Over the past few years, compensation became the fastest way organizations could respond to a market that wasn’t slowing down. It helped teams secure talent quickly, hold onto critical skills, and stay competitive when demand consistently outpaced supply. At Tech Talent North, Western Edition, Liz Elliott and Jennifer Kwong from Mercer shared what they’re seeing across the market and where that shift is showing up most clearly inside organizations.

If your teams are spread across regions, you’ve probably felt it. Work takes a little longer than it should. Decisions stall. Meetings are harder to coordinate. Things don’t quite flow the way they used to.It’s rarely one big issue. Instead, it’s the accumulation of small ones. At Tech Talent North, Vimal Patel, Global Head & Director of HR Services, Technology & Mobility at Kinaxis, shared a grounded look at why this happens and where HR leaders can step in to improve how work actually gets done.

Today's hiring market is neither booming nor frozen. Instead, it sits in a more complex middle ground, creating both opportunity and hesitation for People and Culture leaders. When we spoke with Jonathan Morse, Director of Staffing Services at Microserve Canada, he described it as “a soft employer’s market.” Talent is available and actively looking, yet this isn’t a return to an employer-dominated landscape where compensation drops and leverage shifts dramatically.It’s a more measured environment. Organizations have options if they are willing to hire and what determines success isn’t access to talent but clarity in how they move.

AI conversations have moved past curiosity. For most People & Culture leaders, the question is no longer whether AI will impact HR because it already has. Now, the real question is where it adds value, where it introduces risk and how to implement it without losing the human core of the work. At Tech Talent North Western Edition, Laurie Murdoch, Senior VP, People & Operations at Sony Pictures Imageworks, moderated a practical conversation with Wendy Pat Fong, Senior PM for HR Digital Employee Experience at Microsoft and Advisor at Topicflow, and Christopher Yeh, Director of People Strategy & Execution at Clio.

Hiring has always relied on trust. You assess experience, listen for judgement, look for values alignment and assume the person on the other side of the screen is being honest. At Tech Talent North Western Edition, Timothy Khoo-Jones, VP of Strategic Growth & Human Capital at Hillspire, explained why that assumption now needs closer attention. His session, The New Face of Fraud, captured what many HR leaders are already encountering: candidate fraud is evolving quietly and it’s getting harder to detect.

AI is no longer just a digital tool sitting behind a screen. It’s beginning to enter physical workplaces, taking shape as machines that move, lift, assemble and interact with the real world. For People and Culture leaders, this raises new questions about jobs, skills, trust and what it really means to prepare a workforce for what’s next. At the Tech Talent North, Western Edition, Lewisa Anciano, Fractional Chief People Officer at Sanctuary AI, and Ben Nyland, Strategic Advisor at Sanctuary AI and former CEO of Loop Energy, offered a grounded, reality-checked look at what an augmented workforce actually means today.