Connect, learn, and set the energy for the entire day.

Starting TechHR Pulse Mumbai 2026 with a power-packed roundup of the must-know shifts, highlights, and stories that frame today’s dialogue.

In a world defined by constant disruption, leaders are being called to navigate uncertainty with clarity, courage, and compassion. This welcome note sets the tone for a day focused on embracing the unknown, not with fear, but with informed fearlessness. It highlights how awareness of shifting realities, clarity of purpose, and collaborative strength can transform ambiguity into opportunity. By leaning into change with openness and collective intelligence, leaders can chart new paths, inspire resilience, and unlock possibilities that traditional playbooks often overlook. This session invites everyone to step forward boldly, together, into what’s next.

As the talent landscape evolves, hiring is no longer about filling roles — it’s about engineering an AI-powered talent engine that blends speed, precision, and human connection. This keynote explores how forward-thinking organisations are shifting from transactional hiring to dynamic talent ecosystems, accelerating decisions with AI, and crafting seamless, personalised candidate journeys. Learn how Talent Acquisition is being redefined by three core pillars: Talent Communities, Talent Velocity, and Talent Experience.

Founder & CEO

What does it take to keep the team together when numbers wobble? In this candid on-stage chat, Shantanu Deshpande shares how he has led Bombay Shaving Company through the messy middle, navigating setbacks, rebuilding momentum, and keeping culture strong under pressure. The conversation also explores what it takes to compete with industry giants, and how leaders build high-performing teams that can take on far bigger players without losing belief or speed. A must-attend for HR leaders shaping resilient cultures where people, brand, and performance move together.

Grab your coffee, head towards the exhibition zone, meet our partners & explore innovative solutions!

As organisations scale across geographies, HR operations are becoming increasingly complex: fragmented systems, inconsistent policies, compliance risk, and slow decision cycles continue to limit agility. While automation has improved efficiency, it has not fundamentally changed how HR operates. Agentic AI marks the next inflexion point. This session explores how autonomous, goal-driven AI agents are moving HR from task execution to orchestration, managing workflows, resolving exceptions, and enabling real-time decision-making across global HR operations. From multi-country payroll and compliance monitoring to workforce administration and employee support, agentic AI is reshaping HR’s operating model.

Chair of Board and Advisor

SVP & CHRO

CHRO

It makes one central argument: AI isn’t failing because the technology isn’t ready. It’s failing because organisations aren’t. Most enterprises are treating AI as a technical upgrade or a set of isolated pilots. What this keynote surfaces is that AI is actually a leadership and language problem. When leaders, business teams, and technologists don’t share a common way of reasoning about AI, scale becomes impossible. The talk reframes responsibility. The real risk isn’t Gen Z or future talent. It’s the current workforce and leadership systems that haven’t been designed for AI-led decision-making. It then lays out what actually works. Not frameworks for the sake of frameworks, but three things that must move together: shared AI understanding across the organiation, learning that mirrors real work, and strong human judgment to guide AI responsibly. The keynote closes with a clear call to action. There is no map for AI. But leaders don’t need one. They need a shared language, better judgment, and systems that can scale. In short, this is not a talk about adopting AI. It’s a talk about what leadership needs to change for AI to actually work.

President & Chief Revenue Officer

Despite increased HR tech adoption, maturity remains uneven. Insights from a survey of 350+ HR leaders show that while organisations invest in multiple HR tools, 53% still rely on Excel, 47% struggle with manual reporting, and 45% operate with disconnected systems. Even as AI gains prominence, expectations often outpace readiness, 43% expect AI to fix reporting and analytics, yet weak data foundations and partial automation continue to slow decisions. This session examines why the next phase of HR tech impact will come not from adding more AI, but from strengthening integration, data trust, and decision relevance.

President Growth

In a world of ambiguity, pretending to have certainty is a liability. This talk focuses on how HDFC ERGO leaders build trust by admitting what they don't know and crowd-sourcing solutions from their people.

Lunchtime isn't just about feeding your appetite, but also feeding your connections. Grab a plate, make a connection & enjoy the synergy!

Through P&G’s real-world practices, leaders will learn how care shows up in decision-making, leadership behaviours, talent systems, and ways of working, embedded well into the culture. The session will help you learn how organisational health, defined by trust, inclusion, wellbeing, accountability, and clarity, creates the conditions for faster innovation, stronger execution, and resilient growth, even at scale.

Head - HR

High performance isn’t about pushing harder, it’s about enabling people to operate at their best consistently. This panel explores the invisible drivers of performance that leaders often overlook: energy, cognitive load, attention, and the ability to focus deeply in increasingly fragmented work environments. Learn how leaders design work, manage focus, and enable people to deliver consistently by investing in their health and development.

Head of People & Culture (HR)

Talent expects wellbeing to be seamlessly woven into the fabric of work itself, not treated as a perk, but as a core part of culture. This panel explores how progressive organisations are integrating physical, mental, and social wellbeing into daily employee experience, leadership behaviors, team rituals, and workplace norms. HR leaders will uncover how embedding health into culture drives real impact: stronger engagement, lower burnout, higher performance, and improved retention. The conversation will highlight the strategies companies are using to build workplaces where people feel energised, connected, and genuinely cared for.

People Director & Head HR

Head of Revenue (Bangalore & West)

Organisations are competing for skills at scale, traditional hiring models continue to favour narrow talent pools, credential-heavy filters, and slow, opaque processes. This limits access for candidates and constrains outcomes for employers. The real opportunity lies in reimagining hiring as an open, skills-driven ecosystem, where talent is discovered early, engaged meaningfully, and evaluated fairly. In this case study session, listen as a leading organisation shares how AI-enabled, skills-first talent engagement can democratise access while improving hiring speed, quality, and experience. The conversation will explore how the organisation moved beyond resumes and referrals to build inclusive talent communities, use real-world challenges and assessments to surface potential, and apply AI to scale engagement and decision-making.

Associate General Manager - HR

Head Employee Experience

AI is everywhere but not everyone is ready for it. Employees are anxious about being replaced, overwhelmed by constant tech rollouts, and struggling to keep up with new digital expectations. HR teams face the difficult task of driving tech adoption while managing fear, fatigue, and capability gaps. This session explores the human side of digital transformation how to reduce AI anxiety, build confidence, close digital skill gaps, and design adoption strategies rooted in empathy and clarity.

Region Head - SE Asia

As the world races toward an AI-driven, hyperconnected and increasingly unpredictable 2030, the demands on leaders are being rewritten in real time. Drawing on insights from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs outlook, this power-packed panel explores the essential skills that will define high-impact leadership in the decade ahead. From digital and AI fluency to empathy, culture-building and talent magnetism; from resilience and agility to ethical and sustainability leadership, today’s leaders must transform not just what they know, but how they think, decide, and show up. This session brings together leaders who are already leading at the edge of disruption to decode the new leadership blueprint: one that blends technology with humanity, data with intuition, and strategy with self-mastery. Walk away with a clear view of the competencies that matter, the mindsets that differentiate, and the actions required to build truly future-fit leaders.

VP & Global Head L&D

Managing Director, Head - HR India

Global Head Talent & Learning

As India sets its sights on becoming a $10 trillion economy, the real differentiator will not just be capital or technology but leadership. Drawing from his experience as CTO, his work on AI-led public sector transformation in Govt, mentor for fintechs in IIMB, and his deep engagement as a youth mentor with multiple startups, Rohit Kilam will share insights on: What leadership must look like in an AI-first, India-scale economy, how institutions including corporates, government, and academian can build leadership pipelines early and how young talent can be prepared to lead responsibly amid rapid technological change.

As we close TechHR Pulse Mumbai 2026, the mic now comes to you, this final moment is about your reflections, your questions, and your perspective on the unknown.

AI in talent has moved beyond experimentation—but delivering real, defensible ROI at scale remains a challenge for many organizations. In this fireside chat, Amit Kumar, Director of Product, Phenom and Ravalnath Kamath, VP & Global Head - Global Resourcing Group, Quest Global unpack how Quest Global reimagined its talent supply chain through an AI-driven transformation powered by Phenom. The conversation will explore how Quest Global built an end-to-end AI ecosystem across sourcing, hiring, and talent engagement—achieving a 62% reduction in sourcing costs, a 21% improvement in time-to-hire, 20% increase in recruiter productivity, and a 75% reduction in vendor dependency. Beyond efficiency gains, the session will also dive into how Quest Global operationalized ethical AI, with bias mitigation and continuous monitoring guardrails embedded into decision-making. Designed for senior HR and talent leaders, this session offers a practical, outcome-led view of what it truly takes to scale applied AI responsibly—turning talent strategy into measurable business impact.

Vice President & Global Head - Global Resourcing Group

Director Product

HR is no longer Human Resources — it’s Hybrid Resources. In a world where employees, gig workers, and AI agents work together, employee experience can’t be built on policies and processes alone. This keynote challenges the old equation of EX = Policies + Processes + Org EQ and introduces the new reality. Because when machines shape decisions, empathy must scale — and when scale accelerates, human judgment must lead.

Senior Vice President – Marketing

AI is fundamentally reshaping the world of work, accelerating some roles, reinventing others, and rendering a few obsolete. For freshers, AI is lowering the barrier to entry while raising the bar on skills: routine tasks are automated, but creativity, analytical reasoning, and the ability to work with AI tools have become core differentiators. For mature talent, AI disrupts long-held role identities by shifting value from experience-based expertise to agility, digital fluency, and problem-solving. Their deep knowledge remains vital, but must now be amplified through AI to stay relevant. Learn how to support continuous reinvention, including re-skilling pathways for mature employees and accelerated development journeys for early talent.

Sr. Editor

High-performing organisations in the AI era will be the ones with the strongest cultural and execution foundations to use those tools meaningfully. Learn how to become one. Get direct access to an execution framework for building high-performing teams. This session provides a talent management blueprint designed with performance at its core, specifically tailored to integrate the company's culture, growth strategy, and business context with AI.

Founder

India’s manufacturing output grew 4.26% in FY 2024–25, with Maharashtra leading several sub-sectors. And blue-collar and frontline roles are being reshaped by automation, ergonomic monitoring, and digital workflow tools (Deloitte 2025). These insights indicate how Mumbai’s industrial corridor: spanning automotive, pharma, chemicals, engineering is entering a phase where intelligence matters as much as infrastructure. This session explores how leaders can redesign work, training, and mobility pathways for Industry 4.0 and 5.0 environments. We unpack how AI-assisted operations, digital twins, and predictive safety systems will redefine frontline jobs, and what it will take to build a workforce that is digitally capable, safety-first, and ready for continuous upskilling.

Chief HR Officer

Chief Human Capital & Sustainability Officer

Head Global Talent Acquisition

This masterclass goes beyond tools and technologies to examine what leading truly means when intelligence is no longer exclusively human. As the pace of disruption accelerates, the role of HR is no longer just about enabling leadership, it’s about engineering it. This panel explores how HR leaders are reinventing leadership development for an era defined by digital acceleration, distributed teams, and constant transformation. From rethinking pipelines and capability frameworks to embedding coaching and learning ecosystems, discover how you can shape future-ready, human-centered organisations where leadership isn’t positional, it’s pervasive.

Strategic Growth & Leadership Masterclass Facilitator

Leaders often solve problems by analysing symptoms, communication gaps, misalignment, conflict, low motivation, without fully seeing the system creating them. Systemic Constellation offers a breakthrough approach: it visualises the hidden dynamics shaping behaviours, culture, and performance, making the invisible visible. In this immersive workshop, participants will learn how to apply Systemic Constellation principles to unlock their own and their team’s potential. Through a blend of short inputs, live demonstrations, and hands-on exercises, attendees will experience how systemic insights lead to clarity, alignment, and better decision-making.

Certified Life Coach, PhD in Psychotherapy & Counselling

In today’s disruptive world, learning effectiveness is often determined not by the availability of content, but by how seamlessly it reaches the last mile of the learner journey. This tour will share WNS’s journey on how they have blended technology and their foray into Agentic Nudging—an AI-powered approach designed to encourage employees to complete their learning journeys in a personalized, timely, and non-intrusive way.