How can AI be embedded effectively into the rewards ecosystem to support faster and more confident decision-making?

This workshop explores practical lessons from implementing AI-powered tools in reward and HR environments, focusing on how they are used in practice and where they create the most value. Attendees will gain actionable insights on how to introduce AI in a way that is trusted, relevant, and aligned with business outcomes.

How is AI reshaping leadership — and what remains uniquely human?

This workshop explores how AI is transforming both management tasks and people leadership, from decision support to talent development. It will highlight practical use cases and emerging capabilities, focusing on how leaders can combine AI with critical thinking, judgement, and emotional intelligence to lead effectively in an AI-driven environment.

Rewards is moving from market benchmarking to evidence-based decisions — powered by leadership assessment and engagement insights. In this interactive breakout, we’ll translate talent signals into practical reward and recognition levers (culture impact, tiered leadership rewards, targeted recognition, skills-based pay). We’ll explore how to link rewards to leadership impact and future capability without compromising fairness, transparency, or privacy. You’ll leave with what to measure (culture, retention, promotion velocity, engagement delta) and how to build a credible business case. Bring your challenges — this session is designed for peer discussion, shared examples, and quick wins you can implement immediately.

How can executive rewards balance increasing governance requirements with the need for innovation and long-term value creation? This session will explore how organizations are redesigning executive pay frameworks to align with evolving regulations while supporting strategic business goals and sustainable performance.

Pay transparency and mandatory pay gap reporting are now baseline requirements but reporting alone won’t close gaps or drive performance, and new policies will drive a hunt for management loopholes unless implemented holistically. This breakout session challenges the “compliance as finish line” mindset. Let's reframe fair pay and DEI as strategic levers that shape workforce design, productivity, and the ROI from AI investments.

With the EU Pay Transparency Directive coming into effect in June 2026, European employers are now navigating a new landscape where pay transparency is not just a future requirement but an immediate reality. This shift brings challenges beyond compliance, including managing employee expectations, handling increased pay inquiries, and ensuring pay structures and job architectures are robust and explainable.

In this interactive panel, two client leaders and Mercer communications consultant/s share first-hand experiences from the early months of implementation. They discuss how their organisations have adapted to the Directive’s requirements — strengthening governance, improving data quality, enabling managers to have transparent pay conversations, and communicating pay principles clearly to build trust and support equitable pay practices. The session will include live polling and an audience Q&A to focus on the practical challenges attendees face now, such as multi-country coordination, remediation decisions, and sustaining employee engagement in a more transparent pay environment.

How should rewards adapt to shifting talent dynamics to become a strategic driver of capability, performance, and business value?

This session will explore how organisations can reposition rewards from an administrative cost to a strategic value driver. Moving beyond transactional pay and benefits, we will examine how reward systems can shape behaviour, build capability, and deliver measurable business outcomes.

The discussion will also include a review of key rewards trends across Europe and Asia, highlighting how organisations are responding to evolving workforce expectations, growing pay scrutiny, macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty, and intensifying competition for critical skills. We will consider both shared themes and regional differences shaping reward strategy across these markets.

How should executive rewards evolve in response to increasing globalization, shifting sustainability priorities, and growing geopolitical uncertainty?
This session explores the latest developments and emerging trends shaping executive rewards, with a focus on three key themes:

1. The globalization of executive and board remuneration – balancing globally informed reward strategies with local market practices, governance expectations, and evolving say-on-pay requirements.
2. What globalization means for locally focused organizations – understanding the implications of global talent, investor expectations, and reward practices, even for businesses operating primarily in domestic markets.
3. Designing rewards for an uncertain future – navigating differing approaches to climate, workforce experience, and broader sustainability priorities across Europe and North America, while creating incentive plans that remain effective amid increasing geopolitical volatility.

Pay transparency is usually run as a compliance mandate. Booking.com treats it as a strategy in its own right, embedding automation into reward processes to make it scalable and remove complexity. This session shows how that works in practice, from ongoing pay equity analysis, to a People Assistant chatbot that handles right-to-information requests, to an AI agent that turns interview feedback into compliant and equitable offers, and why building it this way earns trust.

How do you turn ambitions for growth and fairness into a framework that people actually believe in? In this session, Bitrise will share how it built a competency-based model that brings together skills, career progression and pay in a way that is practical, transparent and scalable.

Starting with engineering, the company co-created the framework through employee listening, manager collaboration and real-world testing before expanding it more broadly. This case study will highlight how clearly documented expectations, defined career levels and aligned salary ranges can build trust, reduce subjectivity, and create a stronger foundation for fair, consistent and defensible reward decisions.

How do you create a reward strategy that is globally consistent, locally relevant, and ready for the future?

In this session, EDP will share how it is evolving its Global Compensation Framework to bring greater clarity, fairness, and impact across regions. Discover how EDP is linking performance and contribution to recognition — and using transparent communication to build trust, engage employees, and support long-term success.

How do you navigate geopolitical risk and regulatory dynamics in today’s complex global landscape?

Led by a global professional services organisation that supports companies across industries, including shipping, oil and gas, and renewable energy, this session shows how organisations can drive agile decision-making and engagement by dynamically adapting reward strategies in response to ongoing geopolitical disruption.

Astellas Pharma has introduced a new role-based benchmark to assess competitiveness for director-and-above positions. This benchmark is based on total direct compensation (TDC), including base salary, STI, and LTI.

This approach enables Astellas to measure role competitiveness consistently worldwide, where target competitiveness has previously varied by region. With these insights, Astellas has been able to identify competitiveness gaps consistently and respond accordingly — for example, introducing LTI where gaps exist and pausing merit increases for employees above the target competitiveness level.

This session focuses on replacing legacy models with value adding, data driven reward strategies, and offers a compelling, practical client example of global role based TDC benchmarking.

How can organisations move from regulatory compliance to delivering real fair pay under the EU Pay Transparency Directive — and what does the longer journey look like?

This session shares how large financial services organisations across Europe have approached compliance with the EU Pay Transparency Directive over the past two years. It covers key decisions across reward governance, benefits valuation, and employee communication, highlighting practical lessons, trade-offs, and implications for organisations navigating similar transformations. We will also make some predictions for what comes next, with input from the audience.

How can AI be embedded effectively into the rewards ecosystem to support faster and more confident decision-making?

This workshop explores practical lessons from implementing AI-powered tools in reward and HR environments, focusing on how they are used in practice and where they create the most value. Attendees will gain actionable insights on how to introduce AI in a way that is trusted, relevant, and aligned with business outcomes.

How is AI reshaping leadership — and what remains uniquely human?

This workshop explores how AI is transforming both management tasks and people leadership, from decision support to talent development. It will highlight practical use cases and emerging capabilities, focusing on how leaders can combine AI with critical thinking, judgement, and emotional intelligence to lead effectively in an AI-driven environment.

Rewards is moving from market benchmarking to evidence-based decisions — powered by leadership assessment and engagement insights. In this interactive breakout, we’ll translate talent signals into practical reward and recognition levers (culture impact, tiered leadership rewards, targeted recognition, skills-based pay). We’ll explore how to link rewards to leadership impact and future capability without compromising fairness, transparency, or privacy. You’ll leave with what to measure (culture, retention, promotion velocity, engagement delta) and how to build a credible business case. Bring your challenges — this session is designed for peer discussion, shared examples, and quick wins you can implement immediately.

How can executive rewards balance increasing governance requirements with the need for innovation and long-term value creation? This session will explore how organizations are redesigning executive pay frameworks to align with evolving regulations while supporting strategic business goals and sustainable performance.

When your gender pay gap exceeds 5%, the Directive doesn’t give you time to think — it gives you a works council, a legal obligation, and a clock.

In this 45-minute simulation, you’ll work through a realistic joint pay assessment (JPA) from trigger to remediation: analysing data, identifying root causes, and presenting your findings under live challenge from an expert panel. You'll leave knowing exactly what a joint pay assessment demands — and whether your organisation is ready to deliver one.

With the EU Pay Transparency Directive coming into effect in June 2026, European employers are now navigating a new landscape where pay transparency is not just a future requirement but an immediate reality. This shift brings challenges beyond compliance, including managing employee expectations, handling increased pay inquiries, and ensuring pay structures and job architectures are robust and explainable.

In this interactive panel, two client leaders and Mercer communications consultant/s share first-hand experiences from the early months of implementation. They discuss how their organisations have adapted to the Directive’s requirements — strengthening governance, improving data quality, enabling managers to have transparent pay conversations, and communicating pay principles clearly to build trust and support equitable pay practices. The session will include live polling and an audience Q&A to focus on the practical challenges attendees face now, such as multi-country coordination, remediation decisions, and sustaining employee engagement in a more transparent pay environment.

How should rewards adapt to shifting talent dynamics to become a strategic driver of capability, performance, and business value?

This session will explore how organisations can reposition rewards from an administrative cost toa strategic value driver. Moving beyond transactional pay and benefits, we will examine how reward systems can shape behaviour, build capability, and deliver measurable business outcomes.

The discussion will also include a review of key rewards trends across Europe and Asia, highlighting how organisations are responding to evolving workforce expectations, growing pay scrutiny, macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty, and intensifying competition for critical skills. We will consider both shared themes and regional differences shaping reward strategy across these markets.

How should executive rewards evolve in response to increasing globalization, shifting sustainability priorities, and growing geopolitical uncertainty?
This session explores the latest developments and emerging trends shaping executive rewards, with a focus on three key themes:

1. The globalization of executive and board remuneration – balancing globally informed reward strategies with local market practices, governance expectations, and evolving say-on-pay requirements.
2. What globalization means for locally focused organizations – understanding the implications of global talent, investor expectations, and reward practices, even for businesses operating primarily in domestic markets.
3. Designing rewards for an uncertain future – navigating differing approaches to climate, workforce experience, and broader sustainability priorities across Europe and North America, while creating incentive plans that remain effective amid increasing geopolitical volatility.

How does the reward ecosystem need to evolve as organisational models change — shifting from a classic pyramid to a more dynamic, agile mix?

This session explores what that shift means for the core reward function, and how processes such a fair pay are being managed to support compliance for a large multinational undergoing transformation. 

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Only a limited number of places are available for this event. Please register early to avoid disappointment.

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• Cancellations received before 11 September 2026 will be refunded in full.
• No-shows on the day of the conference will not be refunded.
• Participants may substitute a colleague at any time before the start of the conference.

Cancellations should be sent in writing to:

Gemma Clifton
Mercer
gemma.clifton@marsh.com