Speakers

Nazim Ünlü has always been closer to the business than most HR leaders are comfortable with.

Twenty years. Three continents. Turkey, Singapore, Dubai, Switzerland. Pharma, biotech, banking, manufacturing, agriculture. He has led workforce transformation at the scale where theory runs out, and execution is all that matters.

At Novartis, he built the people architecture behind data42 (Palantir), one of the most advanced human-AI integrations in pharmaceutical R&D. At Cargill, he drove large-scale people transformation across some of the world's most complex agricultural and manufacturing operations. He knows what it actually costs to operationalize change at enterprise scale. In trust. In skills. In dollars.

Today he operates across the full spectrum. Board Advisor, Work-Self. Investor and strategic advisor at allygatr. Chair, BiotechX 2026. Startup jury member at international HR tech competitions. Strategic Advisor for HR Future Readiness. Ambassador, London AI Summit. He has spoken on four continents — and this is his third year on the HRTE stage.

He came from corporate banking. He brought that commercial lens into HR and never put it down. That's the edge.

His thesis is simple and it has aged well:

"AI doesn't replace jobs. It replaces skills. The organizations that treat AI governance as an IT problem will regret it. The ones that hand it to HR will win."

2026 HR Executive Top 100 HR Tech Influencers. WEF Future of Jobs contributor. Wharton | INSEAD | Harvard.
Based in Basel. Part of the HRTE family since the beginning.