Pre-Conference Day

A premium session featuring contributions from BioNTech, Egetis Therapeutics, Excelya, Charles River Laboratories and ICON Health, built for senior Talent Acquisition leaders who want to benchmark at the highest level

• Learn how BioNTech built end-to-end recruitment attribution, tracking candidate journeys from media engagement through application, interview, and hire to identify the channels that deliver the highest quality talent
• Integrating recruitment, marketing, and talent intelligence analytics to challenge assumptions, revealing which specialist platforms, job boards, and campaigns actually drive interviewable candidates and successful hires
• Using actionable recruitment data to shape media spend, eliminate low-value partnerships and enable smarter, evidence-based hiring decisions across a global organisation of 7,000 employees

• Explore how Egetis Therapeutics scaled its US organisation over 560% using an in-house recruitment model that delivered quality hires without relying on expensive head-hunters
• Explore the assessment and hiring strategies that enabled a growing biotech to attract, evaluate and secure top talent while maintaining speed, consistency and hiring manager satisfaction
• Gain practical insights into balancing rapid commercial expansion, cost efficiency, and long-term retention as your organisation transitions from biotech start-up to international commercial business

Go beyond the case study: This is your chance to ask questions that uncover the decisions, challenges, and lessons behind the results

Turn insight into action: This is your opportunity to work with your peers to identify the changes you can immediately apply in your organisation

• Find out how Excelya chose a different path to transform TA into a strategic growth enabler in a scaling life sciences company, rather than investing in additional recruiters, new tools, or external agencies
• Discover how a complete redesign of Talent Acquisition operations, governance, technology and stakeholder ownership helped double recruitment win rates from 24% to 51%, while creating a sustainable foundation for future growth
• Understand how to challenge traditional assumptions about scaling recruitment and align business leaders, hiring managers, and recruiters around shared hiring accountability

• Learn how Charles River Laboratories evolved from 11 independently operated UK and Ireland sites to a harmonised TA hub model and the lessons shaping its next phase of European expansion
• Outline the strategies implemented to overcome language, compliance, cultural, and stakeholder adoption challenges when standardising recruitment processes across multiple countries
• Understand how TA leaders can balance technology, AI governance, recruiter productivity, and candidate experience while increasing recruiter capacity from approximately 16-18 to 25 requisitions per recruiter

• Uncover how ICON is deploying AI agents, automated screening summaries and intelligent workflow automation to eliminate administrative burden and accelerate hiring decisions without sacrificing recruiter or candidate experience
• Hear where human judgement remains critical across the recruitment lifecycle and how ICON is defining the right balance between automation, fairness and personal connection
• Delve into how AI-driven talent matching, contract automation and proactive SLA management are helping recruiters spend more time engaging talent and less time chasing process steps

Go beyond the case study: This is your chance to ask questions that uncover the decisions, challenges and lessons behind the results

Turn insight into action: This is your opportunity to work with your peers to identify the changes you can immediately apply in your organisation

A premium session featuring contributions from Daiichi Sankyo, Novartis, MSD and UCB for senior HR leaders looking to harness AI responsibly, effectively, and at scale.

• Learn how to establish a process excellence framework that helps talent, rewards and HR operations teams make better decisions around business value, user impact, operational effort and long-term sustainability
• Discover how HRIS leaders can partner with Centres of Excellence to balance functional requirements with user experience, efficiency, and organisational scalability
• Explore practical techniques for aligning stakeholders around shared outcomes, reducing process friction, and accelerating the adoption of new ways of working across HR

• Explore how Novartis is leveraging AI to enable faster, more accurate, insight-led decisions while maintaining the critical balance between data intelligence and human judgment
• Learn how HR leaders can build the organisational capability, psychological safety, and trust required to successfully embed AI into leadership and talent strategies
• Uncover practical approaches to moving HR beyond administrative efficiency and towards measurable business impact, innovation, and long-term value creation

Go beyond the case study: This is your chance to ask questions that uncover the decisions, challenges and lessons behind the results

Turn insight into action: This is your opportunity to work with your peers to identify the changes you can immediately apply in your organisation

• Translating enterprise-wide AI ambitions into practical capability frameworks that balance universal digital proficiency with role-specific learning needs
• Explore how AI-powered learning agents are transforming learning consultancy, accelerating needs analysis, curating content and guiding employees to the most relevant development pathways
• Understand how HR and L&D can work together to embed AI responsibly, strengthen governance and help employees focus on what truly matters amid rapidly expanding technology ecosystems

• Using skills intelligence to identify emerging capability needs, align workforce development to business priorities and prepare employees for evolving roles
• Creating safe environments for experimentation enables teams to test ideas, learn quickly and build confidence with new ways of working
• Balancing technical, human and leadership capabilities to create a workforce that can continuously adapt to change

Go beyond the case study: This is your chance to ask questions that uncover the decisions, challenges and lessons behind the results

Turn insight into action: This is your opportunity to work with your peers to identify the changes you can immediately apply in your organisation

As AI becomes increasingly embedded into business strategy, HR leaders face a critical question: where should AI inform decision making, and where must human judgment remain essential? In this highly interactive session, participants will work in small groups taking on a real HR challenge facing Life Sciences today. You will design a practical AI-augmented response using the frameworks from this session.

By the end of this session, you’ll leave empowered to:

• Evaluate where AI adds value across key HR decisions and where human oversight remains essential
• Illustrate the role of HR Leaders in an AI-enabled future by balancing efficiency, accountability, fairness and business context
• Navigate the opportunities and risks of AI adoption in HR decision-making to deliver measurable business value