Two days at the 20th World HR Congress in Mexico City (23–24 September 2026), followed by a WFPMA Board meeting, have left us with plenty to reflect on. As WFPMA Board members representing Europe, we joined more than 3,500 participants to explore the Congress theme: Leadership in Motion: Transforming Talent and Culture.
There were new connections, warm hugs with old friends, music, dancing and even exercise during the breaks. A lot of energy – in every sense of the word.
But perhaps the strongest thought we took away was this: We are not in a race with technology. We are experiencing a tectonic shift in how we understand work, organizations – and what it means to be human at work.
This thought was already there in WFPMA President Low Peck Kem’s opening address: ‘Technology may transform work, but people remain at the heart of every organization.’ Her call for a future where technology amplifies human capability, rather than diminishes human dignity, became one of the threads running through these two days. And this requires something much deeper than simply ‘adopting AI’. We need to rethink the role we want people to have in this new reality, and how technology can free our time and energy for what matters more.
Several speakers helped us explore what this might mean in practice.
Jesús Cochegrús invited us to think about our companies and our lives as a video game: unexpected challenges, changing conditions, different levels, failures, another attempt, another strategy. The game does not necessarily become easier. We learn how to play it differently.
Dora Valdez added courage – believing in an idea, standing up for it and making it happen.
And Fons Trompenaars made us think about ambidexterity: perhaps we need to stop thinking in ORs and become better at ANDs. Stability and change. Global and local. Technology and humanity. Not compromise. Integration.
BCG research presented by Philipp Kolo and the WFPMA panel brought these ideas closer to organizational reality: adaptability, the critical role – and sometimes resistance – of middle management, and the need to move beyond talking about AI adoption to changing how organizations work.
As Lucas van Wees explained during the panel, 10% of AI’s added value comes from algorithms, 20% from technology and 70% from people, processes and organizational transformation. The AI agenda is therefore also an HR agenda. For HR, this means working backwards from the business problem: identifying the gaps and deciding how to address them. High tech, with a human touch.
Then Amin Toufani’s particularly thought-provoking talk, From HR to xHR: Exponential Human Readiness, pushed the question further. If AI becomes capable of performing an increasingly large part of what we currently call ‘work’, perhaps we are not simply adding another tool. We are redesigning the organization itself – and the place and role of people within it.
So, the question is not simply ‘How do we keep up with AI?’ What do we hand over to AI? Where do we become stronger by working together with it? And what do we deliberately choose to keep deeply human?
There was also a small paradox that made us smile. Almost everyone talked about focus, choosing where to invest our time and energy, and using AI to free ourselves for what matters. And yet, we have rarely seen so much AI-generated imagery in presentations – warriors, knights, dramatic battles, futuristic worlds…
It left us wondering: when AI makes it so easy to create more, how do we know when more actually adds value? Perhaps mastering AI is also about knowing what not to generate.
And this brings us back to HR. Our responsibility is not to protect people from technology. Nor is it to help humans compete with AI. It is to help organizations consciously shape a new relationship between human and artificial intelligence – and make choices about the place we want people to have in it. Perhaps the alebrije, chosen by the organizers as a symbol of diversity and transformation, was the perfect companion for these two days: different creatures, colours and forms coming together to create something new – without losing their distinctiveness.
Maybe this is exactly where we are now.
And it makes the direction we have chosen within EAPM for International HR Day 2027 feel even more relevant:
Lead change. Keep it human.
Solveiga Grudiene and Lucas van Wees,
WFPMA Board Members
