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The lush environs of Melbourne’s Royal Botanical Gardens proved an inspiring venue as talent leaders from a wide range of industries gathered by its picturesque lakes to share success stories and exchange the latest insights in HR at #AvatureUpfront APAC 2025.
Home to over 8,500 species of plants and countless birds and wildlife, the gardens are an apt testament to how careful selection, placement and care can nurture a collection of disparate individuals into a thriving ecosystem that offers far more than the sum of its parts.
Read on as we relive the highlights and reexamine the main talking points from a memorable day.
Context and Explainability Key in the Age of AI Talent Tech
Avature CEO Dimitri Boylan opened the one-day event with a thought-provoking take on why true agility is within the grasp of talent leaders, provided they can harness the tools and approaches now made possible by machine learning and AI.
He underscored that we are in the middle of a huge leap – and during a technological leap, even the experts get surprised. Although no one is expected to have a mature model at this stage, taking steps to incorporate AI into the talent technology stack and practices of your teams is now becoming essential to avoid being left behind once the dust settles.
In this scenario, technology that uses contextual and explainable AI will be the differentiator. For AI tools to deliver the most value and efficiency, the data they have been trained on and the use cases they are applied to must align. That means navigating a crowded AI tech space with a discerning eye, eschewing bolt-on, non-context-specific applications and seeking out tools that have been trained on the data and cases relevant to the task at hand.
Context is the key to unlock AI predictions”
Dimitri Boylan,
CEO of Avature
However, AI is not all that HR leaders should take into account. Ensuring your technology is sufficiently robust, scalable and malleable to your evolving needs is of the utmost importance. The talent market is changing rapidly and no one can afford to waste the time nor energy involved in implementing and adopting new technologies if they are soon rendered ineffective or obsolete – only to have to repeat an often lengthy, expensive process all over again.
Boylan’s message was loud and clear: true agility will be achieved only through a platform in which high configurability is paired with high autonomy and supported by the best contextual and explainable AI. That’s what will lead to a sustainable competitive advantage.
The Olympian Taking the Fight for Equality From the Pitch to the Boardroom
Next on stage and creating a buzz among the assembled audience was Olympic champion and triple-sport athlete Chloe Dalton.
In a keynote speech that detailed her extraordinary trajectory from elite athlete to passionate advocate of gender equality and inclusivity, Chloe offered actionable strategies for breaking through gender barriers in leadership, cultivating a growth mindset and fostering environments in which everyone can succeed.
Sport has a real ability to invade our daily lives and our conversations in the workplace and with friendship groups. I began to understand that as an athlete I had real power with my platform to start conversations around gender equity.”
Chloe Dalton,
Olympic Gold Medallist, Rio Games
Not only is Dalton living proof of the importance of having clear goals and a strategic approach to achieving them, but her passion and strength of will were an inspiration to all. To the clear delight of those in attendance, she even allowed her treasured Olympic gold medal from the 2016 Rio Games to be passed around for a closer look.
How Siemens Energy is Brokering Peace in the Tug-of-Tech
Soon after, the same audience was invited to explore a scenario familiar to any HR leader charged with overseeing a digital transformation. Maria Ma, Global Senior HR Demand and Solutioning Manager at Siemens Energy, took to the stage to discuss the trade-offs and perspectives to consider when balancing the competing needs of each business unit with IT’s desire for centralization and scalability.
By remaining focused on stakeholder experience as the guiding objective and embracing knowledge sharing and collaboration as keystone practices, Ma showed that the power dynamics and competing priorities that often impact digital transformation can be channeled into broader alignment, leading to productive outcomes for the whole business.
Ma also offered sage advice for those seeking the right technology partner to support change, especially during a period of considerable upheaval in the talent space:
It’s important to leverage the roadmap of the vendor we partner with, so don’t reinvent the wheel ourselves.”
Maria Ma,
Global Senior HR Demand and Solutioning Manager at Siemens Energy
High-Volume Recruiting Without Sacrificing the Personal Touch
Striking a balance continued to be a theme, with Melinda Todd, Melinda Todd, Senior Manager, Talent Advisory Consulting, APAC at AMS, showcasing how attaining the level of automation required in high-volume scenarios needn’t mean sacrificing the personal touch expected by today’s candidates. Recounting how AMS has leveraged Avature to deliver for a number of high-profile clients, Todd had some eye-catching numbers to share.
In one case, a major international airline was able to process a staggering 400,000 applications in 2024. Using Avature’s interview scheduling tool, it organized over 18,000 interviews, before eventually welcoming 9,200 new hires.
Beyond high-volume hiring, the recruiting team also had to tackle a complex operational task—coordinating travel for on-site interviews across multiple departments. Avature’s configurability and flexible workflows enabled seamless HR case management, ensuring smooth collaboration and a well-structured process for travel booking.In another case involving a UK-based professional services company, she detailed how AMS had leveraged Avature’s high automation and process agility to schedule 100 interviews per day and save over £100k and 6,000 candidate hours while attaining an impressive 99 percent candidate recommendation rate.
In keeping with a common thread running through the whole event, Todd stressed that agility and adaptability are fast becoming the fundamental characteristics of a successful talent function.
The world is changing too fast, you can’t rely on something that works now, but not a few months from now.”
Melinda Todd,
Senior Manager of Talent Advisory Consulting at AMS
Panelists Advocate Making HR a Strategic Business Partner
Avature Upfront also served up a lively panel comprising HR leaders and industry specialists. With a number of disruptions currently taking place across the world of work, the panel tackled the difficulties and opportunities involved in building a change-ready organization, including reskilling, innovative work models and taking a proactive approach to AI.
The importance of aligning HR with wider business strategy and being able to ebb and flow organically with the needs of the organization and demands of the market was an early key topic.
Alex Thomson, Head of Talent Attraction & Mobility at Australia Post, discussed this often abstract concept in starkly concrete terms, explaining that a company largely dependent on physically delivering business post will need to pivot with considerable agility in the coming years once business mail ceases to exist. Creating career paths for the different demographics within the organization with those changes in mind requires considerable coordination at all levels of the business.
With the discussion moving to how HR leaders can have greater impact, Sue Howse, CEO of The Human Collaborative, was quick to impress that understanding how the long-term strategy of the business is interpreted by each of the senior partners, and then speaking to them in the language and with the metrics they understand, is key to obtaining the buy-in.
If the leadership initiatives you’re putting in place don’t have a commercial impact on the strategy, your relevance dilutes significantly. Gone are the days of HR being boxes of tissues or the firing squad. That is HR of the past.”
Sue Howse,
CEO, The Human Collaborative
Echoing Dimitri Boylan’s opening remarks on the importance of having technology capable of evolving with the needs of the business was Gareth Flynn, CEO of TQ Solutions. Flynn was clear-minded that in these times of great change, bigger businesses with tortuous procurement procedures will soon be outpaced if they have to wait 18 months for approval to integrate a point solution that an iterative platform can incorporate in next to no time.
One approach to realizing workforce agility that has gained huge traction in recent times is the skills-based approach. Spoken about by talent visionaries for years, the practical difficulties in making skills a reality are now dissolving in the face of huge advances in technology, most noticeably AI. However, according to Flynn, the benefits of combining AI and skills will only be rendered if HR leaders use their integration as a catalyst to reevaluate work design.
HR is putting the cart before the horse when it comes to skills. With AI, we actually need to do something else first, and that’s this whole area of work design and work analysis. We are seeing a lot of companies starting to think about how they can unpack the work down to a task level so that they can understand where they want to put AI, what the business case is for AI and how that will inform their skills strategy.”
Gareth Flynn,
CEO, TQ Solutions
As new technologies power new approaches, there will be a growing requirement for talent leaders and their teams to become more tech-savvy and take the reins in selecting and designing their technology, rather than depending on IT to solve their needs. The responsibility to respond to this shift was laid out in stark terms by Howse:
“If we think ten years ago, recruitment was marketing back then.”, she began. “[Now] Recruitment is tech. Talent is tech… with the level and pace of change, we miss so much unless we have that embedded capability in the people and culture function”
From Rowing the Boat to Steering the Ship via Skills and AI
Following on from the panel session, skills continued to be a hot topic at Avature Upfront. This should come as little surprise, since Avature’s recent survey shows 76 percent of HR leaders are moving to adopt skills. Yet, many organizations are still in the early stages of skills adoption and unsure of how to proceed.
In a hugely informative presentation from Mark Condon, Managing Partner and Founder at QuantumWork Advisory, attendees were treated to a showcase of the vast potential of skills and AI alongside the practical steps needed to bring them into the talent function.
Championing a four-phase approach to revamping and braiding together the different strands of workforce management, Condon showed all in attendance that the time for merely talking about the potential of these new approaches is now drawing to a close. Furthermore, adopting and aligning them with the strategic goals of the business will equip HR leaders with the means to move from reacting to the decisions taken by the C-suite to informing and guiding them.
Your role will change significantly over the next few years from rowing the boat to steering the ship.”
Mark Condon,
Managing Partner & Founder, QuantumWork Advisory
From Innovative Approaches to Innovative Applications
The vast configurability of the Avature platform allows users to tackle all manner of practical issues with truly creative solutions.
To illustrate its great flexibility and inspire creativity in those present, this year’s Avature Upfront saw the inaugural Art of the Possible session, in which users could share the unorthodox ways they had utilized Avature to create practical solutions, from shaving weeks off the time to issue secondment contracts to surveying friends to help select a baby name – complete with animated emails announcing the results!
Avature building blocks are like musical notes, they all have variants and when they’re arranged in different ways they create wildly different results.”
Scott Allan,
Founder & Managing Director, TalentTech
Teejay Bui-Mata’afa, Employee Experience, Process & Systems Lead presented how Bupa has been applying the concept of hyper-personalization together with Avature to tailor meaningful experiences for each candidate, employee and customer.
By allowing leads to enrich their talent profiles with a greater depth of information, the health insurance and healthcare giant has been able to refine and segment its talent pools, identifying difficult-to-find candidates ahead of need. The results have been hugely impressive, with over 370,000 signups since September 2022 and 220,000 profiles successfully re-engaged.
Meanwhile, Evelyn Jackson, HR Director Australia at Diageo, gave a fascinating insight into how the beverages giant was supercharging internal mobility, employee growth and staff recognition to deliver an EVP and culture that truly engages and inspires.
And Roman Cunci, Avature’s Manager of Technical Services, APAC, gave a practical account of how a large mining and construction firm has configured Avature to trace the status of its employees’ critical safety certification, ensuring it is up to date at all times.
Via a fully automated workflow, alerts are triggered in advance of an upcoming expiration and staff are requested to renew their certificate. Then, once a freshly obtained certificate is received, a further workflow sees alerts and reminders set up for the next renewal, removing unnecessary manual inputting and creating peace of mind for compliance teams.
Looking Ahead: AI Assistants and Greater User Autonomy
The eagerly anticipated Avature Roadmap presentation saw Dimitri Boylan retake the stage alongside Avature Product Marketing Manager XiaoBin Shi, treating attendees to a sneak peek of some of the innovations in store for the year ahead. Huge AI enhancements to scheduling, matching, data management and chatbot are in the works, and users will be able to enjoy greater autonomy than ever before.
However, the biggest revelation was undoubtedly the presentation of Avature Copilot, which will use agentic AI to help with everything from drafting job descriptions and sourcing candidates to building portals and brainstorming interview questions.
The amount of time you’re going to be doing things will shrink drastically thanks to our Copilot.”
Dimitri Boylan,
Avature CEO
With the game-changing possibilities of Avature’s AI features very much in mind and a dayful of HR insights to unpack, attendees enjoyed an evening reception in beautiful surroundings and good humor, exchanging ideas and contacts, and contemplating the vast possibilities of the year ahead.
