FEBRUARY 5TH, 2026
Aspire, One World Trade
New York City
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Advisors
We've assembled a team of former CHROs, enterprise leaders, AI pioneers and technologists, and other deep experts in talent and workplace transformation to guide our product development and advise ourselves and our customers.

Former CEO, Vanguard; Board member, IBM, UnitedHealth
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Over his more than 30 years at Vanguard, William McNabb led each of the famed investment manager’s client-facing business divisions before serving as CEO from 2008 to 2017. He currently serves on the boards of UnitedHealth Group, IBM, and Axiom, as well as CEOs for Corporate Purpose. McNabb is a senior fellow at the Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management.

Former CHRO, Prudential
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Lucien Alziari has spent 21 years as a CHRO at some of the world’s best companies, including Avon, A.P. Moller-Maersk, and most recently Prudential, where he served as Executive Vice President and CHRO for over 8 years. He previously held senior roles with Mars and PepsiCo and served as a non-executive director at C&J Clarks International. He is a fellow and director of the National Academy of Human Resources and a founding member of HR50.

Founding VP, People Analytics, Google
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Prasad Setty spent 15 years at Google, where he founded the company’s renowned people analytics team. He led Projects Oxygen and Aristotle while at Google, which established the role that managers play in preventing attrition and improving employee performance, as well as best practices for cultivating stronger teams. He now advises companies such as Roblox and DataStax on evidence-based performance and teaches a course on the future of work at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Former CHRO, IBM; Board member, Kraft Heinz
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Diane Gherson is the former Chief Human Resources Officer at IBM and a key figure in reinventing the HR profession for the digital age. At IBM, she oversaw the digitization of the 360,000-person company’s human resources division, incorporating the groundbreaking Watson AI into IBM’s leadership training program. Gherson is now a senior advisor to the Boston Consulting Group and a board member at the Kraft Heinz Company.

Former CHRO, ING
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Hein Knaapen is an executive with over 35 years of experience in the human resources field, including leadership roles at Unilever, KPN Telecom, and ING. He is now managing partner for Europe at CEO.works, where he specializes in precision talent solutions and helping companies apply rigorous investment strategies to people management.

Chief People Officer, WPP
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Lindsay Pattison will join Valence’s CXO Advisory Network in an official capacity in June of 2025. As Chief People Officer at WPP, she led the company’s global people strategy and operations, having previously served as WPP’s Chief Client Officer. She has also held leadership roles at GroupM and served as Global CEO of Maxus, where she launched the award-winning “Walk The Talk” program to support senior women in leadership.

Leadership Author
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Jennifer Garvey Berger is the founder of Cultivating Leadership, which trains leadership coaches to guide the future of business. Her clients include Google, Microsoft, Novartis, and Oxfam International. She is also the author of four acclaimed books on leadership, including Unleash Your Complexity Genius: Growing Your Inner Capacity to Lead, with Carolyn Coughlin, and Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World.

Chair, Human Capital Management, NYU
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Dr. Anna Tavis leads NYU's Human Capital Management Department, where she has worked to incubate new approaches to talent and organizational development. She is also a senior editor of People+Strategy Journal and the co-author of Humans at Work, a book about the corporate pivot toward human-centered organizations. Prior to her role as NYU faculty, Tavis held talent leadership roles at Motorola, Nokia, and AIG Investment.

Nobel Laureate in Physics
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Since keynoting Valence’s first AI & the Workforce Summit in 2024, Geoffrey Hinton has been an informal advisor to our leadership team. Known as the “Godfather of AI,” Hinton laid the foundations for the field of deep learning as a researcher at the University of Toronto. A visionary computer scientist, he nurtured a generation of AI innovators who now lead top tech companies and research institutions worldwide. He received a Turing Award in 2018, for his work on deep learning, and a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024.

FORMER EVP, HOME DEPOT
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Over more than two decades at The Home Depot, Tim Hourigan led global HR strategy and operations, most recently as Executive VP of HR. He also served as President of the Southern Division. Earlier, he held senior roles at Sears and British American Tobacco and began his career at Ernst & Young. He serves on the boards of HD Supply and Love’s Travel Stops. Hourigan earned his B.A. from Bellarmine University.
“I'm on the board at Kraft Heinz, and Nadia is helping their frontline supervisors deal with difficult situations at work. You could never scale human coaching that way. But they're able to get support right when they need it, and they come in prepared and feeling like they can handle any situation.”
“Now we have the ability to give them Valence’s AI coach that can answer specific questions to make them a better professional. I’m almost giddy about the potential. We can transform how we develop leaders.”
“With tools like Valence's Nadia, we not only gain some time back, we can become much better thinkers, leaders, and team players.”

We keep hearing that AI is joining the org chart, but what exactly does that mean? In this roundtable discussion, Lucien Alziari (former CHRO, Prudential), Diane Gherson (former CHRO, IBM), and Larry Emond (Senior Partner, Modern Executive Solutions) explore how AI is becoming a new part of how work gets done, how the best leaders are onboarding AI into their organizations, and what the future of talent looks like.

If you want to maximize AI’s impact at your company, start with managers. Hein Knaapen (former CHRO, ING), Linsday Pattison (Chief People Officer, WPP), and Paula Landmann (Chief Talent and Development Officer, Novartis) unpack the new AI toolkit to support managers, unlock capacity, and ultimately drive organizational performance.

What’s the most overused word when it comes to AI? According to Geoffrey Hinton, one of the inventors of the modern LLM, it’s hype and AI is under, not overhyped. He explains the power of AI coaches and assistants in healthcare, education, and the workplaces and what leaders most need to understand about the technology.

Author of The Digital Coaching Revolution, Dr. Anna Tavis believes HR professionals should look to performance athletes and their coaches to understand the power of a work coach to drive performance.

AI is a fast-developing technology, and it may be tempting to wait and see how it evolves. But, as former Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb explains in this fireside chat from Valence's AI & The Workforce Summit, those who lean in early will benefit from compelling productivity gains and develop new and better capabilities.

Prasad Setty led Google's original research, Project Aristotle and Project Oxygen, into what makes teams and leaders effective. In this fireside chat from Valence's AI & the Workforce Summit, he discusses the power of AI to provide personalized leadership development at scale.