic, technology-shaped, and skills-driven organization.

• How to redesign leadership and talent development so people are prepared to lead in human + AI environments

• How to protect and strengthen the future talent pipeline as AI changes early-career work and skill-building pathways

• How to develop leaders who can combine human judgment, AI fluency, and orchestration skills to drive performance at scale

4 - 5 PM

Closing Remarks & Networking Reception

SPEAKER:

Apply to Attend

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We reserve the right to reject any registrations if your role is to provide HR services, products, or consultancy offerings.
The HR Leaders Innovation Roundtable is strictly reserved for Executive level HR Practitioners (both generalists & specialists).

Why Should You Attend the Innovation Roundtable?

Members

Hosted at Fontainebleau Las Vegas HQ

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