Normandin Beaudry wants to push the conversation on AI, cognitive limits, and workforce strategy at HRFest Canada 2026
Normandin Beaudry, one of Canada’s largest independently owned total rewards consultancies, is taking a targeted approach to HRFest Canada 2026. Rather than occupying a main stage, the Montréal-based firm is sponsoring the Content Lounge – a quieter, conversation-first space built for the candid exchanges formal settings rarely allow. The firm became the first Canadian total rewards firm to achieve B Corp certification in March 2026, according to B Lab Canada, and arrives at HRFest Canada with a clear purpose: to test ideas, gather feedback, and demonstrate a new generation of AI-driven workforce insight technology, according to Daniel Imbeault, Senior Principal, Compensation, Talent and Culture at Normandin Beaudry in Montréal.
“All of these things are interconnected,” says Imbeault. “The problems that clients are bringing to us are just becoming more integrated, interdependent, and interconnected.”
HRFest Canada 2026’s headline themes – AI implementation and ethics, workforce planning under hiring freezes, wellbeing tied to hard metrics, total rewards – all resonate urgently with clients and Imbeault says the firm looks forward to the conversations around them that will take place at the event.
Pressures from AI, talent disruption
Imbeault describes a compounding set of pressures: AI’s disruption of how work is structured, geopolitical instability constraining talent mobility, and a workforce whose anxiety levels run measurably higher than in previous cycles of change.
He believes that the rapid pace of AI transformation is a challenge everyone is trying to stay on top of as use of AI tools among Canadian workers increases. “It’s not like when the BlackBerry came in, it was cool to have a BlackBerry. You could sit in an airport lounge and you would look like somebody important,” he says. “AI is scaring everybody, so we’re living in a different environment.”
That distinction carries practical weight. Cognitive availability – the mental bandwidth employees have to absorb change, reskill, and perform – is being depleted at precisely the moment organizations are demanding the most of their workforces, according to Imbeault, who says that the vast majority of clients he currently works with are reviewing their operating models in significant ways.
“If you assume that people have an infinite amount of brain capacity, you’re going to fail,” he says. “So look into the cognitive availability of your organization and put this against what you're asking them to do alongside with how AI is changing work and the fact that people have to reinvent and reskill themselves faster than before.”
Wellbeing, in this framing, isn’t a standalone HR program. It’s a performance variable – shaped not only by formal benefits offerings but by management quality, how information flows, and how collaboration is structured, says Imbeault. Those conditions are as much a total rewards question as compensation itself, he says.
Closing the HR readiness gap
Imbeault brings a frank assessment of where the HR function currently stands. HRD Canada recently reported on how more than a third of Canadian organizations leave their chief human resources officers out of AI strategy, according to a 2026 IBM Institute for Business Value study, so the expectation that HR will lead AI transformation isn’t matched by current infrastructure.
Competency frameworks, learning and development programs, and talent acquisition teams often operate from separate data sets – limiting the function’s ability to project future skills needs or respond to business change in real time, says Imbeault, who draws a parallel to what supply chain professionals learned through the COVID-19 pandemic: the value of real-time visibility across multiple talent pools.
“HR needs to adopt AI and transform itself in terms of eliminating the manual processes to free up capacity so they can support the organization better,” he says. “HR needs to look at the way it functions in a drastic way in order to be able to have the right level of capacity and follow the rhythm at which the organization is transforming – because if AI is transforming a role drastically, compensation has to be different and the work environment in which the work is performed might be different.”
Canada’s widening AI skills gap and its implications for workforce readiness make the stakes concrete: the 2026 TD AI Insights Report found one in three Canadian workers admit to overstating their AI abilities at work – an issue that lands squarely in HR’s court.
Independence as a strategic advantage
Imbeault says Normandin Beaudry’s ownership structure shapes both the advice it can give and the conversations it’s prepared to have. Founded in 1992 and wholly owned by its professionals, the firm operates outside the quarterly financial pressures that constrain publicly listed competitors, he says.
“We can look longer term as opposed to at the next quarter financial results like the publicly owned companies that are under a tremendous amount of pressure the minute the stock price fluctuates in the wrong direction,” says Imbeault.
The result, he argues, is a less siloed practice – one where expertise connects more naturally across disciplines and client relationships trend toward collaboration rather than prescription. The B Corp certification signals that this orientation extends beyond consulting outputs to how the firm itself operates.
What to expect at HRFest Canada 2026
At HRFest Canada 2026, Normandin Beaudry’s Content Lounge presence will centre on demonstration and dialogue, according to Imbeault. He says the firm plans to showcase a synthetic persona tool – an AI-driven employee insight platform designed to simulate workforce perspectives at scale.
“If we have a context where we can engage in much more tailored and personal conversations, that’s where we want to test a few things,” he says.
HRFest Canada 2026’s full program spanning AI adoption, workforce planning, legal risk, and employee wellbeing brings together more than 100 speakers across five stages and in areas such as the Content Lounge. Normandin Beaudry will bring its thinking to that room and it’s asking HR leaders to challenge it, according to Imbeault.
“HR and total rewards are back in the center of this earthquake,” he says. “What I would love for [attendees] to realize is that we can help them connect the dots so they can transform their functions – basically not being hit by the next wave, but surfing on it.”
HRFest Canada 2026 takes place at Rebel in Toronto on Nov. 10 and 11, 2026.
