Amanda Lopez
Vice President - Talent Management Ardelyx
Amanda Lopez is a strategic Talent Executive with 15+ years of strategic HR leadership experience from companies like Entrada, CRISPR Therapeutics, Intarcia, Immunogen, and Biogen—where she helped prepare for five product launches in five years and has hired over 1,000 people throughout her career. As a Talent Management leader, she designs and delivers integrated talent strategies that enhance the employee experience—strengthening recruitment, developing leaders, driving performance, and expanding learning and career opportunities for an organization’s greatest asset: its people. Before moving in-house, Amanda served as a Principal in Executive Search at J. Robert Scott, and started her career as a management consultant at IBM and The Corporate Executive Board (now part of Gartner).
Seminars
- Growth brings momentum and opportunity, but it also brings uncertainty, shifting priorities, evolving roles, and friction. For HR leaders, the challenge isn’t introducing more programs – it’s creating practical people systems that help employees grow while the business itself is still evolving.
- In this session, explore how Ardelyx is reframing career development as a strategic bridge between today’s growing pains and the workforce needed for its next chapter.
- You’ll learn how a lean Talent Management team is connecting goals, mid-year conversations, individual development planning, manager enablement, and just-in-time learning to make growth more visible, practical, and aligned to the business.
- Attendees will leave with a practical example of how HR teams can turn scaling friction into a growth system, building the bridge to the future while the organization is still in motion.
This interactive Q&A explores the intersection of coaching-led performance culture and AI-enabled development, two approaches that between them represent the most significant shift in how organizations are managing talent growth right now.
Participants will examine how these models work alongside each other, where they create tension, and what it takes to build a development culture that is genuinely coaching-first and AI-ready at the same time.
- How do you embed a coaching mindset in managers who were promoted for technical expertise, not people skills?
- What does an AI-enabled development ecosystem look like in a mid-sized biotech without enterprise-scale resources?
- How do you ensure AI-powered skills intelligence translates into different development decisions, not just better data?
- Where does the coaching-first approach and the AI-enabled approach most naturally reinforce each other, and where do they create friction?
