Less gut feeling. More good calls. Real-time people analytics, OKRs and continuous feedback loops are redefining how organisations track progress and unlock potential.
Reviews should guide development, not surprise people once a year.
10:30 – 11:00
Breakout room
Data & Performance Management
Workday
Bjorn De Clerck
Bjorn De Clerck is a Senior Solution Consultant at Workday, where he has spent over eight years helping organizations modernize their HR and Finance operations through cloud ERP solutions, following six years as an Account Executive at the company. He partners with prospective customers from initial discovery through deployment, focusing on how businesses can gain deeper insights from their data, reduce total cost of ownership, and shift from operational to strategic HR and Finance functions. Bjorn brings over two decades of experience in the HCM software space, having previously held sales, pre-sales, and consulting leadership roles at Lumesse and StepStone.
Bjorn De Clerck
Workday Sana Enterprise: AI orchestration for the modern tech stack!
People leaders are under pressure to improve productivity, engagement, and
decision quality without adding more tools to an already crowded landscape.
In this session, we’ll explore how Workday Sana Enterprise serves as an AI
“orchestration layer” across your existing tech stack to make work simpler for
employees and leaders alike.
You’ll see how users can instantly find answers across HR systems, policies,
and collaboration tools; take action in everyday apps like email, chat, and
CRM; and turn ideas into real output in seconds with AI-generated documents,
dashboards, and workflows. We’ll walk through practical examples such as
preparing for performance reviews using data from multiple systems, and
show how no-code agents and workflows can eliminate repetitive manual
tasks while keeping humans in the loop for critical decisions.
Finally, we’ll discuss how Sana and Workday approach security, governance,
and responsible AI at enterprise scale, so you can experiment confidently even
if you are early in your AI journey. This session is designed for CHROs who
want to understand what is practically possible with AI in HR and beyond.
11:00 – 11:30
Breakout room
Data & Performance Management
HIBOB
Toby Hough
Toby Hough is VP of People & HR Strategy at HiBob, the leading HR platform helping organisations drive culture, engagement, and business growth. He plays a pivotal role in scaling HiBob’s global workforce across the US, Europe, Israel, and APAC, ensuring people strategy is closely aligned with business objectives.
With a background in consulting at Deloitte and experience as a member of executive leadership teams, Toby brings a commercial, pragmatic approach to HR. He understands the challenges of rapid growth and organisational change, and is passionate about connecting people initiatives to performance and business impact.
At HiBob, Toby champions the role of HR as a strategic driver of growth, culture, and leadership effectiveness. A strong advocate for modern HR, he combines data-driven insights with empathy to help organisations unlock the full value of their people and create thriving workplaces.
Toby Hough
Data-Driven Storytelling in the Age of AI
In an AI-driven world, HR teams have more data than ever but less clarity on how to use it to influence decisions. This session explores why storytelling is now the critical skill behind effective people analytics. Using practical HR examples, it shows how to turn metrics into narratives leaders act on by framing insights around business priorities, designing visuals that surface meaning rather than noise, and humanising data with real employee stories. Attendees will learn how to answer the questions leaders actually care about and overcome common executive objections. Because data alone doesn’t persuade. Stories do.
11:30 – 11:45
Breakout room
Data & Performance Management
Humanistix
Dominique Dejonghe
Dominique Dejonghe is a transformation leader with 25+ years of
experience driving complex change across Belgium’s most
demanding organizations, have taught Dominique one thing: HR
tech succeeds when technology and adoption move together.
He now brings that hard-won lesson to Humanistix.ai, where he
helps HR teams put AI to work on the problems that actually hurt.
For his work, he was Awarded the Harvard Business Review /
McKinsey M-Prize for Leadership.
His track record spans HRIS implementations, digital
transformation, and business process optimization.
Through Humanistix.ai, Dominique has benchmarked the AI-
readiness of hundreds HR teams across Belgium — one of the
largest hands-on datasets on how HR is actually adopting AI in the
Benelux.
Dominique Dejonghe
From Pilot to Practice: What the AI for HR Quickscan Reveals.
The HR tech industry has a favourite story: HR is “lagging behind”
on AI. The data tells a more interesting one.
Through the Humanistix.AI Quickscan, we have benchmarked 245+
HR teams across Belgium on their real AI-readiness — not their
ambitions, their actual capacity to absorb, deploy and sustain AI in
daily practice. In this 10-minute session, Dominique Dejonghe
shares what that dataset reveals:
– Where HR teams think they need AI vs. where it would actually
create value
– Why most pilots die quietly six months after launch
– The three disciplines that separate the top-performing 20%
from the rest
– Three concrete moves any HR leader can make on Monday
No vendor pitch. No slideware. Just a mirror — and an honest
conversation about what it will take for HR to move from AI curiosity
to AI capability.
Come with your team’s biggest AI question. Leave with a plan.
11:45 – 12:00
Breakout room
Data & Performance Management
ELLI
Louis Behaeghe
Louis Behaeghe is Commercial Lead at elli, where he works with organisations on how they can better understand and prepare their workforce for change. His focus lies at the intersection of people, technology and transformation from engagement and resilience to AI readiness and organisational change.
With a background in strategy, marketing and business development, Louis is particularly interested in how companies can move beyond one-off employee surveys and use workforce data to make better decisions, earlier.
Louis Behaeghe
Change is accelerating. Is your workforce ready for it?
Change is accelerating. Is your workforce ready for it?
Burnout cases in Belgium have nearly doubled since 2018, and long-term
illness now costs over €9 billion a year. Yet most organisations still learn
how their people are doing from an annual survey that lands months
after the damage is done. Everyone measures. Few see the signals.
Fewer act.
In ten minutes, elli shows what continuous, science-based listening looks
like in practice. We follow one real signal — an engineering team stuck at
32 out of 100 on cognitive load for months, unnoticed — and turn it into
four concrete actions, each with an owner and a deadline. One survey
engine covers engagement, resilience, AI readiness, transformation
fatigue and the mandatory psychosocial risk analysis, with privacy built
in: no individual scores, GDPR and AI Act compliant.
Science-based listening. Concrete action — for HR, leaders and teams
13:30 – 14:00
Breakout room
Data & Performance Management
CORNERSTONE ON DEMAND
Glenn Van den Steen
With over 20 years of human resources expertise, specializing in Talent Management, he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. As a trusted advisor, he is adept at identifying client needs, offering solutions grounded in best practices, and driving project deliverables to completion. Drawing from his firsthand experience as a Cornerstone client, coupled with more than 7 years of experience in implementing Cornerstone solutions, he is regarded as a subject matter expert in every facet of talent management.
Glenn Van den Steen
Michael Neefs
Michael Neefs is Country Sales Manager Belgium & Luxembourg at Cornerstone. With extensive experience in enterprise technology, entrepreneurship, sales, and workforce transformation he works closely with Large and medium organizations to understand their needs and identify solutions that help them develop talent, strengthen skills, and build more agile, future-ready workforces.
Drawing on his experience at Cornerstone, he combines a strong understanding of talent management with a passion for helping organizations leverage learning, skills intelligence, and AI to drive meaningful business outcomes.
Michael Neefs
Ready at every level: When the development plan, team plan, and workforce plan actually work as one
As the market and business priorities change, so do the skills, roles, and capabilities organizations need. Yet knowing what capabilities you have today, what you need next, and how to close the gap fast enough remains difficult. Harder still is making sure employees, managers, and leaders are all working from the same picture of what the business needs.
In this 20-minute session, we will explore what workforce readiness looks like when employees, managers, and leaders are working from that same picture: people building the skills the business needs, managers developing and mobilizing talent, and leaders continuously adapting workforce plans as priorities change.
We will look at how AI and workforce intelligence can turn fragmented workforce data into a shared, dynamic view of workforce capability, connecting insight, planning, development, and action as the business evolves.
14:00 – 14:30
Breakout room
Data & Performance Management
IMEC & Athumi
Ben De Meester
Ben De Meester is a post-doctoral researcher in the KNoWS research group at IDLab, Ghent University & imec, where he conducts research on semantic and technical interoperability across European, national, and industrial R&D projects. As one of the leads behind RML.io and FnO, he develops methods and technologies that enable organisations to transform heterogeneous data into interoperable Knowledge Graphs and data-driven applications. His work spans Linked Data, Solid, Verifiable Credentials, and data exchange architectures, with a focus on enabling secure, reliable, and scalable information sharing across organisational boundaries. Through collaborations with industry, government, and academia, he helps bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and practical interoperability solutions.
Ben De Meester
Brecht Wyns
Brecht Wyns helps organisations unlock the full potential of data for businesses and governments, while respecting people’s rights over their personal data. A Business Engineer from Solvay Brussels School, he has worked in data governance since 2012 (PwC, Colruyt Group). Driven by a passion for personal data empowerment, he joined Inrupt to work with Sir Tim Berners-Lee on bringing personal data vault technology to enterprises. Today, at Athumi, he continues that mission: enabling trusted, consent-based data exchange between citizens, organisations and governments.
Brecht Wyns
Your data, their decision: personal data exchange through data spaces
Data spaces give organisations shared European infrastructure to find and exchange data under common rules. For HR, this means less paperwork, more efficient processes and better hiring decisions based on verified information. But HR runs on personal data such as diplomas and skills, and GDPR protects that data strictly. For data spaces to deliver their full value in HR, personal data has to be able to flow too, and only with the consent of the person it belongs to.
Athumi and imec are building exactly that. In this session, we explain what EU Data Spaces can do for HR and we show how Flanders’ trusted data ecosystem connects to the European Skills Data Space, built on Prometheus-X, so personal data such as official student enrolment status can be discovered and shared across Europe. You will leave with a clear understanding of data spaces, why consent-based exchange of personal data is the key to unlocking them, and how this approach can serve as a blueprint for data sharing with people and businesses.
14:30 – 15:00
Breakout room
Data & Performance Management
Personio
Ness Sbai
Ness Sbai has spent the past 15 years working at the intersection of People, business and transformation, across Belgian and international organisations ranging from start-ups and scale-ups to global companies such as IQVIA and Novartis.
Her work focuses on the moments when organisations need to change faster than their existing structures can support them: building the foundations for growth, transforming organisations and People functions, redesigning operating models and technology, and navigating M&A and post-merger integration.
She has led and supported dozens of acquisitions, integrations, restructurings and transformation programmes. Her experience in M&A spans the full lifecycle — from due diligence and transaction preparation through to designing and leading complex, business-wide integration and transformation programmes.
Alongside senior People leadership roles, Ness has held Chief of Staff, PMO and Transformation Office mandates, often stepping beyond the traditional boundaries of HR to work directly with CEOs, executive teams and investors on strategy, organisation and execution.
That combination has shaped how she approaches People: not as a standalone function, but as part of the broader business system. Organisation, leadership, technology, operating model and execution need to work together if transformation is going to deliver results.
Today, through NS People, Ness focuses on transformation, building scalable organisational and People foundations, growth and M&A, while also coaching HR leaders to strengthen their business acumen and become more effective transformation partners to the business.
Ness Sbai
What 2,000 European HR Leaders Taught Us About Data and AI
HR leaders face a growing paradox: the C-suite demands an AI strategy, but HR data is often trapped in fragmented systems, siloed payroll software, and complex legacy setups. Delaying AI is no longer an option, but running it on your current data poses a huge organisational risk.
Powered by exclusive, unreleased insights from 2,000 European companies in the upcoming Workforce Pulse report, HR expert Ness Sbai and Personio’s leading HR Tech specialist will share the core of building an HR strategy based on solid data and forward-looking AI principles.
They’ll break down 3 areas, asking 5 critical questions every HR leader must answer before adopting AI. You will learn:
What non-negotiable data foundations you’ll need
Exactly what goes wrong when AI models are fed unreliable, siloed HR data.
Practical, immediate steps to build a data ecosystem you can actually trust.
