HR Week

What happens when someone who builds products…also spends their time helping others actually ship them? You get someone like Marija Milosevic. Marija is a product, growth and AI builder who does the thing many people talk about, but few actually do. Marija's a Lovable Ambassador, founder of buildthat.tech, and a product builder who's spent years helping startups ship. She's the kind of person who builds Android apps during lockdown to help elderly people order food, teaches hackathon teams how to win, and genuinely believes that if you can describe what you need, you can build it. At Fusion, she's leading a hands-on Lovable workshop for HR builders—people leaders who want to stop waiting for vendors to solve their problems and start prototyping solutions themselves. No coding experience required. Just ideas and the willingness to experiment. (And yeah, every Fusion startup gets 10k in Lovable credits, so there's that.) Which is exactly what our HR community wants to see inside Fusion. Because the future of HR tech isn’t shaped only by big ideas. It’s shaped by people who build fast, experiment often, and aren’t afraid to rethink how products come to life. Marija joins our growing lineup of speakers, advisors and HR tech founders helping bridge the gap between AI builders and the people who will actually use what gets created: Chad Sowash, Alycia Damp, PhD, Alisher Jafarov, and Tom Zrubecky Together with our partners from the AI for HR Community, Vanessa Gutierrez, Surbhi Ugra, and Stacey Talve, Marija will be lighting the HR Builder stage on 🔥 Fusion by HR Week | May 20–21 | Online To register, link in the comments Hosted by Peter Hopwood // Story Coach // Global Events Host Hopwood | Program Chair Maja Ninkovic Shapera | Program Director Valerie Capers Workman | Chief Product Advisor David Hannibal

This is the part where we're supposed to play it cool. Barbara Matthews is opening Fusion! May 20th, first keynote. We are not playing it cool 🔥🔥🔥 Barbara spent 12 years building people operations at Google and then led Stripe's entire HR function across EMEA and APAC. Now she's Chief People Officer at Remote - a company that's basically built on the thesis that the future of work isn't tied to location, legacy systems, or the way things have always been done. Which is exactly why she's the right person to open Fusion, one of the most unique HR events of the year - the only place where innovative #hrtech startups build bridges with HR tech users and explore key future of work topics. Barbara's kicking it off by talking about AI in HR, not the hype, but the real questions HR professionals should be asking themselves right now. Because if you're building distributed teams, rethinking talent models, or figuring out how AI fits into any of this, you need someone who's already done it at scale. She’s joining a fabulous speaker lineup Nadia Vatalidis (she/her/hers), Vanessa Monsequeira - चित्रलेखा, Chad Sowash, Perry Timms, Alisa Reznik, Dr. Elizabeth C. Nelson. And huge shoutout to our community partners Stakkd, AI for HR Community, OpenOrg, and Lovable as the startup partner.

After hearing from 100 speakers at HR Week, we heard the real story behind AI adoption.  AI adoption isn’t only a technology challenge. People leaders treated AI adoption as a system problem: behavior change, incentives, workflows, governance, and capability-building - not a software deployment. The strongest pattern was consistent: adoption follows value, value follows clear use cases, and scaling follows governance-by-design + enablement.   Where teams stumbled, it wasn’t because the model was weak, but because the operating context was. Three things kept coming up in those conversations: ✅ AI doesn’t resolve messy processes - it simply accelerates them, which makes teams trust the output even less ✅ Adoption tends to follow value, and value appears when AI is embedded directly into real work rather than introduced as another separate initiative to learn ✅Governance is a day-one issue: without guardrails, employees either avoid AI (“it’s risky”) or use it recklessly (“no one’s watching”). Both outcomes kill credible adoption. Our experts described the pattern that actually worked: ideate broadly, prioritize pragmatic value, pilot in a contained environment, and scale only once governance and proof are in place. This is exactly why conversations between builders and HR leaders matter so much right now. The real opportunity isn’t just in what AI can technically do, but in understanding what teams will actually trust, use consistently, and build into how they work. This is also why we’re shaping Fusion the way we are. Founders don’t just present their AI ideas; they get direct input from HR leaders who are dealing with these adoption challenges every day, asking what would actually work inside a real organization and what would likely stall after the demo. We’re so excited to continue that conversation with speakers and advisors like: Michael Jones, Dr. Elizabeth C. Nelson, Vanessa Monsequeira - चित्रलेखा, and many others. Hosted by Peter Hopwood // Story Coach // Global Events Host | Program Chair Maja Ninkovic Shapera | Program Director Valerie Capers Workman | Chief Product Advisor David Hannibal Fusion by HR Week | May 20–21 | Online

David Hannibal is joining Fusion as Chief Product Advisor, and if you know enterprise AI products, you know this is a big deal. Dave has led product and corporate development across global organizations and worked on enterprise GenAI platforms trusted by highly regulated industries. With Wavefront Innovations, LLC, he’s spent years translating big AI visions into roadmaps engineering can build, marketing can explain, and sales can actually sell. Which is exactly the perspective we want inside Fusion. On May 20–21, he’ll also lead the Fusion Founders’ Den — a space where HR tech founders get real talk on product strategy, go-to-market, and how to build something users don’t immediately want to replace. What does it take to go from pilot to production? How do you balance innovation with governance? What makes AI useful beyond the demo? These are the kinds of conversations that shape better products. The boldest founders in the AI in HR space are stepping onto the Fusion stage, including Shapes (formerly DreamTeam) (Shirley Baumer), PRJCT LAZRUS (Marcus Workman), Talentpilot (Tom Zrubecky), Avery (Alisher Jafarov), Beneflo (Alexander Snurnitsyn), and Open Org (Adam Horne). David also joins our growing lineup of speakers, advisors, and HR tech leaders helping bridge the gap between AI ambition and real-world adoption: Thomas Moeller Lybaek, Aylia Naqvi, Sian Visser, Marija Milosevic, and many more. Fusion by HR Week May 20–21, 2026 | Online hrweek.global

This is exactly the kind of builder we love bringing into Fusion! Open Org and Adam Horne are leaning into feedback, building in public, and actually inviting HR leaders into the process. And after all, that’s exactly what the Fusion stage is designed for. - Founders showing what they’ve built. - People leaders reacting in real time. - Products getting shaped in the room. Alongside OpenOrg, we’re also welcoming startups like Rounds, ZenHire, and HIOFU, all taking bold approaches to how HR tech gets built and used. Across Fusion, we’ll also hear from speakers like Susan P. Chen, Ph.D. (co:grow), Valerie Capers Workman (Empower Pharmacy), Glenn Martin (Never Mind The Job Spec), and many others. We’re also excited to welcome Chad Sowash, one of the hosts of HR’s most dangerous podcast, The Chad & Cheese Podcast, as one of our newest partners, alongside Lovable and the rest of the Fusion ecosystem. This is going to be a very interesting room! Fusion by HR Week | May 20–21 | Online Hosted by Peter Hopwood // Story Coach // Global Events Host | Program Chair Maja Ninkovic Shapera | Program Director Valerie Capers Workman | Chief Product Advisor David Hannibal

Fusion by HR Week starts May 20! Over the years, we've brought together 10,000+ People leaders from around the world to explore the future of work. It was innovative, boundary-pushing, and impactful. And it created a perfect platform for us to do something more. Fusion is a one-of-a-kind event where senior People leaders from the HR Week community step into an advisory role and use their experience to shape the future of HR Tech. Over two days, handpicked, growth-ready HR Tech startups take the stage. It looks like a pitching session, but it’s so much more than that! Instead of pitching to VCs, founders present their products to HR advisors and find out how they truly land in today's HR landscape - what resonates, what's missing, and what would make them genuinely useful in real organizations. Why Fusion? Why now? HR Tech is being fundamentally disrupted. AI isn't just a feature anymore, it's becoming the infrastructure. HR teams are shifting from tool users to tool builders. The gap between what's being built and what's actually needed? It's widening. The most valuable knowledge about what will make the new wave of HR Tech work is held by the People leaders who use it daily - and carry the scars of previous implementations (IYKYK 😨) And yet, builders rarely have privileged access to that knowledge, at scale. Fusion changes that. It turns a global HR community into an active force, helping the next generation of HR Tech become not just usable, but genuinely lovable. Thanks to our Startup partners Lovable and community partners AI for HR Community, AIHR | Academy to Innovate HR, Stakkd, OpenOrg for helping us bring together some of the most influential voices in modern HR to directly shape the future of HR Tech. Thanks to our speakers Nadia Vatalidis (she/her/hers), Vanessa Monsequeira - चित्रलेखा, Michael Jones, Dr. Elizabeth C. Nelson, and many others. The boldest founders in AI in HR space are taking part on the Fusion stage - Rounds, ZenHire, Talentpilot, PRJCT LAZRUS, Shapes (formerly DreamTeam) and many more. Fusion by HR Week May 20-21, 2026 | Online hrweek.global Advisors: Applications open in the comments 👇 Founders: Building for real HR pain? Reach out.

If you're drowning in AI hype... overwhelmed by the pace or just exhausted by 'do something with AI' conversations, you CANNOT miss Glenn Martin sessions at Fusion! If you were at last HR Week, you know Glenn doesn't do surface-level. He goes deep on what actually happens when new technology hits real organizations. The resistance and adaptation and things vendors don't mention in demos. He founded Never Mind The Job Spec. Co-hosted Amplify AI. Spent 20 years figuring out what makes technology work for humans instead of against them. At Fusion, you get Glenn twice! 🎤Why AI in HR Tech conversations need to shift from 'what can this do?' to 'what does this change for the people using it?' 🎤🎤Moderating #hrtech founders panel - asking them the tough questions you wish you could ask before you bought their product! Glenn joins our fab lineup of speakers, advisors and HR tech founders Jessie Schofer Dr. Elizabeth C. Nelson Perry Timms Aylia Naqvi Chad Sowash Sian Visser Christopher Johnson and many moreee Fusion by HR Week | May 20–21 | Online 👇 To register, link in the comments Hosted by Peter Hopwood // Story Coach // Global Events Host | Program Chair Maja Ninkovic Shapera | Program Director Valerie Capers Workman | Chief Product Advisor David Hannibal

Do you ever notice how most virtual events kind of just… blur together? We saw more than 300,000 clicks in just 5 days on our platform last time, and it made us stop and think about why. Because Fusion is not yet another virtual event. It's a platform. Most events follow the same pattern.... Same layouts, same panels, and the same feeling that you’re just watching something instead of actually being PART OF IT! We didn’t want Fusion to feel like that. So we decided to treat the Fusion stage as something that actually deserves design, not just a mere Zoom link. Which is how we ended up building it with a dedicated architect of its own. Huge credit to Sara Amigh, who designed the entire Fusion environment from the ground up. Not just how it looks, but how people move through it, how startups present, and how conversations happen. The result is an immersive digital platform that hosts Fusion and all of our partners and sponsors, and stays live for 90 days after the event. Which tells us something simple yet true: If you build the environment right, people stay, explore, and engage. That is the kind of experience we are aiming for with Fusion. Fusion by HR Week | May 20–21 | Online Link in the comments #FutureOfWork #HRTech #FusionByHRWeek

Want to know why so much HR Tech feels like it was built in a vacuum? Because the feedback loop between builders and practitioners is seriously broken. That’s exactly the role of the Fusion Advisory Board, and today, we highlight our first group of amazing humans joining us as Fusion advisors! Fusion advisors are an invite-only group of senior people leaders from around the world who bring deep experience in selecting, evaluating, and using HR technology at scale. Their job is simple: help bridge the gap between HR tech builders and the people who ultimately use these tools. Which is why we are genuinely excited to welcome the first group of advisors who will help keep us honest, curious, and slightly on our toes: Sian Visser, Regional Talent Acquisition Lead at G4S Thomas Moeller Lybaek, Director Talent Product Lead at the LEGO Group Aylia Naqvi, Principal HR Advisor at HCM Strategy Three people who spend their days dealing with the messy, fascinating reality of people and talent inside large organisations. Huge thanks to all three for stepping into this experiment with us. If you’re a senior HR leader interested in shaping the next generation of HR tech, we’d love to hear from you. Link to the advisor application in the comments. Fusion startups, are you ready? Fusion by HR Week | May 20–21 | Online Hosted by Peter Hopwood // Story Coach // Global Events Host | Program Chair Maja Ninkovic Shapera | Program Director Valerie Capers Workman | Chief Product Advisor David Hannibal