BBP breakdown of 
SHRM Annual Conference & Expo · 2026We went through all 188 recorded SHRM26 sessions — 1.7M words of transcript — to map what the field is actually wrestling with. Every session gets a five-minute debrief.
All 188 sessions · 1.7M words — five-minute debrief on each.
Out of all 188, these are the ones worth your next 5 minutes.
Three sessions worth your next five minutes.
Flip between raw mentions and how many sessions each theme touched. Watch what happens to AI.
Mentions vs. reach — see what happens to AI when you flip the view.
Click any theme to see matching sessions.
Five generations, ranked by how often each came up across all 188 sessions.
We compared every topic pair against what you'd expect from how often each came up on its own. So this isn't what's popular (Leadership overlaps with everything). It's what paired more, or less, than chance — the dashed line.
Bar clears the line = more than chance.
Return-to-office and layoffs kept surfacing in the same sessions.
The one human topic automation reliably connected to.
Where managers came up, so did the outcomes — productivity, wellbeing, retention.
Bar falls short of the line = less than chance.
Two of SHRM's biggest themes, rarely in the same room.
The hiring conversation rarely met the reason people leave.
Pay stayed a numbers conversation, not a human one.
A look at who was on stage — in-house practitioners alongside consultants, founders, and vendors.
Who was on stage, by role.
Search by title, speaker, or topic — or expand a track. Every link opens a 5-minute debrief.
Search or browse by track — every link opens a debrief.
Got feedback on this breakdown, an idea for what we should dig into next, or want to pitch yourself as a podcast guest? Send it straight to the team.
Independent analysis of the SHRM Annual Conference & Expo. Built By People is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by SHRM.
