The gap between AI ambition and AI readiness is real at every stage — whether an organization is defining its strategy for the first time or working to make early momentum last.

This session, the first in a three-part AI Collaboratory series, starts there. It is designed for HR leaders at any stage of the adoption journey — including those who are still working out what their organization’s AI strategy should be and what their own role in it looks like. For those further along, the session offers a structured opportunity to pressure-test assumptions, learn from peers, and work through the organizational challenges that pilots alone do not resolve.

Rather than surveying what AI can do, we examine what organizations actually need to do differently: how people, culture, and systems must shift for adoption to move beyond the starting line — and beyond early pilots and isolated wins.

What the session covers

The session centers on a question that sounds simple but rarely is: what does HR’s role in AI adoption actually require? Not in theory, but in practice — when budgets are constrained, leadership alignment is partial, and the workforce is somewhere between curious and anxious.

Across the session, we examine:

• • • How to assess where your organization is today and identify a realistic path forward
    • What organizational conditions distinguish adoption that sustains from adoption that stalls
    • How HR leaders can influence peers and executive teams as co-owners of AI strategy, not just implementers
    • What people considerations change at each stage of the adoption curve, from early experimentation through integration and scaling
    • How to build accountability for AI adoption that does not depend on individual champions
    • What “leadership alignment” actually requires, and how organizations close the gap between stated commitment and genuine organizational readiness

How the session is structured

The session combines a senior HR leader panel, a research-grounded thought leadership presentation, practitioner case studies, and structured small-group work. Participants will leave with a draft outline of a people strategy applicable to their own organization — whether that means clarifying where to start or strengthening what is already underway.

Speakers and facilitators include senior HR leaders sharing candid lessons from their organizations’ AI journeys, researchers presenting evidence-based frameworks for organizational readiness, and HR practitioners offering case studies of what has worked — and what has not.

Table discussions are facilitated by members of the HRSF AI Collaboratory Task Force. Groups are organized by organizational AI maturity, so conversations are grounded in shared context and relevant to the challenges participants are actually facing — regardless of how far along their organizations are.