As artificial intelligence, organizational restructuring and shifting workforce expectations accelerate the pace of workplace change, HR leaders are confronting a problem that technology alone cannot solve: helping employees adapt. HCI is launching its Employee Experience Summit, a virtual event focused on manager effectiveness, employee trust, resilience, career growth and change management.
For organizations racing to adopt AI and redesign how work gets done, the technology implementation is often the visible part of transformation. The harder challenge happens afterward, when employees have to change how they work.
That employee-level impact is the focus of HCI’s new Employee Experience Summit, a single-day virtual event aimed at HR and business leaders navigating organizational change.
The summit will examine how companies can help employees adapt to uncertainty while maintaining trust, engagement and performance. Rather than positioning employee experience as a standalone HR initiative, HCI is framing it as an operational component of transformation.
That distinction is becoming increasingly important.
AI adoption, restructuring and changing expectations around flexibility and career development are putting pressure on managers to lead through conditions for which traditional management practices may not have been designed. Employees are being asked to learn new tools, adjust responsibilities and sometimes work within entirely different organizational structures.
The quality of that transition can influence whether a transformation gains momentum or generates resistance.
Stacey Bailey, vice president of product at HCI, said the summit was created around the premise that organizational success increasingly depends on how effectively leaders help employees adapt to change.
The event will feature perspectives from employee experience and culture leaders at organizations including the Atlanta Braves, Coinbase, Expedia Group and GoDaddy. Speakers include DeRetta Rhodes, executive vice president and chief people and culture officer at the Atlanta Braves; Jeremy Browder, director of employee and workplace experience at Coinbase; Mary Fairchild, senior director of culture and employee experience at Expedia Group; and Janelle Jordan, senior program manager of employee experience at GoDaddy.
The speaker lineup points to an important trend in HR technology: employee experience is no longer limited to benefits, workplace perks or engagement surveys.
It increasingly encompasses the systems and management practices that determine how employees experience organizational change.
That includes the manager’s role.
Managers are often the first people employees turn to when responsibilities change, teams are reorganized or new technology is introduced. Yet many organizations still struggle to give managers sufficient training, data and decision-making support.
This creates a potential gap between enterprise transformation strategy and employee reality.
HR technology vendors are responding with platforms designed to support performance management, employee listening, workforce analytics, learning and career development. Companies such as Microsoft, Workday and Salesforce are also incorporating AI into enterprise workflows that influence how employees collaborate and manage work.
But software cannot automatically create trust.
The HCI summit’s emphasis on practical frameworks and manager enablement reflects a broader shift toward treating employee experience as something organizations actively design rather than simply measure.
The event will focus on four areas: leading organizational change while maintaining trust and engagement; helping managers guide teams through uncertainty; reducing burnout and building workforce resilience; and creating employee experiences that support continuous growth.
Each is connected to a broader HR technology challenge.
Consider manager enablement. A performance management platform can provide goals and feedback data, but managers still need the skills to deliver difficult feedback and explain why priorities are changing.
The same applies to career development. A talent marketplace may identify potential career paths, but employees need managers who can discuss those options and organizations that make internal mobility realistic.
Employee listening technology presents a similar issue. Surveys can reveal sentiment, but the value comes from whether leaders act on the information.
This is where the employee experience market increasingly intersects with organizational change management.
The global market for employee experience technology includes employee engagement platforms, performance management software, workplace communications tools, learning systems, employee listening products and workforce analytics. Competition is shifting toward platforms that can connect these capabilities and use data to provide more personalized experiences.
AI is likely to accelerate that convergence.
Generative AI can help employees access information, summarize feedback, create learning content and automate administrative work. AI-enabled workforce analytics can potentially identify patterns in engagement or performance. But organizations also face questions around transparency, employee trust, data privacy and the appropriate boundaries for AI-driven recommendations.
The summit’s focus on resilience is therefore timely, but it also raises an important distinction for HR leaders.
Resilience should not become a way of placing responsibility for organizational strain entirely on employees. Training workers to adapt does not remove the underlying causes of burnout, poor management or excessive workloads.
The more sustainable approach combines individual capability with organizational changes that make adaptation manageable.
That means clearer communication, better manager training, realistic workloads, meaningful career pathways and technology that reduces friction rather than creating another layer of complexity.
PerformYard, a performance management software provider, is the exclusive sponsor of the event. Its involvement also highlights the convergence between employee experience and performance management. As organizations rethink how they measure performance in hybrid and AI-enabled workplaces, traditional annual reviews are increasingly being supplemented by continuous feedback, goal management and development conversations.
For enterprise HR teams, the summit’s broader message is that transformation requires more than deploying new technology.
The employee experience has become part of the transformation architecture itself.
Organizations that can connect change management, manager capability, career development and employee feedback are better positioned to understand how transformation is actually landing with their workforce. Those that focus exclusively on technology deployment risk discovering too late that adoption is as much a people problem as a technical one.
HCI’s Employee Experience Summit is designed around that intersection, bringing together HR and business leaders for a virtual day of expert sessions and practical frameworks.
The event may ultimately be less about employee experience as a category and more about a question confronting nearly every enterprise: How do you help people keep moving when the organization itself keeps changing?
Market Landscape
The employee experience technology market is broadening as organizations connect engagement, performance management, learning, career mobility and workforce analytics.
Vendors increasingly compete on their ability to create a continuous employee lifecycle rather than isolated HR workflows. AI is adding another layer, enabling more personalized recommendations and automated employee support while introducing governance and trust concerns.
For HR buyers, the most important consideration is increasingly integration. Employee experience platforms need to connect with core HR systems, collaboration tools, performance data and learning infrastructure without creating fragmented employee journeys.
The market is also moving toward manager-centric technology. Managers remain a critical interface between corporate strategy and employee experience, making manager enablement an increasingly important component of HR technology investments.
Top Insights
- HCI’s Employee Experience Summit will examine how organizations can manage AI-driven change while maintaining employee trust, engagement and workforce resilience.
- Speakers from Coinbase, Expedia Group, GoDaddy and the Atlanta Braves will share practical approaches to culture, management and employee experience.
- Manager enablement is emerging as a critical transformation capability as employees increasingly rely on frontline leaders during organizational uncertainty.
- Employee experience platforms are converging with performance management, learning, career development and workforce analytics to create more connected HR technology ecosystems.
- AI can personalize employee support, but sustainable transformation still depends on organizational design, effective leadership and realistic approaches to workforce resilience.
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