3 quotes that tell the story of UNLEASH America 2025

Wow, what a show UNLEASH America 2025 was!

Over three-days, the UNLEASH team welcomed hundreds of top tier speakers to discuss the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the HR and technology sectors.

AI was, of course, top of mind for all the speakers – it was the core topic of the Day 1 summits, CHRO panels and breakouts, and Main Stage keynotes from Josh Bersin, MIT’s Max Tegmark and Lenovo’s Chief AI Officer Doug Fisher.

Overall, UNLEASH America took an optimistic view of AI – seeing it as an opportunity for good, and particularly for HR to become an even strategic business function (as Atlassian’s CPO Avani Prabhakar put it during the Day One summits).

Tegmark particularly had an optimistic message for the HR leaders in the audience – he described himself as being “team human” and having faith in regulators to do the right thing on AI.

This hopeful message was my top takeaway from UNLEASH America 2025 – my seventh show as a journalist here.

Let’s dig more into the contents – here are some of the standout quotes that, for me, tell the story of the event.

Feeling the FOMO? Make sure you join in Paris in October for UNLEASH World, or next year in Las Vegas for UNLEASH America 2026. You can grab a pass now.

Josh Bersin: AI is the ‘only technology I’ve ever seen that actually completely transforms the way the company operates’

Josh Bersin’s keynotes are always jam-packed full of great insights that keep HR leaders up-to-date on the latest AI developments.

For him the adoption of AI is not really a technology challenge, it is all about people. “People will be a major part of the AI revolution”, and the key for HR is to “try and help people not to be afraid of it.

He declared that “the big early day story on AI is productivity”, but to truly reap the rewards of AI, organizations need to look beyond this. AI is the “‘only technology I’ve ever seen that actually completely transforms the way the company operates”.

For Bersin, HR must remember, “we are playing a very important role”.

You’re going to look back 10 years from now, and you’re going to remember 2025 as the year of reinvention of everything just began”.

Want to hear more from Bersin? In an exclusive UNLEASH webinar on June 10, Bersin and Editor-in-Chief Nima Sherpa Green will discuss what every CHRO Needs to know right now about agentic AI. You can sign up here!

While there’s lots of excitement around AI, of course, bias and risk around AI was also a huge topic at UNLEASH America.

This was the core of Dr Joy Buolamwini’s opening keynote. She called on HR leaders in the audience to ask the uncomfortable questions and to reduce exclusive overheads.

While Lenovo’s Fisher – who is the tech giant’s self-proclaimed Chief Trust Officer – shared that “AI is only as secure as the governance behind it”.

I sat down with Fisher for an exclusive video interview – stay tuned, as we dig more into his advice around AI governance in that conversation.

Phillips 66’s CHRO: ‘Leadership is not a rung on a career ladder’

Throughout the show, the audience were treated to stellar panels of HR leaders from the world’s largest brands.

One on Day Two featured CHROs from Phillips 66, Microsoft and LVMH North America – moderated by Gary Bolles – and it was just full of such great insights about the future of leadership to drive this HR revolution.

Phillips 66’s Andrez Carberry stated that “leadership is not a rung on a career ladder”, “it is a true responsibility”.

Leaders need to live and breathe culture, and they need to avoid siloed thinking.

Microsoft’s newly appointed CPO Amy Coleman added that organizations need to move from thinking about change management to change readiness.

In order to have a change ready workforce, Microsoft is leaning into coaching its leaders for times of “uncertainty”.

Agility is essential in the future, but so is having a “sprinkle of optimism” so that leaders can communicate hope to their workforce.

Focusing on the future of leadership, on a panel at the end of Day Three, Achievers’ CTO Anu Subramanian stated that its time to reframe conversations about failure.

If we want our people to be innovative, and push boundaries to the benefit of businesses, then “we don’t talk about failure” – instead, everything is a learning opportunity.

“Great leaps in anything come from taking a chance.”

For Jacqui Canney, Chief People and AI enablement Officer at ServiceNow, the key here is to create somewhere for employees to play.

As HR leaders, “we are driving the largest change management that I’ve ever seen in my career”; “how are we taking ownership of how to manage that change journey for our people?”.

What is the strategy? How are you thinking about your early career employees? – “are they getting the same chance at grabbing that run like I did?”

L’Oréal North America CHRO: ‘You can’t use an old map to explore a new world. Our people are counting on us.’

Closing out UNLEASH America 2025 was Stephanie Kramer, L’Oréal’s CHRO North America.

She concluded by sharing that “I very much believe you can’t use an old map to explore a new world. Our people are counting on us”.

This echoes what Google’s Chief Talent and Learning Officer Brian Glaser shared earlier on Day Three: “Leading right now is not for the faint of heart.” Leaders need to step up to provide the conditions for people to do the best work of their lives.

Given that “the very nature of work, as we speak, is changing right before our eyes” as SAP SVP and Global Head of People & Culture Services, Dr Christian Schmeichel shared on a Main Stage panel.

“Look five or ten years down the road – what does your future workforce look like? How many kinds of skills, how many workers are really needed? How much AI do you have, with how many robots?” He asked.

“Then you start to understand what you need to do in the future of your people practices, how you incentivize this new growth force, how you improve, what is good work for, how you train.”

To conclude, ServiceNow’s Canney stated: “AI is a really important tool, but if you don’t bring the people along with it you won’t get the value”.

While this may all seem daunting, start small is Canney’s message.

The most important thing that any of us have is time”, so think about AI in terms of how it gives you more time, whether that’s to spend with family and friends, or to do more meaningful work.

Stay tuned for more insights on UNLEASH America 2025 from me and my Editorial colleagues – as well as that interview with Doug from Lenovo, we also sat down for exclusive conversations with Bersin, Google’s Glaser, SAP’s Dr Schmeichel, Bristol Myers Squibb’s Jamaal Sebastian-Barnes, and many more.