April 24, 2026
Your Employee Experience Roundup: HR Tech Europe, Agentic AI, and the Workplace Abuse Crisis
It’s been a busy week for employee experience technology, with a flurry of AI product launches and acquisitions. Amsterdam was also the place to be, with HR Tech Europe 2026 taking place to packed-out sessions. Some concerning new research also landed on the prevalence of workplace abuse, and the normalisation of it, particularly among public-facing workers.
Here’s what you need to know from this week’s employee experience roundup.
HR Tech Europe 2026 Takeaways
The big event of the week was HR Tech Europe, held on 22-23 April at RAI Amsterdam. Thousands of senior HR professionals attended what proved to be an oversubscribed event, with packed sessions signalling strong appetite for meaningful, actionable insight.
The hot topic was, unsurprisingly, AI – but the conversation has matured. The focus has shifted away from releasing admin burden and boosting efficiency towards fundamentally transforming how work gets done and how organisations operate.
Recruitment Results That Speak the Language of Business
There have been ongoing concerns about HR lagging behind other functions in AI adoption, but recruitment is one domain where impressive results are emerging. The opening keynote from Byron Clayton, Chief People and Planet Officer at Pandora, was evidence of this. Pandora’s AI-powered recruitment transformation – built with Paradox and Harver – demonstrated that when the focus moves from people programmes towards developing measurable business value, the results can be remarkable.
“In my keynote, I shared how we at Pandora treat attrition as a core business challenge, not a people metric,” said Clayton on LinkedIn shortly after his talk. “By using technology and AI responsibly to simplify the hiring process, we’ve freed up 64% of our managers’ time, reduced attrition by 25%, and seen measurable gains in productivity and sales.” The commercial impact includes generating €35 million in additional value in the US alone.
Redesigning HR for the Agentic Era
On the second day, Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, offered a playbook for redesigning the HR operating model. Bersin recently published his HR 2030 vision for agentic human resources, in which he argues that HR will shift from a people operations department to a business enablement function. AI agents will have access to real-time employee, sales, and customer data, surfacing options around redeployment, development, and performance. Bersin highlighted that several tech companies – among them ServiceNow, Microsoft, and Google – are already moving in this direction. But the contentious issue remains: how much decision-making gets offloaded to agents, and where must human judgement take over?
Who Governs the AI Agent?
This issue of AI governance and safety was a central theme at the conference. Gianpaolo Barozzi, Cisco’s VP and CTO for People, Policy, and Purpose, urged organisations to move quickly on responsible AI principles: “You need to decide what you will allow AI to do and what you will not.” Central to this will be responsible supplier selection. Cornerstone OnDemand announced earlier this year that it has adopted the Global Standard for Responsible AI – others are expected to follow, and organisations should be factoring this into procurement decisions.
The conference’s Pitchfest winner may have offered the most forward-looking idea of the week. Michael Beygelman, Founder and CEO of Insygna, presented the concept of ‘Agentic Workforce Management’. He argues that as AI agents execute tasks, make decisions, and interact with employees without human involvement, they exist entirely outside the governance structures organisations have built for their people. It is a problem that is only going to grow.
The Latest Tech Moves
Workday + Achievers: Recognition Enters the Core HR Platform
Workday and Achievers launched Workday Recognition, embedding Achievers’ rewards engine directly into the Workday HCM suite. AI analyses real-time recognition activity to surface insights about high performers and help HR identify what drives results. An interesting question, which our coverage explored, is whether the nature of recognition changes when the act becomes a data point feeding talent decisions. EX leaders should be thinking carefully about how this looks from the employee side.
Learning Pool Acquires WorkStep: A Full-Lifecycle Play for the Frontline
Learning Pool announced the acquisition of WorkStep, an AI-powered employee engagement platform specifically designed for the frontline workforce. The deal builds on its recent acquisitions of WorkRamp (AI-first LMS) and Elucidat (cloud authoring), and positions Learning Pool to offer organisations with high-volume frontline staff a single ecosystem covering the entire employee lifecycle. The acquisition arrives in a period when the frontline employee experience appears to be deteriorating, as our coverage highlights. Learning Pool’s recent move signals that the market is beginning to address this need.
ServiceNow Q1 2026: Agentic AI Enters the Employee Experience
Strong Q1 results were almost secondary to two product announcements buried in the earnings. ServiceNow launched Autonomous Workforce, a class of AI specialists that execute enterprise jobs end-to-end with built-in governance and human oversight. It also announced EmployeeWorks, which combines Moveworks’ conversational AI and enterprise search with ServiceNow’s autonomous workflows to turn plain-language employee requests into completed actions. The EX implication to consider is that when the majority of employee service interactions are handled by agents, the experience of getting help at work changes fundamentally.
TUC Abuse research
This week’s roundup has been tech-heavy, so let’s close on a human experience problem that’s getting worse: workplace abuse. A recent Trades Union Congress (TUC) study found that 80% of UK frontline employees faced violence at work in the last year. Equally concerning is that over half of those who don’t report these incidents regard them as ‘part of the job’. The issue is a global one, with nearly a quarter (23%) of workers worldwide experiencing workplace bullying and harassment, according to the International Labour Organisation. Rising customer aggression is a serious contributor, and robust policies are the very least organisations should be doing to protect their customer-facing staff.
Get in touch
That’s it for this week. I’ll be back next Friday, and if you have employee experience stories to share, connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a line at [email protected]
Becky Norman is the Employee Experience Editor for CXM. With 14 years in digital publishing, she champions the organisations and practitioners creating exceptional experiences for their people — and driving measurable impact on customer success as a result. Prior to this role, Becky spent eight years as editor of B2B publications HRZone and TrainingZone, covering the most pressing issues facing HR, people, and learning leaders. In 2020, she co-created Culture Pioneers – a global campaign recognising the organisations shaping workplace culture to drive both business performance and employee experience.
