Everyone in HR tech is selling "AI agents" right now. Very few mean the same thing when they say it, and the difference between a chatbot with plugins and a purpose-built agentic system determines what the technology can actually do for your workforce.

In this session, AI experts walk through the architectural realities behind the buzzword, drawing on what they've built at Valence and decades of combined experience in conversational AI research.

What you'll take away:

• A precise framework for distinguishing between foundation models, chatbots, and true agentic systems — and why the architecture sets the ceiling on what any AI can do
• The five questions every HR leader should ask vendors to separate substance from marketing
• A look inside an enterprise-grade agentic system for coaching, including the memory, context, and orchestration layers most "AI coaches" don't have
• How to evaluate whether a system actually improves for individual users over time, instead of relying on model benchmarks or adoption dashboards

Jeff Dalton is Valence's Head of AI and Chief Scientist, a Turing AI Fellow, and previously led the development of language understanding for Google Assistant. John Foley is Valence's Director of Applied AI and has spent over a decade building intelligent conversational systems.

Bring your hardest questions about the technology — and leave with the technical fluency to evaluate any AI tool your organization is considering.