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For four days in Washington, D.C., the Four Seasons Hotel once again became a hub for innovation and collaboration as more than 250 industry trailblazers joined forces to shape the next chapter of strategic HR.
In his opening remarks, Avature Founder and CEO Dimitri Boylan reminded us that AI is already changing the world of work — altering roles, skills and organizational structures in ways we can’t yet fully anticipate. HR, he argued, has a choice: orchestrate the change or react to it.
Over the following days, presenters and participants from across industries shared how they’re meeting this challenge head-on. Read on for the key highlights and insights that defined #AvatureUpfront US 2025.
Expanding AI Ambition: From More Efficient Processes to a Hybrid Workforce
Echoing Boylan’s call for HR to lead the AI transformation, IBM offered a powerful example of what orchestrating change looks like in practice. Guided by its mission to become the most productive company in the world, the organization shared how it has eliminated, simplified and automated operations with the help of AI, delivering an estimated $3.5 billion in efficiency savings.
But IBM’s ambition extends well beyond automation. With a goal of building a hybrid human–AI workforce by 2027, the company shared how it is reimagining the nature of work itself — creating an ecosystem where AI agents and employees collaborate seamlessly to amplify performance, enhance decision-making and free HR to focus on higher-value strategic initiatives.
Digital-first isn’t about replacing people—it’s about routing questions to the right specialists faster, giving managers time back and letting HR focus on strategic work instead of administrative churn.”
David Swanz
HR & Talent Transformation Service Line Leader, IBM
Dr. Alberto Rossi, Director of the AI, Analytics and Future of Work Initiative at Georgetown University, reinforced this idea in his keynote. Drawing on extensive research, Rossi reminded attendees that while some roles will be replaced by AI and automation (a concern shared by over 30 percent of attendees), new ones will emerge, with the human touch remaining a deciding factor in securing competitive advantage.
To prepare for this AI-enhanced future, he urged HR leaders to act now by investing in AI augmentation tools, experimenting with agentic AI in low-risk, high-value use cases, mapping out the skills required for an AI-driven future and upskilling workforces today. Lastly, he called on organizations to treat AI adoption not as a technology project, but as a people transition whose success will depend on seeing employees as active participants in the change rather than passive observers.
Making Skills the Currency That Powers Workforce Agility
As AI continues to redefine the capabilities required of tomorrow’s workforce, the ability to identify, develop and mobilize skills has never been more critical.
This growing urgency set the stage for two Avature sessions on the topic. During one of the pre-conference workshops, participants explored how to overcome common roadblocks to expanding promising skills pilot programs to enterprise-wide adoption, working through a practical framework designed to bridge the gap between experimentation and execution.
On the Power User Track, Avature experts encouraged the audience to view the skills journey from a “crawl, walk, jog, run” perspective, starting small with an out-of-the-box taxonomy before connecting skills data across the entire talent ecosystem. Beyond discovering practical first steps that deliver immediate value, attendees gained a clear roadmap to becoming a truly skills-based organization.
Delta Air Lines put these principles into practice, illustrating how even the largest organizations can successfully scale a skills-driven transformation across a 10,000-strong workforce. In a behind-the-scenes look at its multi-year skills transformation, Delta shared how it built a proprietary skills ontology that now connects talent acquisition, learning and talent management through one integrated ecosystem.
We connected our HRIS to Avature to share employee skills and external prospect data in new ways, so Talent Acquisition can work seamlessly with talent management and learning.”
Mike Jacobson
General Manager of TA, Delta Air Lines
With Avature CRM as the backbone, recruiters and talent managers can view shared data, market opportunities to internal and external talent and enable employees to see clear career pathways while identifying the skills needed to advance. AI-driven matching and personalized outreach have also delivered tangible results, driving eight times higher engagement and fueling a 5,000-prospect pipeline for flight attendants.
Looking ahead, the company plans to evolve its ontology and expand AI literacy, ensuring its people and systems continue to grow together in an ever-changing world of work.
Faced with low internal mobility, limited cross-functional visibility and a lack of trust in the internal recruitment process, Jack Henry knew they needed to rebuild mobility from the ground up, with skills as the new cornerstone.
We’d have people quit their job and reapply externally. And that was HR advice! We were underutilizing our internal talent. We also had limited cross-functional knowledge, because with our previous system, you couldn’t really see what was going on.”
Rachel Raymond
Director of Talent Acquisition, People Technology & Analytics, Jack Henry
The financial services provider shared how a simple email opt-in campaign gathered skills data from 70 percent of associates in Avature—an important first step to boosting visibility into internal skills. Through integrations with learning systems and updates to their internal career site, employees now receive skills-based job recommendations and targeted development pathways that support both lateral and upward moves.
As engagement and trust in the process have grown, Jack Henry has seen internal mobility almost double, with 77 percent of employees agreeing their career goals can be met at Jack Henry, up from just 59 percent in 2020. Leveraging this solid foundation for long-term, skills-driven talent development, the company revealed its future plans to include gig and project assignments, internal sourcing and workforce planning.
Similarly, Jacobs demonstrated how they’ve redefined internal mobility by designing a manager-driven gig platform in Avature, enhanced by AI-powered job, candidate and gig recommendations. Beyond accelerating project resourcing, it creates a faster and more transparent way to match skills and opportunities across the business and unlock in-demand skills at scale. Managers now enjoy greater visibility into available talent and a more agile and dynamic way of resourcing projects, without adding extra work for recruiters.
The organization is now exploring agentic automation to synthesize performance reviews, consolidate project history and surface key strengths or development areas in concise, actionable briefs.
Shaping the Skills of Tomorrow’s Workforce—Together
Echoing the progress seen across these organizations, Stephanie Ferguson Melhorn, Executive Director of Workforce & International Labor Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, emphasized that while government and community partners play a role, employer-led reskilling must take the lead—especially as 39 percent of core U.S. workforce skills are expected to change by 2030.
After a keynote speech, Ferguson Melhorn joined a fireside chat with our CEO and Cory Simpson, Chief Executive Officer of ICIT, that examined how policy, technology and business can work together to prepare the workforce for the skills of the future.
She also urged organizations to take a critical look at job descriptions and consider where training could replace traditional degree requirements to broaden access to opportunity.
I would urge employers to take a real look at what their job descriptions and requirements are for their roles. Do you really need a bachelor’s and six years’ experience, or can training get someone ramped in three months?”
Stephanie Ferguson Melhorn
Executive Director of Workforce & International Labor Policy, The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Boylan added that better labor data is key to solving the skills gap. “Saying 40,000 people are ready to work is meaningless if we don’t know their skills,” he noted. He described this as a “Moneyball moment for HR,” where analytics can reveal who truly succeeds in a role and empower leaders to rewrite job descriptions based on evidence rather than assumptions.
Together, their insights painted a vision of the future where skills, data and collaboration form the foundation of a more inclusive, competitive and future-ready workforce.
Streamlining Hiring for a Faster, Smarter Future
The same appetite for agility and innovation is reshaping recruitment, as organizations seek to streamline hiring, accelerate time to fill and deliver smarter, faster results without sacrificing candidate experience.
Transcom demonstrated how rethinking talent acquisition can elevate it from a support function to a true business accelerator. The global customer experience leader shared how it transformed a manual, fragmented hiring model into a fully automated, high-speed recruitment engine powered by Avature, seamlessly connecting workflows, systems and teams across 30 countries.
By standardizing processes and embedding automation, Transcom reduced time-to-hire from eight days to one and cut HRIS administrative hiring time from eight hours to less than ten seconds—enabling recruiters to focus on quality, agility and strategic value rather than administrative tasks.
Big things happen when we are positioned as a strategic partner. We’ve been able to drive agility, reduce cost significantly and accelerate our business performance.”
Karen Beaman
VP Global Talent Acquisition, Transcom
Koch Services showed how optimizing the underlying integrations can unlock agility behind the scenes. In a technical deep dive, together with Avature, Koch showcased how Avature’s self-service integrations tool, Junction, empowers the second-largest privately held company in the United States to build and manage its own integrations with the company’s HRIS, resulting in a significant reduction in HRIS update times.
However, as companies strive to make their hiring practices faster and more automated, candidates’ widespread use of AI means that staying vigilant against candidate fraud has never been more important. In the pre-conference candidate fraud workshop, participants learned how to spot red flags in applications, measure the risks posed by fraudulent profiles and collaborated to design effective countermeasures using Avature’s tools and workflows.
Following the workshop, Avature announced its upcoming Candidate Fraud Detection feature that will help recruiters identify suspicious profiles early in the hiring process, protect the integrity of their talent pipelines and ensure genuine candidates receive the high-touch experience they deserve.
Building Relationships Before Requisitions
Of course, hiring transformation needs more than efficiency and speed. Equally important is delivering a quality candidate experience and building meaningful relationships long before an application arrives.
Indeed, Mantech showed how Avature CRM can turn relationship-building into a powerful differentiator in a market defined by fierce competition for hard-to-find talent. The defense contracting firm demonstrated how it leveraged Avature CRM to create a self-sustaining talent ecosystem that strengthens its employer brand and drives engagement at scale.
By nurturing its talent communities with targeted content, Mantech was able to reduce its reliance on third-party job boards—achieving true talent supply chain independence and delivering significant ROI.
The results speak for themselves: 57 percent of external hires now come directly from the career page, and applicant flow has surged from 40,000 in 2022 to 400,000 in 2025—proof that when organizations prioritize candidate relationships, the return on engagement is exponential.
Continuing the focus on building engaging, personalized candidate experiences, MetLife shared how it moved from a patchwork of career sites to one global, data-driven hiring experience by unifying over 40 global markets on a single multilingual career site that brings its award-winning employer brand to life. The result is a seamless, data-driven experience that feels personal and authentic to every visitor—one that has already attracted 5.7 million visits, 473,000 applications and 127,000 new talent community members within just nine months.
The impact is real: tripled traffic and applications, over 30,000 engaged via our new careers blog and a unified voice that earned a 2025 Candidate Experience Award—now scaling into events and advanced nurture.”
Francesca Corbett
HRIS Manager, MetLife
Nestlé+ and Purina+ provided another compelling example of how a unified CRM strategy could deliver a seamless candidate experience at scale.
We’re using Avature functionality to effectively fill the top of the funnel. We’re capturing active and passive talent, building pipelines and honing skills and ready to go sourcers. We use it to grow our network and to depend less on other platforms, which was the case years ago.”
Dejana Marich
Talent Acquisition, Recruitment Marketing and Technology Leader, Nestlé
By implementing a centralized yet flexible CRM strategy, both teams maintained their unique recruiting approaches while benefiting from shared data, automation and consistent engagement. This unified system has allowed them to double their talent community to 1.8 million members, deliver 8.7 million nurturing emails and drive an impressive 40 percent of hires through personalized outreach.
Key to Nestlé’s proactive sourcing strategy is Avature’s LinkedIn CRM Connect Integration, which has made it possible to match 40 percent of its candidate database to LinkedIn profiles, making candidate profile update times four times faster. This resulted in a two-minute time saving per candidate, allowing the team to focus on meaningful engagement instead of manual admin work.
Adding yet another dimension to how Avature CRM can elevate the talent journey, Booz Allen Hamilton demonstrated how unique CRM configurations—like its Pipeline Portal and custom reports—give sourcers and recruiters instant access to high-value candidates and real-time pipeline insights. This “speed-to-market” approach means teams never start from scratch when a new requisition opens, dramatically shortening the time it takes to find and engage the right talent while keeping hiring both agile and data-driven.
Unleashing Imagination With the Right Tools for Innovation
Having explored the tools and strategies shaping strategic HR transformation, Boylan reminded the audience that true innovation also depends on one of our greatest assets: imagination.
This call to think beyond convention came to life in Pontoon’s presentation, where the company revealed that while its Avature journey may have begun with our ATS as its hiring powerhouse, it has since evolved far beyond recruitment.
After adopting Avature for talent management and mastering the platform’s flexibility, the team recognized that it could extend Avature’s capabilities to support core HR processes typically handled by HRIS solutions, such as compensation reviews and time tracking—proving that with the right tools, HR can innovate far beyond traditional boundaries.
From global headcount to compensation review, we’ve used the platform to run high‑stakes, complex processes with accuracy and speed—moving HR from manual firefighting to strategic, data‑driven execution.”
Brandie Sheehan
Global People Operations Director, Pontoon
Maximus and the University of Phoenix provided another powerful example that innovation thrives when creativity meets configurability. In a live demo, the organizations showcased how they have leveraged Avature’s intuitive Portal Apps Builder to quickly design and evolve stakeholder-focused portals with flexibility and autonomy, allowing The University of Phoenix to upgrade a career site that has driven 350,000 visits, while Maximus expanded an onboarding portal that serves more than 18,000 users.
Demonstrating ROI and Business Impact
Imagination might ignite innovation, but sustaining that momentum requires clear evidence of impact. Bringing together talent leaders from Transcom, Unifi and Epic, an animated panel discussion explored best practices and creative approaches to communicating HR’s impact with clarity and confidence.
Here are some of the key takeaways:
- Use tools that unify data and make insights accessible beyond HR. In the words of Akshay Loomba, Senior Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Unifi, “You need to have clear data, and have clarity, because clarity gives you simplicity.”
- Focus on quality and consistent data before sophistication.
- Start small. As Karen Beaman, VP Global Talent Acquisition at Transcom, suggests, “Start with something simple like ‘how many people did we hire this year?’ Start reporting on something and then build on it.”
- Build storytelling and business partnering capabilities to translate numbers into meaning.
- Don’t let insights stay in reports. Share them widely to celebrate success and influence future investment.
Together, these lessons reinforced a simple truth: when HR couples data with storytelling, it transforms numbers into influence and innovation into measurable business value.
Strengthening the Relationship Between IT and HR
As the conversation around ROI made clear, turning innovation into measurable business value requires more than technology — it demands alignment across functions.
In fact, 64 percent of senior IT decision-makers at large companies expect their HR and IT functions to merge within the next five years, proving that the partnership between HR and IT has never been more critical. In an engaging panel discussion, talent leaders shared how they’re redefining the HR–IT partnership to drive innovation, unlock business value and future-proof their organizations.
The discussion underscored that successful transformation depends as much on mindset as on technology. Sean Morris, Principal and Enterprise Transformation Leader at Deloitte, noted that large, established organizations have to gain from embracing the experimental mindset that fuels smaller, more agile companies.
Tech start-ups are fail fast and large organizations not so much, so we have to go back to that mindset.”
Sean Morris
Principal Enterprise Transformation Leader, Deloitte
David Swanz, HR & Talent Transformation Service Line Leader at IBM, echoed this focus on agility, stressing that progress begins with fixing what’s broken rather than overhauling everything at once. “Don’t boil the ocean.”, he reminded us, “Fix broken processes first, start small, measure ROI and iterate—our journey from 850 systems to 55 came from focused choices and tight HR–IT alignment.” The payoff, he explained, has been measurable:
HR was busy being busy, and now we’re the most popular function in IBM because we demonstrate ROI and the CEO is happy to give us money. We’re good at building use cases and that builds alignment overall.”
David Swanz
HR & Talent Transformation Service Line Leader, IBM
Co-Creating the Future: Highlights From the Avature Roadmap
Throughout #AvatureUpfront US 2025, attendees were treated to four roadmap sessions that painted a vivid picture of Avature’s evolution and the future we are building in partnership with our customers. Each session reinforced a core idea: meaningful innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s co-created, refined and scaled through collaboration with the talent leaders who use the platform every day.
From intelligent automation to cutting-edge user experiences, attendees saw how our new capabilities, like Avature Copilot-assisted interview scheduling and coding, new matching attributes, candidate fraud detection and LLM-powered search, will enable TA teams to act with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
The roadmap also shone a spotlight on Avature’s expanding role as a unifying hub for the entire employee journey. From hiring to growth and retention, the message was clear: skills are the new connective tissue of talent management. Attendees watched as upcoming enhancements linked performance management, learning and mobility into one seamless experience, powered by tools such as the Chart Builder and AI-driven matching that translate data into visual insight.
For more details of Avature’s latest developments, check out the highlights from #AvatureUpfront EU.
Innovation and Impact Recognized at the Avature Awards
#AvatureUpfront didn’t only provide a forward look at where HR is headed – it also offered the occasion to look back at what the Avature community has achieved and celebrate their success in the Avature Awards.
Following careful consideration of submissions by an esteemed panel of industry experts, the award winners of the three categories were announced live in Washington, D.C.
The Most Innovative Use of Avature
Seeing off competition from Kelly Services and Advocate Health, Jacobs was recognized for its manager-driven gig platform, which has redefined internal mobility and enabled leaders to unlock the full potential of their workforce’s skills.
The Best Use Case of AI and Automation
Pipping AmeriLife and Jack Henry to the award was IBM, which has already achieved $3.5 billion in productivity savings and 94 percent HR satisfaction by automating work and deploying AI where it can deliver low-risk, high-impact results.
The Biggest Business Impact
Following strong competition from Nestlé Purina and RGP, Transcom picked up the award for redefining large-scale recruiting by building a fully automated, global hiring engine in Avature.
Together, these stories captured the spirit of #AvatureUpfront US 2025: a community of talent trailblazers united by curiosity, collaboration and a shared belief that with the right technology and imagination, HR can lead the transformation shaping the future of work.
