Human and Digital Workers: Which Decisions Get Better?

AI Raises the Speed of Work. Clarity Raises the Quality of Decisions.

More AI. More pilots. More systems. Yet across higher education, the questions that matter most have not moved: how do we redeploy people rather than make them redundant, how do we modernize grade frameworks built a decade or more ago, and how do we compete with industry for digital and transformation skills?

Here is the uncomfortable truth. These are not separate problems. They are the same problem seen from different corners. Work, roles, and progression have not been defined clearly enough to make good decisions on any of them. And AI does not fix a weak decision. It scales it.

This session moves the conversation from an HR topic to a business performance topic. Korn Ferry and Workday will show why job and career architecture is no longer an HR framework, but a lever for financial sustainability and workforce engagement, and why that makes it a leadership decision, not an HR one.

In 45 minutes, Mike Dodds of Korn Ferry, with Workday, will share trends and learning from other sectors, show where architecture drives real value, and give you a practical way to name the decisions that move your institution and the one to fix first.

The institutions that act will set their architecture before the next restructuring cycle, not during it. This session is where that work begins.

What You Will Take Away

• Where job and career architecture drives real financial and workforce value
• The four processes where the decisions that matter concentrate
• A practical way to name your top decisions and the one to fix first

Who Should Attend

This session is built for a mix of leaders, because these decisions cut across the institution:

• ‍HR and Talent: how talent processes and offerings are powered by career architecture and technology
• ‍ IT and Finance: how organization and job data can power workforce planning and insight‍
• Academic and administrative leaders: how job architecture drives decision-making and improves the employee offer at university, faculty, and school level

These decisions do not belong to one function. That is exactly why they need a shared architecture.