What I Was Curious About - and What the Room Taught Me

That question became the foundation for this event. Not AI in theory, not AI as a headline, but AI as it is being applied by practitioners who have made the decisions, run the pilots, set the guardrails, and learned from what didn't go to plan. While the market is crowded with frameworks and vendor promises, there is unique value in peer‑level insight from practitioners who have genuinely been through the journey and are willing to share what they’ve learned along the way. 

So, I went looking for exactly that. And I was fortunate to find three leaders willing to share their learnings with remarkable openness. 

Building the right panel 

I wanted the panel to speak across the full spectrum of AI application in the people and safety space, across different industries, different scales of organisation, and different functional perspectives. Davin D'Silva at Coles has led the build and deployment of an AI-powered P&C chatbot across one of Australia's largest and most complex workforces. Mark Lipman at Qantas is navigating AI in one of the world's most regulated and risk-sensitive environments. And Kelly Brough leads AI and data transformation at Accenture for the region, while being part of one of the world's most ambitious internal AI adoption programs. 

What I hoped for was honest, practical, and human. What I got exceeded that. The consistency of their instincts (despite coming from such different contexts) was one of the things that struck me most. The same core principles kept resurfacing, expressed in different ways: start with the problem, protect human judgment, govern deliberately, and design for what AI cannot replace. 

What I took from being in the chair 

I've facilitated many conversations over the years. But there were moments in this one where I found myself genuinely leaning in, not just as a moderator, but as someone who works in people and talent every day and felt the relevance of what was being said quite personally. 

One moment that has really stayed with me came from Davin. He was reflecting on the OIC role in Coles stores, the people responsible for payroll processing, and how giving them access to an AI chatbot had directly reduced off‑cycle payments. Not because payroll was automated, but because the person doing the work could get the right answer, at the right moment, within the window that mattered. “You want to do the right thing by your team member each and every time,” he said. 

That perspective shifted something for me. We often talk about AI in terms of efficiency or cost savings, but what Davin described was something more human — enabling people to do their jobs well, with confidence, in ways that genuinely support others. That’s the version of the story I find most compelling, and the one that feels deeply relevant to the work we do in HR and talent. 

"The leaders of tomorrow will need decision-making, empathy, and coaching skills.

AI will push off the administrative load.

Our job is to make sure we hire and develop for what's left." 

Davin D’Silva 

The opportunity I keep thinking about 

Mark raised a question I've been sitting with since the event. He talked about "decision literacy", the skill of making sound judgments under uncertainty, and the possibility that as junior professionals take on less of the administrative work that has historically built that instinct, the development pathway changes in ways we haven't fully thought through yet. 

I see this as one of the most interesting talent and capability questions of the next few years. The nature of entry-level work is shifting. The repetitions that have traditionally built professional muscle and judgment will look different. And the coaching responsibility sitting with the layer above becomes more important. 

For The Next Step, this is genuinely exciting territory. It sharpens the question we’re asking with every assignment and every client conversation: what capability are you actively building for, and what does the talent pipeline need to look like if the shape of early‑career work is changing? These are questions we want to be right alongside our clients in answering. 

What I'm taking into every client conversation 

I came into this event curious about what the leading edge looks like in practice. I left with a clearer sense of the principles that define it, plus a handful of ideas I'll be drawing on regularly. 

Kelly's framing of AI as a judgment-assist tool is one I'll use often. It's precise and it's humanising; it positions the technology correctly, and it positions the human correctly too. 

Mark's governance approach of being explicit not just about where AI will be used, but where it won't, is a model of clarity that I think every organisation benefits from having. It's a leadership statement as much as a policy one. 

And perhaps most relevantly for the work I do: the leaders we're helping organisations find and develop need to be identified and assessed for what AI genuinely can't replicate. Judgment, empathy, coaching, and the ability to lead people through complexity and change. The brief is evolving. The capability profile is shifting. The opportunity for great HR and talent partnerships has never been more interesting. 

If this conversation resonated with you and you'd like to explore what it means for your team or talent strategy, I'd love to connect. It's the kind of thinking I find most energising, and from everything I heard in that room, I'm certain we're only at the start of it.