Reflecting on Transform 2026, Las Vegas by Ruth Reese
I was in Las Vegas in March for Transform 2026, a conference for HR leaders and people professionals who want to stay ahead of where work is heading. Honestly, I went expecting to come home with a list of new tools to look into. What I actually came home with was the realisation that nobody has this all figured out yet.
We’re All Figuring Out AI at the Same Time
Every session, every hallway conversation, circled back to a common theme. We are all trying to work out what AI actually means for the people in our organisations, not just the processes.
One CPO panel hit on something I have been thinking about since. When you introduce an AI product internally, the technical rollout is the easy part. The harder question is how it lands with your team. If the tool looks or feels like it could take someone’s job, that matters, even if it is not the intention. People notice. Morale shifts. And most implementation plans do not budget for that.
Women and individual contributors are adopting AI at work at a much slower rate than senior leaders and their male counterparts. Left unaddressed, that becomes a skills gap, and then an income gap. Companies that are serious about AI need to think about how they bring everyone along, not just the people who were already comfortable with technology.
None of this feels far away from Australia. We are not getting the usual buffer of watching other markets go first. The pace of change is the same here, and the organisations waiting to see how it settles before doing anything are already running behind.
In a world where AI can do more and more of the actual work, the thing that still belongs entirely to people is the relationship. Your network, your reputation, your ability to show up for someone in a way a tool cannot.
The Quiet Thing Nobody Said Out Loud
Transform also reminded me how much has quietly shifted. We have been so focused on making work faster and smoother that somewhere along the way the texture of it changed. Fewer spontaneous conversations. Less of the stuff that does not show up in a productivity metric but turns out to matter quite a lot. We humans still need each other, maybe now more than ever.
A session on mental health in the global workforce gave me language for what I had been picking up all week. The part that stayed with me was about manager capability. Not training managers to be counsellors, but giving them enough awareness to notice when someone on their team is not okay, and enough of a relationship with that person that a conversation can actually happen. Peer support came up too, the idea that trusted relationships at work, whether with a manager or a colleague, are genuinely protective.
In Australia this connects to something we see clearly in the group risk space. Mental health is the number one reason for income protection claims here. That is worth sitting with. Getting support to people earlier, before things reach a crisis point, is better for the individual and it changes claims outcomes. Those two things are not in tension.
I also kept thinking about what it means for us professionally. The people I have seen build the most resilient careers are not the ones who mastered every new tool first. They are the ones who invested in relationships and showed up consistently for the people around them. AI can take on a lot. It cannot replicate that.
Benefits That Follow People Through Real Life
Something came up repeatedly at Transform 2026 that I suspect every HR leader already knows: employees want benefits that feel relevant to their actual lives. Delivering that at scale is a much harder problem.
A few sessions wrestled with this without arriving at a tidy answer, which felt honest. But the organisations that seemed to be doing it well had one thing in common. They had a clear sense of what their benefits program was actually for.
Not a list of offerings, but a point of view.
Something they could return to when a new vendor pitched them, or when they were reviewing a policy that had not been touched in three years.
The lens that made most sense to me was thinking about benefits across life stages rather than trying to build something that works for everyone all at once. Becoming a parent. Going through menopause. Caring for kids and ageing parents at the same time. Navigating health changes that come with getting older. These are not niche situations. Most people in your workforce are living through at least one of them at any given time, and a benefits program that reflects that earns a different kind of trust than one that does not.
For People and Finance professionals this framing also makes the internal conversation easier. It gives you a rationale that holds up. When someone asks why you are adding or removing something, you have an answer that is grounded in something more considered than ‘other companies are doing it.’
It also matters more right now because people are paying closer attention. When the future feels uncertain, employees look at how an organisation treats them as a signal of whether they want to stay. Benefits are part of that signal.
At Steadfast Life we work with mid-market employers on this kind of thinking, from strategy through to implementation and renewal. If you are looking at your benefits program and wondering whether it is still doing what it should, let’s find time to talk.
Ruth is an Account Director at Steadfast Life, working with employers to design employee benefits and protection strategies that support engagement, retention and workforce wellbeing. With experience across fast-growth and multinational organisations, she is particularly interested in the intersection of people, technology and the evolving future of work.