Rooted

Keara Smith will welcome you to Rooted. She’ll light the stage, guide you through the journey ahead, and drop a few quick tips to keep you grounded and connected for an experience that will reshape how you see the future of mental health at work.

The future of work will not be built by technology. It will be built by people who still know how to feel. Because right now, most don’t.We scroll through chaos and call it focus. We join meetings but never really arrive. Our calendars are full, but our hearts are empty. Work, home, news, and noise have melted into one endless blur and the real danger isn’t exhaustion. It’s numbness.

In this opening keynote, April Koh, CEO and Co-Founder of Spring Health, faces the truth most leaders won’t say out loud: people aren’t burning out, they’re checking out. Mental health isn’t about apps or slogans. It’s about being human again.

The future doesn’t belong to companies that automate faster. It belongs to those that reconnect people to meaning. To purpose. To each other. Technology isn’t the enemy. Disconnection is. Used wisely, AI can be the bridge back—helping us notice, care, and intervene before someone slips away unseen.

This isn’t a talk about resilience. It’s a call to wake up. To build workplaces that don’t just keep people going, but bring them back to life.

Mental health does not exist in isolation. Financial stress, physical burnout, and emotional strain all converge, and ignoring one affects the others.

In this session, Karishma Patel, Chief People Officer, Kelsey Whitmer, VP of Organizational Excellence, will share how organizations can move beyond siloed programs to embrace whole-person wellbeing.

Attendees will gain a clear framework for understanding the interconnected dimensions of health along with practical strategies to build cultures and benefits that support employees as whole people.

By 2026, AI could shape nearly every aspect of mental health care, enabling earlier detection, faster access, and personalized support at scale, while raising urgent questions about bias, privacy, and trust.

In this session, Dr. Nina Vasan, Julian De Freitas, Gijo Mathew, and Dr. Mill Brown will examine how AI can expand care without sacrificing empathy, safety, or ethics. Attendees will leave with a clear framework for balancing innovation with protection, and a sharper understanding of what is truly at stake as technology transforms the future of care.

Employer healthcare costs are projected to 
hit their steepest climb in more than a decade, but most leaders are overlooking one of the 
most effective cost-control levers: precision mental health.

In this session, Spring Health Co-Founder Adam Chekroud and a panel of experts will reveal how smarter mental health strategies can cut high-cost claims, ease the GLP-1 surge, reduce disability leaves, and strengthen retention.

Join us to learn how to connect mental health investment directly to cost savings and walk away with a clear framework for protecting both your bottom line and your people.

Healthy feedback is the foundation of healthy teams. When people feel safe to speak openly and know they are cared for, they can do their best work and sustain their wellbeing in the process. This session explores how Radical Candor—the balance of direct feedback and genuine care—creates the trust and psychological safety every team needs to thrive.

Led by Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, this keynote will help leaders and teams reimagine feedback as a pathway to connection, not conflict. You will learn how to challenge directly while caring personally, reduce stress and miscommunication, and build stronger, more resilient relationships at work.

Join this session to discover practical tools, real-world examples, and simple shifts you can make right away to create a culture of feedback that drives performance and protects mental health.