Start your day with breakfast, connect with fellow attendees, and get ready for a day of insights and inspiration.

One company’s head of people and head of finance walk through the real version of a benefits decision they made together, including the program they fought over and what actually changed the CFO’s mind. The tension sets the tone for a day about the tradeoffs behind every total rewards call.

AI, predictive analytics, and personalization tools are reshaping how benefits get designed, priced, and measured, and this session cuts through the vendor noise to what actually moves cost, usage, and satisfaction. This session focuses less on what to buy and more on the questions worth asking before you do.

Employers are investing more in workplace benefits, but employees are still navigating competing financial priorities and struggling to make the most of the resources available to them. New research from Vestwell and Franklin Templeton reveals where employee needs and employer offerings diverge, what workers are asking for, and how employers can better support confident financial decision-making.

A candid look inside one of the country’s most-watched employer approaches to healthcare delivery, tracing how centers of excellence and direct-contracting experiments have been used to take control of cost and quality. It is a rare view of a benefits strategy built, tested, and revised in real time.

Wellbeing spans mental, financial, and social health, and this session offers a strategic frame for thinking about it holistically rather than as a pile of disconnected point solutions. It covers remote work stipends, sabbaticals, personalized PTO, and the life-stage and caregiving needs that cut across all of them.

$1,000 a month, per kid, until kindergarten and a 128% ROI to show for it. Molly Moon’s built its childcare benefit as part of a bigger bet that values-driven business (fair wages, local ingredients, benefits that actually help) and profit aren’t in tension. Almost two decades in, the experiment’s working. Here’s the math behind the benefit, and what it’s meant for keeping parents in the workforce.

Mental health benefits have matured well past the awareness-campaign phase, and this session examines what effective support looks like now. The conversation covers getting people to the right care at the right moment and understanding what that investment returns to both the employee and the organization.

The HR leader who wins on total rewards in 2026 isn’t just administering benefits, but defending spend at the CFO’s table and designing for a workforce with a whole life outside of work. This closing conversation steps back from the tactics and shifts to the mindset, exploring how the best people leaders find a way to balance cost, care and culture when it matters most.