Two days at HR Tech Europe in Amsterdam, several hundred sessions, and a few thousand HR leaders, vendors and analysts in the same building. Anna came home with one clear takeaway. The AI conversation has shifted again, and most organisations haven't fully caught up.
In 2024, the question at the event was what is generative AI. In 2025, it became how do we get value from AI. In 2026, hardly anyone was asking those questions anymore. The new question is how to build organisations that can actually benefit from AI, and that's a different kind of question entirely. It's about conditions. Data quality. Integrations. Leadership willing to prioritise. Trust. Adoption.
Anna shares what she heard on stage and in her own panel, "The Agents Have Arrived", with Sam Lea-Wilson from Bupa and Peter Van Hoof. She explores why AI is fundamentally a leadership question, not a technology question, and why so many HR leaders say the right words without really understanding the area on a deeper level. She also flags an observation that hasn't been discussed enough at the event itself, the missing distinction between personal AI use and enterprise AI use, and why blurring the two leaves organisations thinking they're further ahead than they are.
The episode covers the technical shift underneath all of this. Value is moving from individual HR systems to orchestration across systems, with MCP, Model Context Protocol, emerging as the open framework that lets AI agents work across platforms. The HR system's interface matters less than the data inside it and how that data can be accessed.
You'll also hear about Oracle's Fusion Agentic Applications, Gloat's Agentic HR platform, and Workday's announcement around Sana, plus a note for vendors evaluating the Nordic market. The episode closes with five practical takeaways for HR leaders.
