Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo, London: Day 1 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from the Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo taking place today through Thursday, October 8 in London, U.K. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference. 

On Day 1 from the conference, we are highlighting the Opening Keynote, CHRO trends & priorities, future-ready leaders, and AI reshaping careers.

Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

• Gartner Says CHROs’ Top Priorities for 2027 Focus on Meeting CEOs' Expectations While Minimizing Organizational Risk

Presented by CV Viverito, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner, and Arj Bagga, Vice President Analyst, Gartner

AI is delivering productivity gains across the workforce, but the  real opportunity lies in using AI to create value that wasn’t possible before. In this session, CV Viverito, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, and Arj Bagga, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, explored how CHROs can help organizations concentrate AI investments, redesign work faster, and reinvest workforce capacity for growth.

• “For many, business performance remains strong, but costs are rising and most leadership teams hope AI will be a solution to the cost problem.”
• “HR has focused on getting employees to adopt AI tools and embed them across workflows in an effort to take costs out.” 
• “Unfortunately, AI will never be as cheap as it is today, yet almost 40% of companies are over budget on AI.”
• “Organizations showing the strongest results from AI are doing two things at the same time: 
  • Using redesign to change the cost of work, making them more than twice as likely to exceed their cost goals. 
  • Redirecting those gains from AI investment towards innovation, which increases the likelihood of outperforming revenue goals by nearly 4 times.” 
• “To enable this, HR will have to do three things for their organizations:  
  • Concentrate efforts and investments to put AI to work where it will make the greatest difference for success. 
  • Build for speed by getting closer to the business so that opportunities for value aren’t missed. 
  • Treat capacity gained as an asset to deploy towards future growth.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with CV Viverito or Arj Bagga by contacting Gerri Weinberger at gerri.weinberger@gartner.com. 

Presented by Mark Whittle, Vice President Analyst, Gartner

Each year Gartner surveys hundreds of CHROs about their challenges and priorities for the coming year. In this session, Mark Whittle, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, shared the top CHRO trends and priorities for 2027, and how HR leaders can use these to inform their strategic plan. 

• As business needs evolve faster than HR’s delivery model, HR excellence requires speed to value, not just efficiency.
• Human accountability is essential no matter what work AI takes on, particularly as employees increasingly co-create outcomes with AI.”
• “The workforce has become more load-bearing due to organizational decisions; to mitigate this, successful organizations operate with fewer, differentiated skills carrying most of the weight.
  • “Many CEOs have hit the gas but felt their leadership engine stalled, attributed to entrenched ways of working, lagging performance and critical skills gaps.
• The leader role is not designed or supported for disruption, requiring leaders to intentionally let go of legacy behaviors and ways of working and replace them with those that better align with evolving business needs.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with Mark Whittle by contacting Gerri Weinberger at gerri.weinberger@gartner.com. 

Presented by Ingrid Laman, Vice President Analyst, Gartner

By rapidly building new skills, accelerating team adoption of change, and deliberately disrupting the status quo, future-ready leaders position themselves and their organizations to seize growth opportunities in an environment of catalytic change. In this session, Ingrid Laman, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, explored how CHROs can build future-ready leaders by rethinking their traditional approaches to leadership development and change management.

• “Sixty-eight percent of CHROs agree their leaders are not ready for what's next due to not having the right skills, leading low-trust teams and/or clinging to legacy habits.”
• “To build future-ready leaders, organizations must redefine the pace of leadership development by: 
  • Building leader AI readiness through a more efficient development approach
  • Helping leaders drive urgency to accelerate change adoption
  • Enabling leaders to deliberately disrupt ways of working with their teams”
• “Just 36% of HR leaders said most of their leaders are prepared to successfully drive their organization's AI objectives, while 60% of HR leaders agree leadership needs are evolving faster than development programs can keep pace.”
• “Leaders who routinize change are three times more likely to achieve healthy team change adoption.”
• “Eighty-one percent of HR leaders report issues with legacy leader thinking, reinforcing the need to identify and eliminate legacy ways of working and empower teams to co-create new approaches.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with Ingrid Laman by contacting Gerri Weinberger at gerri.weinberger@gartner.com. 

Presented by Kaelyn Lowmaster, Director Analyst, Gartner

AI is automating core development tasks and reshaping the experience-building roles that once defined advancement for promising talent. In this session, Kaelyn Lowmaster, Director Analyst at Gartner, offered HR leaders practical next steps for building a strong, resilient internal talent supply as AI continues to reshape work.

• “AI will create more jobs than it eliminates, but it will also upend millions of careers, leaving organizations and employees navigating a ‘messy middle’ of significant workforce disruption and change.”
• “Employees who see a clear career path as AI changes work are 3.5 times more likely to be highly engaged and 3.4 times more likely to be high performers.”
• “Gartner data found that only 35% of employees see a clear career path in their organization as AI changes work, highlighting a growing lack of career clarity across the workforce.” 
• “To help employees thrive in AI-powered organizations, HR leaders should:
  • Identify and target today’s critical skills, and deprioritize the rest 
  • Incentivize development, not just output 
  • Use AI to accelerate learning, not replace it 
  • Engineer new experiences within roles, not just through promotions 
  • Prioritize diverse employee networks, not just senior ones.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with Kaelyn Lowmaster by contacting Gerri Weinberger at gerri.weinberger@gartner.com.