Held May 4-7 in Singapore, HR Tech Asia’s main goal in 2026 was centered around leading people and organizations through an era of accelerating AI-driven change. The expo brought together leaders from throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Among the top presentations were the event’s opening keynote by Now to Next Co-Founder Jason Averbook and a CHRO panel featuring leaders from some of the more forward-thinking companies on the continent.
Here are some highlights of HR Tech Asia 2026 from HRM Asia reporter Josephine Tan. Click here for more on this event.
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Jason Averbook: Stop automating dysfunction
The opening keynote was delivered by Jason Averbook, co-founder of Now to Next, who brought high energy and a provocative message: the AI revolution will not save organizations that layer new technology on top of broken processes.
“Don’t take AI and put it on top of junk,” Averbook said. “It creates what I call work slop—bad data, bad processes, bad creativity.”
Averbook challenged HR professionals to reckon with a core truth: From mainframe to cloud, the function has essentially continued doing the same things in new wrappers. The AI revolution, he argued, demands something different—a genuine reimagining of work itself.
He introduced a framework for thinking about jobs as composed of three types of tasks: hands work (execution), heads work (strategy and thinking), and hearts work (amplifying people and building connections). Most studies suggest HR spends roughly 70% of its time on hands-on work, precisely the category most susceptible to automation. Rather than cause for alarm, Averbook framed this as liberation. “When 70% of your job goes away, it gives you more time to focus on the human side.”
He also pushed back on the fixation on AI adoption metrics. “Adoption can’t be the goal. Embodiment has to be the goal.” He described a world already arriving in which employees interact with HR systems through conversational interfaces—citing McDonald’s use of WhatsApp as a front-end for Workday—and urged attendees to think beyond tools toward a full cultural shift in how work is designed and experienced.
CHRO panel: Architects of adaptation
The morning featured one of the conference’s most anticipated sessions, a CHRO panel moderated by Dr. Tanvi Gautam, HR Influencer and Transformational Leadership Expert, Leadershift Inc, bringing together senior HR leaders from across Asia.
Panellists included Low Peck Kem, CHRO and Advisor (Workforce Development), Public Service Division, Prime Minister’s Office; Panchalee Weeratammawat, Chief People Officer of Central Retail Corporation; Norhamijah Mohd Hanafiah, CHRO of KPJ Healthcare; Andrew Chan, CHRO for Press Metal; and Suryo Sasono, Executive Vice-President of Human Capital Strategy and Talent Management, Bank BRI.
The conversation ranged across talent mobility, succession planning and the question of where to draw the line between AI-driven decisions and human accountability. Sasono offered a telling example from Bank BRI, where the bank chose not to fully automate credit decisions despite having the data to do so. “When you start outsourcing decision-making purely to AI, it becomes no one’s responsibility,” he said. “There needs to be one person accountable.”
On succession planning, Chan described a multi-year journey at Press Metal to move from familiarity — and tenure-based promotions to a transparent, data-driven talent dashboard— work that earned the organization a United Nations Global Compact Award. Low stressed that talent flow requires deliberate architecture, noting that in Singapore’s public service, HR directors are expected to rotate sectors every five years. “If you yourself don’t want to move, it’s very difficult to convince your business to allow their people to move,” she said.
A rapid-fire round on which leadership quality is hardest to cultivate—curiosity, empathy, or systems thinking—produced a split verdict.
Weeratammawat argued empathy is the most neglected: “Most people focus on delivering commercial targets rather than understanding that human is human.”
Sasono chose curiosity, describing how Bank BRI, as one of Indonesia’s largest and most profitable banks, faces the particular danger of complacency—a mindset, he noted, that has historically felled giants like Kodak and Nokia.
Gautam closed the panel with a note of her own: “A right person with the wrong technology could work. But the wrong person, even with the right technology, is not going to work.”
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