UNLEASH Paris 2026

We have a lovely tradition at 8Levers. If we are in the same location, I always bring Josh Squires something from my stops (this may or may not have included a jar of smalec from Poland). He brings something back from Valencia, or wherever his travels have taken him, and we swap. This year I packed two enormous cans of maple syrup. Over a litre of the sacred elixir.

As you probably heard, Paris had spent the weekend before UNLEASH dealing with protests, so security at the Paris Convention Centre was tight, as it should be. Which is how I found myself explaining to a very confused security officer that I am not a walking Canadian stereotype. I do not, in fact, travel with my own personal stash of sirop d'érable. No, I do not intend to throw it as a weapon. It was a gift. Josh, you're welcome.

UNLEASH framed this year's event around how organisations redesign work in the age of AI. Walking the floor (and giving the walking vendor mascots a very wide berth, because they completely freak me out), I found a plethora of workforce intelligence. Skills inventories, skills graphs, skills inferred from data I didn't know could infer anything. I, like so many, have spent years telling people to know what is in their workforce wallet. Because someday, you are going to need a spare coin for a public washroom. You had better know if you have one.

What I didn't see enough of was integrated work intelligence: an understanding of how the work itself is changing. Skills tell you what people can do. They don't tell you which tasks inside a role are being eaten by an agent, or which new ones are appearing that do not have a category yet.

To be fair, the tech exists. Everest Group now tracks work intelligence platforms as a category, with TechWolf (yes, that TechWolf, the one SAP agreed to buy), Reejig, Orgvue, Beamible, and others mapping roles down to the task. Beamery launched Task Intelligence last year.

So the plumbing is there. My issue is where it's plumbed into. Almost all of it lands in workforce planning and org design. I could not find a through line to L&D, which is where my eyes go first. If a task changes on Monday, who tells the L&D lead on Tuesday? Or, is someone in L&D building a course about Monday's news on Wednesday? And if you want to know more about courseless, I delivered this webinar for Learning Technologies from my Paris hotel room. My life is anything but glamorous.

This is the gap I was trying to close in my piece on the Autonomous Learning Ecosystem. Step 1 senses demand from business signals. Step 2 is the skills intelligence layer. Work intelligence is the missing feed into both. Without it, we are building skills without any knowledge of their applicability. Okay, we might listen to an HR business partner making a request, but by the time the performance consulting is done (because we love L'ADDIE), it is now Friday of the next month, and everything has moved on.

This is more than my opinion. Docebo bought 365Talents in January, and the two have just published their 2027 Skills Intelligence Report with Brandon Hall Group. More than 1,000 HR and L&D leaders took part, and I liked it because it does not flatter the industry. And this is a moment when we cannot afford glossing over our fault lines. (I was unable to get a demo of their platform due to a very busy stand in the expo hall; looking forward to seeing more of it).

In the research, 96% say role-specific skill requirements are defined. I seriously question their confidence.

Kason Morris, who leads future work and talent intelligence strategy at Merck, presses right on the bruise to say: "Most organizations can describe their skills. Very few can tell you where those skills are actually being used, or what proficiency looks like in context." That is the work intelligence gap we desperately need to understand.

Part of the reason nobody owns that through line yet may be that half the hall was busy changing hands. Pearson has agreed to buy Workera, and SAP is buying TechWolf. Everyone is still reeling, and it showed. So when I complain about work intelligence not being plumbed in, it really is only a matter of time.

Which brings me to the lift. I shared one with a gentleman clutching a McDonald's Uber Eats bag and looking sheepish about it. I assured him this was a judgement-free lift. He told me his company was about to be acquired. Gulp.

It was a useful reminder of what an event like UNLEASH actually is. It's Frosh Week (a Canadian term for the first week of university) with lanyards. Everyone is still working out who they are and who they'll be sitting with at lunch, what their major will be, etc.

On the stages and exhibition floor, everyone from Bersin to the baristas told us to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty with AI. I agree. I have been elbow-deep for a while now. But sleeves are an individual answer. They don't tell a 40,000-person organisation how its structures need to change, or what happens to the people whose tasks walk out the door. For me, this still was abstract. I am still searching for tangible sweeping transformation case studies about AI and HR.

So, what captured this magpie's attention? I loved Forge, the new AI coach from the Rise Up Up team. It reads signals from the CRM, the HRIS, and the support queue, builds coaching around the gaps it finds, and measures itself against business KPIs instead of completions. I've written about AI tutors as the direction of travel more times than I can count, so you can imagine my face. Thank you Arnaud Blachon for tolerating my many questions.

Side note: At the Rise Up booth was an arcade crane game, with a single orange ball buried in a sea of blue ones. I got it in about ten seconds and thought it was just a fun game. Apparently, I won a brilliant camera. I still don't know whether I was lucky or tricked. Either way, I'm very keen on Forge, and on the prize. For the record, Rise Up is not a client, and the camera did not buy my opinion.

The other announcement that caught my eye was UKG in Claude, which went into beta on 21 October, mid-UNLEASH. Workday did something similar with its Sana in Claude plugin on 13 October, and SAP plugged Claude into Joule back in May. Nobody has to log into yet another portal, which happens to be my love language. The HCM giants are accepting that people will meet them inside someone else's interface. Be where the work is (I am looking right at you, EdTech providers).

While we're on the giants: if you aren't already following Dr. Thomas Otter, fix that today. His panel was brilliant. Come for the music recommendations in his Work in Progress newsletter, and stay for the top-notch insights about what is really going on in the industry.

A love letter to the UNLEASH team before I get to the serious bit. They kept me fed and watered and were, frankly, amazing. I suspect I came home a dozen croissants and a wheel of brie heavier. One request for next year: a how-to track. We had plenty of why and plenty of wow. I can completely appreciate that the ICP of the event is very senior HR leaders. But maybe that is precisely the audience that needs this the most. The pre-events already prove it works. Stacia Garr's RedThread Research session on "The AI-First HR Function" is one I will recommend a thousand times over. Let's get granular. Show the architecture.

And now, the awkward fangirl moment. I managed to get in the front row in the lounge for a fireside chat with (THE) Louis Theroux. I have watched everything he has ever made. Read everything he has written. I attempted a stealth photograph and received the look he normally reserves for his documentary subjects. I am so sorry, Mr. Theroux.

Content note: the next part of this article discusses sexual abuse.

Later, on the main stage, Theroux spoke frankly about Jimmy Savile and the BBC. For anyone outside the UK: Savile was one of the BBC's biggest stars for decades. After his death in 2011, it emerged that he had sexually abused a large number of people, many of them children, some on BBC premises.

In 2000 Theroux made When Louis Met... Jimmy, a largely affectionate portrait. He did ask Savile about the rumours on camera, and Savile denied them. Once the truth came out, Theroux went back. His 2016 film, Louis Theroux: Savile, sat with survivors, some of whom told him he had been hoodwinked. Revisiting that in public takes some steely nerve.

On stage, he brought it back to Human Resources. He framed the case as an institutional failure, and spoke about the people and systems around Savile as much as the man himself. I found this to be an incredibly poignant close to the event. As painful as it is to revisit as a subject, these twisting and gnarly issues are a large part of the role of HR.

I walked that expo floor for both days, and none of the tools I looked at touched upon this. We are completely obsessed right now with skills and tasks. But people never contact HR because their skills profile is out of date. They contact HR because something is wrong. A manager. Something they saw. Something that happened to them that they are frightened to say out loud.

That is a big part of why HR exists. As we automate the transactions and route more of the function through agents, we cannot get so arm's length that the microphone never reaches the whisper of someone finding the courage to speak.

So, UNLEASH, for October 2027, I hope to see you again. I'll bring more maple syrup. Thank you so much for having me in Paris. To everyone I had a chance to speak with, merci for making the time.

P.S. More detailed thoughts to come. This was the back-of-the-serviette version, scribbled somewhere over the Atlantic on the long haul from CDG to YYZ.