This week I had the privilege of sitting down for a fireside chat at HRcoreREWARD 2026 in Amsterdam — thirty minutes with a sharp moderator and a room full of rewards practitioners who came for implementation, not inspiration. What follows is a distilled version of what we discussed, expanded where I had to rush on stage.
Every “Future of AI in Rewards” talk I’ve sat through in the past year follows the same script. An exploding possibilities curve. Three vendor logos. A reassuring bullet about “human in the loop.” You nod along, go back to your desk on Monday, and nothing changes.
That’s because the conversation keeps starting in the wrong place. The “can AI do this?” question is over. AI can. The real question — the one that actually matters for anyone running comp today — is whether your rewards function is built to let it.
My read: there are three things standing in the way, and they need to be fixed in order.
I’ll tell on myself. At Palo Alto Networks, we set up a NotebookLM project — loaded our allowance policies so recruiters could chat with it, ask questions, get answers in real time. Self-service model. The recruiters loved it.
Then we discovered one of the policies we’d fed into the model was outdated. Wrong numbers. The AI had been confidently giving recruiters incorrect information — and some of them had been using it.
We had to clean up a real mess. Not because the AI was broken — the AI worked perfectly. The policy document was wrong.
This is the fundamental truth nobody wants to hear: most rewards functions are not sitting on clean data. They’re sitting on policies nobody’s audited in two years, job catalogs with stale titles, comp histories in spreadsheets that three people quietly email around. AI doesn’t rescue you from that. AI publishes it at speed.
For anyone from a manufacturing background — you know FIFO: first in, first out. With AI, the crap gets out really fast.
The work ahead isn’t prompts. It’s plumbing.
This is the part that makes people uncomfortable, so I’ll say it directly: the analyst role, as we’ve known it for twenty years, is compressing. Not to zero — but to a fraction.
Think about what an analyst actually does. Pulling benchmarks. Matching jobs to surveys. Building range grids. Chasing clean inputs. All valuable — and all fundamentally clerical. That is exactly the work AI is good at.
Meanwhile, the work AI makes no dent in — designing comp philosophy, running board conversations, being the ethical conscience when the business gets loud, defending fairness under regulatory scrutiny — that’s the work most of us said we wanted to do when we entered this field. We just never had time for it because we were buried in spreadsheets.
The architect role is what opens up. Someone who can design a compensation system, explain it in plain language, defend it to a regulator, debate it with a CEO, and keep the workforce’s trust.
Teams will shrink in headcount. They will grow in weight and influence. That’s a good trade — if you own the transition instead of waiting for someone to own it for you.
If your value has been your spreadsheet, you should be worried. If your value has been your judgment, this is the best decade of your career.
Here’s where it gets personal. Before I was a comp person, I was a part-time software developer during university and studied engineering. That background changed how I approached every single project in rewards.
Every project I’ve taken on, I’ve run it like a product sprint. Get to know the user. Ruthlessly prioritize. Ship fast. Iterate. Measure. My first two promotions at Facebook were directly based on this approach — building tools the entire rewards team used, designing incentive plans within a single year. That’s not analyst work. That’s product work. I just didn’t call it that at the time.
Here’s the reframe: rewards is the only function in HR that still runs on an annual cycle. Every other function has moved to iterative, outcome-driven work. We’re stuck. And we’re stuck because we’ve been running rewards like a cycle when we should have been running it like a product.
Your employees are your users. Your CFO is the exec sponsor. Your HRIS is the tech stack. AI is the leverage layer. Total rewards is the product. You’ve always been a product owner — you just never called it that.
One caveat I gave the room in Amsterdam: I’m not saying run rewards like a Silicon Valley startup. Your users don’t opt in, there’s no churn, and “move fast and break things” will get you sued. Fairness matters more than delight. Steal the four habits, leave the Silicon Valley cosplay at home.
PM discipline is the operating system. AI is the processor. Run them together and your function changes. Run one without the other and you get either disappointed or frustrated.
Everything we discussed in Amsterdam happened at a very specific moment. Four weeks after the conference, the EU Pay Transparency Directive transposition deadline lands (7 June 2026). Twelve weeks after, the EU AI Act starts treating what we do as high-risk — with fines up to €35 million or 7% of global turnover.
Most people treat regulation as an obstacle. I think it’s the opposite. It’s a design brief.
If you’re running an AI tool that influences any pay decision, you now need to explain it, audit it, and prove a human decided. That’s not a tax — that’s exactly the kind of rigour that makes AI trustworthy enough to scale. The compliance bar and the trust bar are converging. Build for both.
If you’re running rewards at a European company and you’ve done nothing with AI yet, here’s a 90-day plan. The first two moves need zero budget approval.
Weeks 1–4: Audit your job catalog and your policies. Count stale titles, duplicate roles, missing levels. Check every policy document for currency and version control. You need this anyway for Pay Transparency.
Weeks 5–8: Pick one AI use case with clean data. Benchmarking is usually the safest — structured data, clear output, easy to compare. Run a parallel pilot: old way and AI way. Measure the delta.
Weeks 9–12: Bring one number and one story to your CFO. “We cut benchmarking time from X to Y. Here’s the capacity we freed up. Here’s what we want to invest in next.”
Notice what those three moves really are — your first product sprint. Scoped problem, clean data, measurable outcome, stakeholder pitch.
Don’t buy an AI tool in April if you haven’t cleaned your job catalog by March.
In 2029, the rewards function that wins isn’t the one with the best AI tools. It’s the one that runs itself like a product team — clear users, ruthless priorities, a real roadmap, metrics that mean something. AI is what makes that possible. Product discipline is what makes it work.
We’ve been running the rewards cycle for twenty years. It’s time to start running the rewards product.
]]>Having access to compensation data through various online platforms has revolutionized the way individuals approach their careers. The list of websites provided above serves as a valuable resource for understanding salary ranges, benefits, and industry norms. However, it is important to note that the data available on these platforms is often crowdsourced and not verified by employers, which can lead to variations and discrepancies. Therefore, it is essential to gather multiple data points and exercise caution when interpreting and relying on this information. By leveraging the power of accessible compensation data, individuals can make informed decisions, negotiate effectively, and pave the way for their career progression.
]]>In conclusion, blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionise the total rewards field by providing a secure, transparent, and decentralised platform for managing employee compensation, benefits, and incentives. While the technology is still in its early stages, the potential use cases of blockchain in the total rewards field are vast and exciting. As the technology continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how blockchain-based total rewards programs can enhance the employee experience and drive business success.
]]>Here is the unedited answer, hope you enjoy reading:
Employee compensation and benefits are crucial factors in retaining talent, boosting employee satisfaction, and enhancing overall company culture. Total rewards refer to the complete package of compensation and benefits offered by an organization, including base pay, bonuses, health insurance, retirement benefits, and other perks. In this blog post, we will explore the importance of total rewards in company culture and how they can impact employee engagement, retention, and productivity.
Attracting Top Talent: A competitive total rewards package can help attract top talent to an organization. According to a survey by Glassdoor, 79% of employees would prefer new or additional benefits to a pay increase. Offering a comprehensive total rewards package can help differentiate an organization from its competitors and attract candidates who are looking for more than just a high salary.
Retention: Total rewards can also play a crucial role in retaining employees. A study by Willis Towers Watson found that organizations with effective total rewards programs experience significantly lower turnover rates than those without. Employees who feel valued and rewarded for their work are more likely to stay with their current employer, reducing the cost and disruption of turnover.
Engagement: Total rewards can also help increase employee engagement. A study by Aon found that organizations with effective total rewards programs had significantly higher levels of engagement among employees. When employees feel valued and appreciated, they are more likely to be committed to their work and to the organization, leading to higher levels of productivity and overall job satisfaction.
Productivity: Total rewards can also impact employee productivity. A study by WorldatWork found that organizations with effective total rewards programs had higher levels of productivity than those without. When employees feel that their efforts are being recognized and rewarded, they are more likely to be motivated to work hard and perform at their best.
In summary, a comprehensive total rewards package is essential for creating a positive and engaging company culture. Not only does it help attract and retain top talent, but it also enhances employee engagement and productivity. Organizations that invest in effective total rewards programs are more likely to see positive business outcomes, including higher levels of employee satisfaction, lower turnover rates, and increased productivity. It is essential to keep in mind that total rewards are not a one-size-fits-all solution, and organizations must tailor their packages to meet the unique needs and preferences of their employees. By doing so, they can create a company culture that values and rewards employees, leading to long-term success for the organization as a whole.
]]>Well, some companies do that to their employees.
I bluntly asked this question to my LinkedIn network and realized that 2 out of 3 people would leave. I even didn’t specify any details by the way. No number of monthly salaries, not even a certain dollar amount. Two third of the people just was happy to quit if they would have received a bonus.
At first, it really doesn’t make sense but I believe it’s purely financial and cultural from employers perspective.
Let me go through the thought process here.
According to Gallup, a disengaged employee costs around 34% of their annual salary. Almost 4 months’ of workforce! In addition to that, a non-regrettable turnover’s true cost to the company is 1.5-2 times monthly salary of an employee. So technically we’re talking about half of an annual salary. Now, let’s consider that you can hire a replacement in 2-3 months’ time, which is quite a good estimate for a backfill, we’re still short of 3 months’ salary in terms of true cost and that’s definitely a significant one to avoid. Hence, an employer would be happy to provide a fraction of it to eliminate the risk of this overall cost.
I think we can also monetize the fact of a disengaged employee’s toxicity in the work environment and the culture but that one’s hard to predict. However, that’s also something you’d pay to avoid hence the above practice makes even more sense.
I know, it’s pretty controversial and unique but if you think about it, it might be a good lever to pull if you’re working on a hefty culture change management these days.
]]>However, recent changes in the regulatory space can shape how this evolves.
A recent bill passed by the State of California, and it seems like it’s not going to stop. Basically, the companies are now required to disclose pay scale for the role they’re hiring.
If you and your teammates are already close to share each other’s compensation data, that’s OK. If not, this pay transparency movement can also help you to be more aware what your market is.
It’s definitely tricky to get this data. As professionals, we use consultancy services and purchase specific market data collected by surveys. And, guess what, they’re expensive and you cannot purchase as an individual.
That leaves you with some crowdsourced data. A good example would be levels.fyi. Although they’re not accurate by the levels of organization, location and scope of the role – they definitely gives you a starting point.
You can also try exploring job sites such as Glassdoor, Salary.com, and even LinkedIn. They offer a platform to look into comparison charts to get an approximate salary range for the respective roles. In addition, you can also reach out to a few people in the same role to get a better sense of the pay scale.
At the end of the day, people should look at their compensation package as their “price tag”. Your compensation package is the monetary equivalent to the worth of your services that’s determined by the organization(s).
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I ran a poll recently on Linkedin and asked if people would prefer to have a flexibility in customising their compensation packages. An example would be that the company would provide a total compensation amount, e.g. $ 100,000 and let the employee choose how they would like to split it into base salary, bonus and equity.
The post received more than 2000 impressions however the voting ended with only 36 votes. 75% of participants voted for “yes” and the rest was either maybe or no.
This shouldn’t mean that I’m advocating for this type of approach. At least yet. However, it’s interesting that people would love to see that flexibility and individualisation. But…
(of course, there will be a but!)
The first and foremost challenge it’s going to create is the pay equity. As employees will choose different splits, this would create an unstandardised approach to base, guaranteed compensation.
Although it’s maybe less relevant internally as part of the organisation culture (of course, if communicated effectively), it would definitely impact employer/company branding when it comes to regulatory reporting.
That’s somehow the continuation of the above. As the individual selection of splits, it’s going to be extremely hard to implement a standardised pay for performance methodology as performance is “relative” and the benchmark is peers. Imagine the peers have no standard in their pay as the baseline: How can you effectively assess performance, and even if you do, how do you translate it to pay without disrupting that fairness?
Well, this is probably one of the most important reason that makes things complicated in this sense. Administrative load will be extremely high due to requests to customise employee pay data and it will definitely require quite flexible HRIS systems to accommodate that. There should be some gatekeeping to manage the customisation frequency, too.
Well, it’s going to be super disruptive to the market. Well, this might not be your problem in the short-term but it’s going to be hard to explain things internally down the line if there would be any competitiveness issues despite this approach.
Well, this is the main challenge. How is it possible to enable people to work towards the vision and mission of your organisation is through a solid total rewards strategy and its implementation.
If you allow people to customise their packages, technically you’re allowing them to play with that “linkage” as they want and this makes the organisation lose that control.
It’s extremely hard, if not impossible, to connect people with the broader strategy if their short- and/or long-term variable compensation is not or not enough linked it.
As an example, you have a bonus program which has a multiplier that’s decided based on the company’s success in terms of revenue growth and that’s a company priority. If the employee chooses to minimize the bonus portion in their package, how would it be possible to keep this person engaged and (to an extent) accountable if you don’t hit that revenue growth?
Overall, this sounds like a cutting-edge approach to rewards management. If the challenges that I mentioned above could be sorted, it might be an amazing lever to pull when it comes to talent attraction, motivation and retention. In the meantime, I do not expect the companies would disrupt the current portfolio of programs but it’s a good food for thought.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com
]]>Relating that instinct to my profession, there comes the pay equity. In a more specific way; gender pay. I don’t think the value of effort, time and experience should be limited by a physical, mental or social categorization. Gender being a major one and unfortunately it’s been used for segregating the workforce for decades (or even centuries!)
Here are my thoughts after working on a lot of those projects. I tried to list them down and also give some sort of explanation for each.
I studied engineering and worked specifically a lot in the field of process management. While building processes, there’s a key element and it’s the most obvious one: input (or prerequisites) – If you think an employee’s life cycle in an organization as a process, their hiring is the input. Now, also remember that famous quote: “garbage in, garbage out”
That exactly applies to gender pay gap. We should clear the hiring decisions and eventually compensation packages free from a potential bias around gender. Scientifically proven, female candidates provide a lesser amount of current compensation data and have less tendency to negotiate for higher compensation.
Companies should avoid lowballing offers and take the advantage of (lack of) these actions.
If you pay a certain amount for a job, it shouldn’t be influenced by the current status of the candidate.
Well, the chances you dominate the statistical outputs as a minority is pretty low. If you even do, then you are the one who’s skewing the data anyway.
In that case, having an as equal as possible headcount distribution by gender is important. This would ensure that median pay is more standardized and impact the overall rates in an equal importance (or weighting).
This is unfortunately the truth in our current society. At least speaking for the last 3 or 4 decades, most of the highly paid jobs, e.g. Engineering, are dominated by male workforce. This is also closely related to the point 1 above. STEM education is more favored by male students and we see almost a handful of women studying engineering in each class year compared to tens or maybe hundreds.
I can clearly remember that my class year in my university had only 4 women vs. 200+ men. We simply cannot talk about equity where the stakes are not equal at all.
This is also a little bit related to the above. In the basic organizational design, the compensation will be directly correlated with the hierarchy – which makes sense; no questions on that.
The issue is though who is taking those seats up at the top? If your C-level is male dominant technically speaking there’s almost no way that you can talk about pay equity. Think about the Pareto Rule: 20% of the highest paid people will skew the data with 80% dominance. If your highest paid employees, aka your C- and executive level is male, then there’s already a pay gap created among both gender. The only way to overcome that is you have a diverse boardroom.
I think these four major factors are quite important in influencing the gender pay in our organizations and also in our society.
Promoting STEM education for the female students, giving them more opportunities in the workforce, treating them in a bias-free way during key touchpoints (hiring, promotions, transfers etc.) in their employee lifecycle will definitely helps us close this pay gap. It’s not easy, not something we can solve overnight but with a proper planning and strategy, it’s possible – and when that happens we will then talk about a developed society.
]]>Nowadays, HR world’s priorities are filled with Diversity and Inclusion initiatives and priorities.
I’m not surprised by this as we have seen how the world is shaken recently on this matter. My aim in this post is to share my thoughts about D&I initiative and how they can be linked to Rewards practices.
Global Diversity Practice, a global consultancy firm specializing on such practices, defines it as follows:
Diversity is any dimension that can be used to differentiate groups and people from one another. In a nutshell, it’s about empowering people by respecting and appreciating what makes them different, in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, education, and national origin.
Inclusion is an organizational effort and practices in which different groups or individuals having different backgrounds are culturally and socially accepted and welcomed, and equally treated. These differences could be self-evident, such as national origin, age, race and ethnicity, religion/belief, gender, marital status and socioeconomic status or they could be more inherent, such as educational background, training, sector experience, organizational tenure, even personality, such as introverts and extroverts.
Simply put, it’s a dimension which can explain the differences of your workforce by several groupings and respecting those differences.
In the recent years, we started seeing an accelerated effort from a lot of states to point these and how they relate to the social welfare of their population. Obviously, it’s directly correlated to the workforce and the workforce’s living.
For any member of the society, who is also a part of an organization and earns a certain level of compensation and is entitled to some benefits, it automatically impacts their involvement in the broader society.
A perfect example for such exercise is gender pay gap.
A lot of countries are concentrating on passing legislation that checks the pay equity between gender, ethnic group or race. It’s generally a reflection of the social issues that the respective country faces and tries to either increase awareness or even penalize based on the results.
I wrote about different pay scales for different nationalities and how this practice was interestingly common in the Middle East long time ago.
I believe this is diminished significantly over the years but it was a great example how far we came along and how much further we need to go.
You can even see the French legislation and see that one of the major indications is about getting a salary increase after returning from maternity leave. This is deliberately added to the legislation as the pay discrimination against French working moms is systemically common and creates a pay gap that is becoming harder to close as year passes by.
These were few examples in our field that shows how pay equity is created, and unfortunately, pretty easily.
My quick step-by-step recommendation on effective pay equity and fairness work are as follows:
Obviously, everything starts by analyzing and identifying the gaps. If you don’t ask question, you will never get an answer. Therefore, asking the right questions, looking at all the different data cuts is vital.
Once you identified the gaps, dig deep and understand the root cause. Sometimes, it’s pretty easy to tell that a pay gap is because of a wrong offer that’s extended or it’s just an outlier. Bear in mind that a compensation "life cycle" is technically a timeline and the reason could lie at any point of that timeline. Reflecting back is pretty helpful in this case.
Create awareness and educate your workforce on importance of pay parity and fairness. Start from the population that has a decision-making authority in Rewards processes, but scale it to the whole workforce. Cascading this responsibility with creating awareness will help you down the line.
Be consistent. I think this is already a crucial aspect of being a Rewards person but exceptions create outliers; outliers create inequity.
Please let me know if you’d like to see more hands-on examples on how to look into these processes or if you are looking for more details on these aspects.
]]>To be honest, I was a bit skeptical to get my recertification approved. Given the pandemic and how it impacted -especially- the social aspect of collaboration with other professionals in the field, I found it hard this time to submit enough credits. However, it didn’t turn out that bad!
Up and onwards! I will share more updates as I get ready for the next one!
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