People Leaders Take Centre Stage at the CXO Summit

When AI hits a workforce, everyone in the building turns to you, the chief people officer, for the plan. You, more often than not, have no one to turn to yourself.

That is the quiet problem we built the CXO Summit to fix. The skills gap keeps widening, Gartner ranks leader development the top CHRO priority for the second year running and this autumn a few hundred people chiefs will spend two days in London doing the one thing the job rarely allows, comparing notes with the only people who truly get it, each other.

Inside the summit, we've carved out a track that is all yours, the CHRO Summit and a panel on The Future of People & Skills.

More information on the CXO Summit panels can be found here.​​​​​​​

What sits on the CHRO agenda

Our HR lineup is eclectic by design with Alex Snelling, Chief People Officer at McDonald's, opening the event with a keynote.

Lisette Danesi, Global Chief People Officer at WPP, and Tom Simons, Chief HR and OD Officer at NHS England, join the speakers running the HR sessions. Between them they answer for well over a million workers, and their fixes are worth borrowing.

Gartner's latest survey of 426 CHROs puts leader and manager development top of the list for 2026, ahead of AI-driven HR change, workforce redesign and culture.

The gap it highlights most is change leadership itself, the knack of steering people through upheaval, which only 32% of leaders worldwide do well.

Skills shortages, change fatigue and mismatched hopes for what AI can deliver fill out the rest of the list, and every one of them lands on HR first.

Dedicated CEO, CFO and CMO zones sit beside the CHRO track, so people strategy gets argued next to capital and brand, not in isolation.

Why the room matters more than the stage

Here is where showing up in person earns its keep. Some 78% of B2B conference-goers say in-person events are the best place to network according to Bizzabo, and a Forbes Insights study found more than 95% of professionals call face-to-face meetings essential to business relationships.

Organisers see it too, with Bizzabo reporting that four in five now rate in-person events critical to their own success.

You know why. The puzzle that took you a year, someone across the table cracked last quarter, and they'll share how over coffee. That is the part no livestream replaces.

More than 50 speakers, four content zones and four workshops fill the two days. But for a people chief, the real value is not the talk on the stage; it is the conversation in the corridor. We'll see you there.

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