The Headline Partner at HRFest Canada looks forward to networking with an engaged Canadian HR community
SAP SuccessFactors is heading to Toronto this November as Headline Partner of HR Fest Canada 2026 – and for Matt Pegoraro, North America Field Marketing Manager at SAP SuccessFactors, the decision was a recognition of something that has been building for years.
"The size and scope of the event is something we haven't really seen from a human capital management (HCM) standpoint in Canada," says Pegoraro, who has supported the Canadian market for four years. "When I went to my leadership, I said, ‘I think we should do this, there's nothing like this."
HR Fest Canada 2026, running on Nov. 10 and 11 in Toronto, will bring together more than 700 HR professionals under one roof. Programming spans artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, workforce planning, legal risk, and employee wellbeing, with more than 100 speakers confirmed. A dedicated Leaders Forum provides a separate stream for senior executives – including chief human resources officers and people leaders – to convene alongside the broader event.
The right event, the right city, the right time
SAP SuccessFactors operates most of its large-scale industry events out of Las Vegas, and the decision to partner on a flagship HCM event in Toronto represents a deliberate shift toward meeting the Canadian human resources (HR) community on its own terms, says Pegoraro.
The city is a meaningful choice. The Toronto area is home to a significant concentration of existing SAP customers and represents a base of practitioners who have actively engaged with the company, according to Pegoraro. "This was a great opportunity to showcase [SAP SuccessFactors] in the Toronto area, especially where we have a huge customer hub," he says. "We have so many customers that are reference customers in the region where the event will be."
What underpins all of it, though, is that the Canadian HR community is among the most engaged Pegoraro has encountered anywhere in North America – not just willing to show up, but hungry to connect and learn. "We're always seeing great numbers with our events in Canada, and people want to learn more," he says. "They want to fill the room – we're always down to a waitlist with our Canadian events."
Agentic AI and the shift to strategic HR
SAP SuccessFactors' presence at HRFest Canada arrives at a pivotal moment for its platform strategy. The company’s 2026 HCM product releases expand suite-wide agentic AI across SuccessFactors – deploying connected agents across recruiting, payroll, learning, and talent development. At the centre of that shift is Joule, SAP's backbone AI agent, which is evolving from a responsive assistant into an active participant in HR workflows, according to Pegoraro.
"The biggest benefit to HR practitioners would be to have these agents do the more general work in our SuccessFactors platform to allow leadership and HRIS admins to really focus more on the strategic areas," he says.
The ambition is to move the HR function away from accumulated administrative friction – navigating complex platform menus, generating static reports, fielding routine queries – and toward decisions that require human judgement and context, says Pegoraro. An agent can guide a user step by step through a workflow, and in some cases complete the task outright.
That shift connects to a wider data story. SAP's "autonomous enterprise" model is designed to draw information from across the full business suite – finance, supply chain, customer experience, and HR – into a unified, queryable picture. As organizations grapple with whether AI in HR truly frees capacity for strategic thinking, Pegoraro points to that integration as the key differentiator.
The broader context matters here. Canada's AI for All strategy – a $2.3-billion federal investment plan launched in June 2026 – is placing workforce transformation squarely at the top of the national agenda, with targets of 250,000 new AI-related jobs over five years and a fivefold increase in business adoption by 2034, according to the Prime Minister's Office. The pressure on HR leaders to move from awareness to action is real and increasing.
What to expect at HRFest Canada 2026
Pegoraro is candid that SAP's headline partnership has a commercial objective, but what fuels his enthusiasm for HRFest Canada is something less transactional: the value of genuine peer conversation in a market where the HR community already knows itself well.
"I think it's just networking and being able to talk to other customers and how they're doing things today," he says. SAP's involvement in Leaders Night – a program designed to bring C-suite HR professionals together in a smaller, more candid setting – reflects a deliberate choice to prioritize depth of engagement over booth volume, he says.
The event format supports that approach. A main stage built for content and conversation sits alongside an expo floor where attendees who want to go deeper on product capabilities can do so on their own terms. "I think it's a fine blend of everything an event really wants to be at the end of the day," says Pegoraro.
As the rapid proliferation of AI agents in enterprise HR platforms forces practitioners to make real adoption decisions, events like HRFest Canada offer a space to have those conversations among peers – not just between vendor and client, he adds.
"The HR world in Canada is committed to their people along with branching out and hearing what others have to say," Pegoraro says. "So that is, I think, what’s really going to be the bread and butter behind this event's success."
HRFest Canada 2026 takes place at Rebel in Toronto on Nov. 10-11. Registration is open now.
