Why I'm Co-Chairing People Analytics World San Francisco This Year
By Alison Ettridge, Founder, AmpliTask
A few months ago I agreed to co-chair the Workforce Strategy track at PAWorld26 San Francisco. I want to explain why, because it isn't just a nice line for my bio. It's because this is the conversation I think our profession most needs to have right now — and I don't think we're having it well enough anywhere else.
The world of work isn't broken. It's outdated.
That's the line I keep coming back to at AmplItask, and it's the lens I'm bringing to this year's programme.
Most organisations aren't failing because something is fundamentally wrong. They're straining because they're still built on assumptions from a different era — stable industries, predictable careers, slower change, fixed ways of working. That world has moved on. AI has moved faster than almost anyone predicted. And a lot of leaders are still trying to improve systems that were never designed for this pace, rather than rethinking the design of work itself.
The result is friction. Confusion. Slower adaptation than the moment demands. And a growing sense among HR and business leaders that something needs to change, without a clear, evidence-based way to decide what.
That's the gap PAWorld26 is built to close.
Activity is not the same as value
If there's one thing I want every attendee to leave San Francisco with, it's this: rolling out AI is not the same as redesigning work.
Too many organisations are measuring activity — pilots launched, tools adopted, licences issued, hours theoretically saved — and calling it progress. But activity doesn't tell you whether decisions are better, whether capacity has genuinely shifted, or whether the work people do every day has actually changed for the better. This year's programme is deliberately built around that distinction: moving from AI and analytics pilots to measurable outcomes — redesigned work, sharper workforce planning, stronger skills decisions, and real links between people data and business performance.
That's why I'm not just attending. I'm co-chairing the Workforce Strategy track and joining a panel on moving from AI access to genuinely redesigned work, alongside leaders from Autodesk, Google and Intel. It's the exact question I put to HR leaders every week in my own work: you've given people access to AI — so what, precisely, has changed about how the work gets done?
Reengineering work means keeping humans in the lead
Here's the part I care about most, and the reason I said yes to this role rather than just showing up as a delegate.
Reengineering work is not about designing humans out of the picture. It's about designing work so that humans stay firmly in the lead — making the judgement calls, owning the decisions that matter, and directing what AI and automation are for, rather than reacting to what they've made possible. When organisations get this right, people aren't sidelined by technology; they're freed up by it, with more capacity for the parts of work that actually require human judgement, creativity, and accountability.
That's not a defensive posture. It's the growth strategy. Organisations that keep humans genuinely at the centre — deciding, creating, holding the risk, driving the relationships — are the ones best placed to innovate, because innovation still starts with human judgement about what's worth building and why. The organisations that lose sight of that, that let AI quietly become the default decision-maker rather than a tool in service of one, don't get faster. They get brittle.
This is what "reengineering work" means to me, and it's the thread I want running through the Workforce Strategy track this year: not rigid job structures, not slow decision models built for a slower era, not policies that limit adaptability — but work that's been deliberately redesigned so that people, not process, are what drive the organisation forward.
Why this event, specifically
I've been to plenty of future-of-work conferences that stay theoretical. What drew me to PAWorld26 is that it doesn't. Two days at The Marker in San Francisco, built around a Decision Room format for the harder cross-functional questions — workforce AI governance, CFO/CHRO economics, decision-grade skills intelligence — alongside practitioner-led sessions from organisations like Adobe, Snowflake, HPE, Cleveland Clinic, Expedia, Merck and AbbVie, sharing what actually worked and what didn't.
It's a room full of people asking the same question I ask every client: not "how do we adopt AI," but "how do we redesign work so people stay in the lead, and so that leadership translates into real business outcomes."
That's a conversation worth chairing. I hope to see you there.
Alison Ettridge is the Founder of AmpliTask, helping HR leaders assess workflows, navigate technology change, and build practical readiness for a different era of work. She is co-chairing the Workforce Strategy track at PAWorld26 San Francisco, 23–24 September 2026.
Register: https://home.paworld365.com/events/26sfo/register Agenda: https://home.paworld365.com/events/26sfo/agenda
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