At WorldatWork’s recent Total Rewards conference in Orlando, vendors were eager to talk about how they were incorporating AI into their compensation tools.
The great promise of AI is that it can save professionals time and effort on mundane, administrative tasks so they can focus on more strategic projects that don’t lend themselves as easily to technology. Compensation is no exception.
Luke Corby, director of professional services for Salary.com, joked that he remembers a time when his boss at a previous company would ask his team to print out and stuff envelopes with 3,000 bonus letters each year.
“I slowly discovered, through that experience, and through talking with other colleagues, that…not everybody is at the forefront of this technology,” he said.
Salary.com and other HR tech firms are positioning themselves to be at the forefront of AI, and hope that their customers will come along for the ride. But not all compensation pros are ready to abandon their Excel spreadsheets just yet.
AI investments. Representatives from several compensation firms at the conference discussed how their platforms are now using “agentic AI,” a form of the technology that can perform certain tasks and workflows with minimal human intervention.
Salary.com launched an agentic AI tool on April 21 that can analyze employers’ compensation data and assess whether employees are a flight risk based on factors like performance, hire date, and current wages, Corby said. It also features a market analysis component that can give predictions on how tariff policies might impact the labor market, for example.
Corby said he hopes companies are embracing agentic AI as he believes it holds promise for the compensation profession.
“Comp people are so busy and frantic all the time, and you never get to be strategic and proactive because it’s always chaos,” he said. Having an agent that can ping a compensation pro about employees that will be affected when the federal or state minimum wage goes up, for example, may help free up their time to be more of “a visionary and a strategist,” he said.
In separate conversations with HR Brew, leaders with compensation firms Syndio and Payscale also spoke about new AI features in their platforms, but emphasized their efficacy—rather than time-saving—potential.
By deploying AI agents across companies to monitor data such as market pricing, internal promotion and attrition rates, and employee engagement surveys, Syndio hopes to help customers make more precise pay decisions, said CEO Maria Colacurcio. “With agentic AI, you can be looking at data across the company…in a way that makes intelligent recommendations,” she explained.
Payscale’s new AI solutions, meanwhile, are designed to help “make it easier to make a good decision,” said Sara Hillenmeyer, the company’s senior director of data science. “We really think that the value of AI and compensation isn’t just about getting the work done faster. It’s about making those better, more informed, more confident decisions about pay.” she said.
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HR’s hesitation. While compensation platforms like Salary.com, Syndio, and Payscale are bullish about AI, the professionals they cater to expressed more hesitation about these new capabilities during one of the conference sessions.
“How many people have been satisfied with the tangible benefits that AI can bring from any of the vendors you’ve talked to today?” Boyd Davis, CEO and co-founder of compensation software firm Payfederate, asked attendees at the session, which was focused on helping compensation professionals deal with an increasing workload.
Just a few attendees raised their hands to give vendors an “A” or “B” on AI, while most graded them as “C.” At least one attendee raised their hand when given the option of “an absolute fail.”
Part of the disconnect between vendors and customers when it comes to AI-enabled compensation tools seems to be a lack of understanding about what the technology actually does.
After Boyd described an AI feature in his company’s product that helps customers identify similarities between new and existing job descriptions, one attendee noted that “if someone actually showed us a real example of what you just talked about, I think you would’ve seen a lot more A’s than C’s or D’s.”
Pay’s new world. Regardless of the skepticism voiced by compensation professionals at the Orlando session, it seems likely AI will soon become more prevalent in the field of total rewards, according to a recent Korn Ferry report.
About one-quarter of firms that the consulting firm surveyed are currently using AI for applications like compiling and benchmarking pay data to set salary bands, while 40% of leaders believe they’ll use it for other functions—such as determining base salaries or pay for performance—as the technology matures.
As more companies embrace AI, HR departments will have the opportunity to lead if they’re open to adoption themselves, predicted Todd Gershkowitz, co-CEO of PayStandards, an agentic AI pay platform. “The HR function needs to be the driver of how [AI] is implemented in the company to make sure that it’s not unnecessarily disruptive, and it’s adopted the right way, implemented the right way,” he said.
“We’re excited about that, because that means HR can not only be a driver of this change in the company…but it can also benefit from it first and be a role model.”
