Start the day with good coffee, and a first look at what Indeed and Glassdoor have on show.
AI has taken over more of hiring than anyone predicted two years ago, screening, sourcing, even early-stage decisions. This opening keynote answers the question every talent leader is now facing: as AI takes on more, what should stay human?
Drawing on real-time hiring data from across India's talent market, we'll look at where AI-driven hiring is actually working, where it's quietly costing companies their best candidates, and what the highest-performing organisations are doing differently, deliberately keeping human judgment in the moments that decide retention, quality of hire, and employer brand.
Two leaders, two very different chapters of Indian business — one built for speed, one built for scale.
Rohit Kapoor, CEO of Swiggy's Food Marketplace, has spent his career scaling fast-growing consumer businesses. Vineet Nayar spent over two decades leading HCL Technologies through a decade of hypergrowth, then wrote the influential Employees First, Customers Second.
In this opening conversation, they compare notes on what good leadership actually looks like at very different speeds — moving fast without breaking culture, and building the discipline that turns momentum into something durable.
Hiring has long been trapped in a conundrum: move fast and risk quality, or protect quality and lose great candidates to slow processes. As application volumes surge, the real risk isn't just slow hiring — it's the right candidates getting lost in the noise.
This session explores how AI-powered screening is breaking that tradeoff, with Indeed Smart Screening as the live case study: structured, criteria-based evaluation that begins the moment a candidate applies, with early results showing speed and quality rising together — a 20% reduction in time-to-hire and 54% fewer applications needed per hire. The conversation will also tackle what senior HR leaders care about most: how structured screening raises the hiring bar, what keeps AI evaluation fair and explainable, and where human judgment remains non-negotiable.
Trade notes on the morning, and keep the best conversations going over a proper meal.
Most employer branding sessions tell you what good looks like. This one shows you. In this showcase, talent leaders from some of the most successful brands take the center stage to present the real employer branding work their teams have built — the campaigns, the creative, the strategy, and the results — live and unfiltered.
Then the conversation begins. Once all the work is on the table, our speakers sit down together for an open Q&A, where the audience gets to dig into the how and the why behind what they've just seen — the decisions, the challenges, the trade-offs, and the lessons that don't make it into the highlight reel.
Walk away with concrete, proven examples of employer branding in action, a candid look at what it really takes to execute, and fresh ideas you can bring straight back to your own team.
Labour markets worldwide are in profound transition — AI is redrawing roles across industries, demographic shifts are reshaping talent supply, and the skills that command a premium are changing faster than most workforce plans.
In this session, senior economists take the stage to decode what large-scale hiring data actually reveals about where the world of work is headed. Drawing on research from Indeed's Hiring Lab — spanning millions of job postings across 60+ labour markets — alongside deep academic insight, they'll unpack which roles and skills are ascending, how AI is reshaping the demand curve, where global and Indian trends converge or diverge, and what it all means for how talent leaders should plan for the decade ahead.
Caffeine, conversation, and a moment to let the ideas settle.
In an AI-powered labor market, your employer brand is no longer solely what you market. It is your employees' lived experience, served instantly. As candidates shift to AI prompting, LLMs cross-reference career sites with external social proof, making your internal reality your external brand.
This keynote with Rohan Sylvester delivers an advanced deep dive into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), optimizing your brand through the three A’s: Amplification, Advocacy, and Authenticity.
Learn to transition from passive attraction to interactive validation, implement strategies that shape how algorithms summarize your culture, and leverage human storytelling that both talent and engines trust.
Our closing speaker has built a career by choosing the roles nobody else would touch — not because she had to, but because the safe, obvious parts never interested her.
In this closing conversation, she talks about the conviction it takes to keep choosing the harder path, why the unconventional choice has been the one that lasted, and what a career built on instinct and originality can teach a room full of leaders whose industries are being rewritten around them.
Every great day deserves a finish worth staying for. As FutureWorks Bengaluru draws to a close, three winners from the room walk away with a once-in-a-year reward — and the pick is theirs. Whether it's the roar of the Singapore Formula 1 Grand Prix, the global gathering of HR's boldest thinkers at SHRM Tech Global, or a front-row seat at FutureWorks Global, each winner chooses the experience that calls to them.
Three names. Three winners. One unforgettable choice each — so stay in your seat, because you'll want to be in the room when we call them.
Kick things off: settle in, meet the room, and line up the conversations you came for.
AI has taken over more of hiring than anyone predicted two years ago, screening, sourcing, even early-stage decisions. This opening keynote answers the question every talent leader is now facing: as AI takes on more, what should stay human?
Drawing on real-time hiring data from across India's talent market, we'll look at where AI-driven hiring is actually working, where it's quietly costing companies their best candidates, and what the highest-performing organisations are doing differently, deliberately keeping human judgment in the moments that decide retention, quality of hire, and employer brand.
Hiring has long been trapped in a conundrum: move fast and risk quality, or protect quality and lose great candidates to slow processes. As application volumes surge, the real risk isn't just slow hiring — it's the right candidates getting lost in the noise.
This session explores how AI-powered screening is breaking that tradeoff, with Indeed Smart Screening as the live case study: structured, criteria-based evaluation that begins the moment a candidate applies, with early results showing speed and quality rising together — a 20% reduction in time-to-hire and 54% fewer applications needed per hire. The conversation will also tackle what senior HR leaders care about most: how structured screening raises the hiring bar, what keeps AI evaluation fair and explainable, and where human judgment remains non-negotiable.
In Mumbai's talent market, a fast-growing fintech, a century-old bank, and a legacy pharma major are chasing the same people from wildly different starting lines — one with buzz but no track record, one with trust and scale but a "safe but slow" reputation, one with purpose and stability but a fight to look anything but dated.
Three CHROs trade honest notes on the same problem from three vantage points: how do you hire fast without a famous brand, modernise a legacy reputation without faking it, and win a candidate weighing all three offers? A candid exchange on where the new economy is winning, where established brands hold an edge candidates underrate, and what each is quietly borrowing from the others — on hiring, speed, EVP, and the AI-era brand that now lives inside an LLM's answer, not just a careers page.
Long before "AI versus human" became a boardroom conversation, it was Viswanathan Anand's daily reality. Chess was the first field to be truly mastered by a machine — and Anand competed at the very top through the whole arc of it, from Deep Blue to engines that no human can beat, to a generation that now trains with AI from childhood.
In this conversation, the five-time World Champion reflects on what actually happened after the machines won: what human judgment turned out to be for, how the best players used AI to get sharper rather than smaller, and what a room full of leaders facing the same reckoning can learn from the one domain that's already lived through it. The most grounded take you'll hear all day on staying valuable when the machine is better than you at the thing you do.
Step out, top up, and find the person you've been trying to catch all day.
In an AI-powered labor market, your employer brand is no longer solely what you market. It is your employees' lived experience, served instantly. As candidates shift to AI prompting, LLMs cross-reference career sites with external social proof, making your internal reality your external brand.
This keynote with Rohan Sylvester delivers an advanced deep dive into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), optimizing your brand through the three A's: Amplification, Advocacy, and Authenticity.
Two of Mumbai's defining industries — BFSI and pharma — are being reshaped by the same global forces, but they're feeling them in very different ways. In banking, insurance and fintech, AI is rewriting roles faster than hiring plans can keep up, risk and compliance talent is scarce, and new-economy players compete hard for the same data and technology skills. In pharma, the pressure is compounded by a shifting trade landscape: US tariffs on pharmaceutical imports are pushing Indian drugmakers to rethink where they manufacture and hire, even as AI reshapes drug discovery and global capability centres pull niche R&D and regulatory talent into India.
In this session, senior economists decode what large-scale hiring data actually reveals about where these two sectors are headed. Drawing on Indeed's Hiring Lab research — millions of job postings across 60+ labour markets — alongside deep academic insight, they'll unpack which roles and skills are ascending in BFSI and pharma, how trade and tariff pressure is reshaping pharma's talent map.
Our closing speaker never followed the template — she set her own, taking roles and telling stories the industry didn't know it wanted until she made them unforgettable.
In this closing conversation, she reflects on the value of originality in a world that rewards fitting in, and why the people bold enough to not match the profile are so often the ones who redefine it. A candid, funny, and disarming take on difference, conviction, and belonging — for a room that says it wants original talent and has to decide whether it means it.
End the day the Mumbai way — good food, unhurried talk, and the connections that outlast the agenda.
Join us for two days of learning, discovery, and The Human Advantage in action across Bengaluru and Mumbai. Limited seats are available.
Register Now