From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Compensation

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

Courtney Vinopal

hr-brew.com

The contribution limit for dependent care flexible spending accounts (FSAs) is 

 from $5,000 to $7,500 annually next year due to a provision in the recently enacted Republican tax bill.

This means that employees with dependents may set aside up to $7,500 pre-tax dollars to use on expenses like daycare or preschool ($3,750 for married individuals filing their taxes separately). FSAs are the most common family care benefit employers offer, according to SHRM, ahead of childcare referral services or backup care.

But employers are still considering whether to adopt the increased FSA contribution limit, according to a flash poll of 903 clients conducted by consulting firm Mercer on August 7. Forty-three percent of clients surveyed said their organization was “still considering” whether to take advantage of the new limit, while 39% said they planned to do so for all employees, and 10% said they didn’t plan to do so.

FSA considerations for benefits leaders. 

One issue HR teams will need to take into account when deciding whether to increase their organization’s FSA contribution limit is what usage among highly compensated employees might look like.

US tax code bars employers from offering dependent care FSA plans that discriminate in favor of “highly compensated” employees; in 2025, this classification refers to employees who earn more than $160,000 a year.

Businesses must pass a series of tests to demonstrate their programs don’t favor these employees, and historically the “55% average benefits test” has been hardest for employers to clear, Rich Glass, a principal with Mercer’s law and policy group, said during an Aug. 7 webinar with clients. In order to pass, employers must show non-highly compensated employees receive 55% of the dependent care assistance benefits given to highly-compensated ones, on average. This may be difficult, particularly with a $7,500 contribution threshold, given highly compensated employees are more likely to make higher contributions to a dependent care FSA.

“A failure to test carries the risk of all [highly compensated employee] contributions becoming taxable,” Glass explained.

The Mercer data suggests employees are taking the potential effects of non-discrimination testing on their dependent care FSA programs into account, as 9% of respondents said they’re only planning on raising the annual contribution limit for certain employees—i.e., those who aren’t considered highly compensated.

“I suspect that that number may increase over time as more people digest this information,” said Dorian Smith, partner, national practice leader with Mercer’s law and policy group.

It’s worth noting that workers also have the option to claim the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) for child care expenses on their federal tax returns, and in 2026 this credit will also go up due to a change in the tax bill. Low-income families 

of up to 50% on $6,000 worth of expenses for two children, up from the previous 35%. Employees can’t claim the same expenses for both a dependent care FSA and the CDCTC, though.

Ultimately, employees’ decision on whether to take advantage of a dependent care FSA or the CDCTC is “highly individualized,” and likely to depend on workers’ gross income and the taxation rates where they reside, Glass said.

Childcare and work. Keyboard with children's alphabet blocks.

Companies weigh new $7,500 limit for dependent care FSAs 

The contribution limit for dependent care assistance programs will go up in 2026, but employers are considering how nondiscrimination tests may affect their programs.

Employers are weighing new $7,500 limit for dependent care FSAs 

Mikaela Cohen

AI skills are in demand, and HR will need to fork over higher salaries to recruit this talent.

Adding AI skills to job descriptions could cost employers 28% more in annual compensation, a 

 from research firm Lightcast found. AI-related skills can include expertise with large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, as well as prompt engineering, text summarization, and more.

A Lightcast analysis of over 1.3 billion job postings in 2024 found roles advertising at least one AI or generative AI skill offered $18,000 more in annual compensation on average than those that did not. Some 51% of these AI roles were not in tech-related industries, up from 44% in 2022.

“AI is becoming more and more pervasive throughout all of the job descriptions that we’re seeing for virtually any different career area,” Cole Napper, VP of research at Lightcast, told HR Brew.

No longer are AI skills only associated with tech or IT roles, Napper said, and the roles that are seeing the biggest rise in AI skill demand are recruiters and HR pros.

Companies that don’t keep up with this trend, he said, could miss out on talent.

“There is a divergence that’s going on between employers who are saying, ‘We’re not leaning into this space. We’re not really seeing the need to do that,” Napper said. “It’s better to recruit sooner than later, because if you try to play catch up later, this is going to cost you even more.”

It’s a supply and demand issue, Napper added. More employers are demanding AI skills, but the supply of employees with these skills has stayed consistent, he said. He suspects the workforce will adjust through upskilling and reskilling, but this will take time.

“There is always a lagging effect, because it takes time for people to build skills,” he said.

AI robot arms reaching towards the sky with lots of money falling around them.

AI talent costs nearly 30% more in annual compensation

In 2007, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a blistering dissent in a Title VII case brought by Lilly Ledbetter, a former supervisor at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant who discovered she was paid less than male colleagues in equal or less senior positions, and sued for sex discrimination.

The dissent touched upon the pervasive problem of secrecy that today’s pay transparency laws are trying to solve. “Pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter’s case, in small increments; cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only over time,” 

. “Comparative pay information, moreover, is often hidden from the employee’s view. Employers may keep under wraps the pay differentials maintained among supervisors, no less the reasons for those differentials.”

By the time Colorado enacted a law requiring employers to share salary information with potential job seekers in 2019, policymakers had been wrestling with fair pay issues like this one for decades. At the federal level they sought to remedy them first with the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and later with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which expanded the statute of limitations on discrimination claims like Ledbetter’s, removing a hurdle for employees bringing lawsuits.

 that have been enacted in more than a dozen US states and Washington, DC, workers have access to much more information about how their employers pay, and why. But like the policies that came before them, these laws haven’t yet resulted in a meaningful narrowing of the gender pay gap—one key goal of the movement.

 can refer to a variety of different compensation practices, the term generally describes laws requiring employers to disclose a good-faith salary range for the jobs they advertise.

Advocates who supported pay transparency legislation believed “giving people information at the time of a new job search was really crucial,” said Helena Almeida, VP, managing counsel with ADP. “It’s harder to increase somebody’s salary while they’re in a particular role. So getting that information to people at the beginning of a new job was vital.”

These pay transparency measures were preceded by a wave of state laws banning employers from asking about a candidate’s salary history, which was already helping to change the dynamics of compensation and bargaining power in the workplace, she added.

Colorado was the first state to enact a pay transparency law, as Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill requiring employers to post salary ranges into law in May 2019. In the 

, legislators cited the persistent gender pay gap as inhibiting women’s earning potential and ability to provide for their families.

“It is the intent of the general assembly to pass legislation that helps to close the pay gap in Colorado and ensure that employees with similar job duties are paid the same wage rate regardless of sex, or sex plus another protected status,” the legislation stated.

A map showing US states where pay transparency laws are in effect.

Since the Colorado law took effect, more than a dozen other states have moved to pass salary range legislation with a similar stated goal of closing pay gaps across gender, race, and ethnicity. By the end of 2025 similar laws 

 across 14 states and Washington, DC, including in major markets such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.

More recent legislation has referenced the fact that salary transparency is now seen as a business imperative as much as a means to narrow pay gaps. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, whose pay transparency law goes into effect this October, 

 beyond ensuring workplaces are more equitable, the policy “will help strengthen the Massachusetts economy and its competitiveness by attracting and retaining the best talent.”

Employers are starting to pick up on the attraction and retention piece as well, as many are including salary ranges in their job postings, even if they’re not hiring in a jurisdiction that requires them to do so. Nearly 60% of US job advertisements on career site Indeed included compensation information as of May 2025.

The domino effect that’s occurred in sync with the passage of these laws is in part a reflection of workers expecting pay transparency from current and prospective employers. Some 36% of job candidates surveyed by research firm Gartner in 2024 said they decided not to apply for a job over the past year because the description lacked a salary range.

Many employers appeared to be caught flat-footed by the Colorado requirements when they took effect in 2021. Companies like Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, and Nike 

 Colorado-based applicants from job postings to avoid including salary ranges for open roles.

As new pay transparency laws took effect in New York and California, some employers posted ranges so wide it was hard to see how they could possibly be helpful to workers, or a “good faith” representation of what they paid. Citigroup, for example, advertised a job for a client service officer and 

 as anywhere from $0 to $2 million. After being called out, the bank attributed the initial range to a technical error and changed it to $61,710–$155,290—still a difference of nearly $100,000. Meanwhile, the New York City Commission on Human Rights 

 against Tesla for posting some jobs without salary ranges, and others that were “not in good faith.” The complaint cited a role for a field service technician that was listed as paying anywhere from $22 to $58 an hour.

Such ranges often don’t seem reasonable to current employees or job candidates, said Gail Greenfield, EVP of pay equity and total rewards strategy and solutions with software firm Trusaic. “But of course, when these ranges were created, they weren’t meant to be shared with anyone, really, outside of HR, except perhaps for managers,” she said. “Over time, organizations are probably going to want to narrow their pay ranges” so they allow employers to reward workers differently “based on legitimate factors,” but also “don’t set off alarm bells that somehow this information can’t be trusted.”

The biggest challenge employers face is deciding how transparent they want to be, Greenfield said. Becoming transparent can be a costly and time-consuming process for organizations, especially if they need to correct inequities that may be unearthed in the process. If a company has major pay inequities or pay compression issues that need to be addressed, for instance, sharing more information than what’s required could be risky, according to Greenfield. “I’ve kind of bristled at the assumption that companies should just be more transparent…that’s just simply not going to be viable for every organization.”

Wolters Kluwer, an information services company headquartered in the Netherlands, is only publishing salary ranges for jobs in locations where it’s required for the moment, said Elisa Wyman, SVP of global rewards and DEIB. “We understand that it’s not something that happens overnight,” she said of the company’s pay transparency journey, which includes training managers to have conversations about compensation, and getting salaries aligned with a global job structure.

Given Wolters Kluwer employs about 21,000 workers across 50 countries, the process of becoming totally transparent is fairly complex, Wyman said. While the firm isn’t yet ready to publish compensation for all open roles, it did share its global pay equity analysis in its 

, which showed an adjusted gender pay gap of 3.1% across the company.

Chicago-based digital consulting firm West Monroe opted for full transparency, according to chief people officer Tanya Moore.

“It’s naive to think that employees don’t talk about their compensation,” Moore said when asked why her organization opted to share salary ranges for all US-based roles, even in locations where it’s not required. She pointed to anonymous forums like Fishbowl or Glassdoor as places employees might turn to if they can’t get the information from HR. “If we hide information, I really believe that employees are going to fill in the blanks with assumptions, and often those assumptions aren’t accurate, and they tend to not be positive.”

Moore acknowledged, though, that full transparency requires a fair amount of investment in education and resources so employees understand why they’re paid what they’re paid. As West Monroe prepares to publish salary bands internally, it’s also training its managers about the company’s compensation philosophy, benchmarking process, and market adjustments, so they can have detailed conversations with employees about their pay.

“You can’t do pay transparency overnight,” she said. “If you roll this stuff out without making sure you've cleaned up any gaps, making sure that you have a compensation philosophy and framework, making sure that you’ve educated people, you have resources available, it really could be a disaster.”

HR leaders are also learning that when they do decide on a transparent compensation strategy, they must stay the course. Help Scout, a remote-first software company that makes customer support tools, pays workers at the same level in the same salary range, regardless of where in the world they’re located.

If she could revisit the company’s approach, Help Scout’s VP of people Leah Knobler would differentiate salaries based on geography, she told HR Brew, as this could save the business money. But at the same time, she notes that Help Scout has been able to attract talent from lesser-known markets thanks to this structure.

“You pick what your philosophy is and what your strategy is for your company, and then you have to just kind of stick to it,” Knobler said. “Let’s continue just to do it as well as we can, understanding that maybe there are learnings, and we would do it differently if we could wave a magic wand.”

It’s still fairly early to assess whether pay transparency laws have been effective in closing pay gaps. The gender wage gap in the US has changed little over the past two decades, as a 

 of government data showed it narrowed only slightly, with women earning 85% of what men earned in 2024, up from 81% in 2003.

The Women’s Foundation of Colorado, which lobbied for the passage of the pay transparency law, shared heartening statistics from the Centennial State last year 

 showing the gender pay gap for the average woman working full-time, year-round closed from 78 cents for every to dollar paid to men in similar jobs in 2021 to 85 cents per dollar in 2024.

Looking at median weekly earnings of full-time workers, though—the way the gender pay gap is typically measured—progress in Colorado looks more muted. The state’s pay gap actually widened to 82 cents on the dollar in 2023, down from 85 cents when pay transparency took effect in 2021, according to the 

Though assessing whether pay transparency will lead to pay equity is a bit of a “crystal ball” exercise, organizations will have math on their side if they take the right approach, said Kelly Voss, head of rewards and career advisory with the professional services firm Aon.

“If we’re showing salary structures, we have people falling outside of salary structures, and we’re adjusting to have people come into the salary structures, over time the math works for you,” she said.

We’re starting to see “the beginnings” of reductions in pay inequities, because pay transparency is “shining a light on how companies are making pay decisions, and in some sense, [requiring] companies to justify those pay decisions,” said Trusaic’s Greenfield.

“There’s an opportunity for pay transparency to reduce or eliminate pay inequities, at least in the long run,” she continued. “In the short run, some of the reasons that inequities are likely to persist” include “the cost of addressing existing inequities, especially for organizations that haven't done this work seriously.”

The federal government does not currently require companies to share their pay data, but individual companies have been eager to share success stories about reducing pay gaps within their organizations when they do occur. Software company 

 a pay equity analysis it performed in mid-2022 that showed 99% of its US employees were paid fairly—that is, the company found few instances where statistically significant differences existed across gender and race for “employees performing comparable work.”

SAP shared salaries for its North American employees internally before it started sharing them externally, which helped the company correct inequities, said Megan Smith, head of people and culture for the Americas. Sharing salary structures with current employees “really holds the employer accountable,” and creates “a lot of clarity and structure for the managers who are making these salary decisions.”

“We had a few more years’ lead time to really be thinking through making sure that that pay fairness is there,” Smith added.

While the grand ambition behind pay transparency laws to reduce inequities that still exist across the US has yet to be fully realized, the movement has shifted the culture of organizations when it comes to talking about compensation. Smith mentioned finding out someone on her team was paid more than her at a previous company when she was in her mid-20s, which marked “a turning point” in how she thought about conversations surrounding pay. She recalled resenting her manager, and being frustrated she didn’t do more to inform herself.

“Now, generationally, it’s completely different,” she said. “People feel more empowered to be able to have conversations, and they have more tools to know where to go to find this information and expect that it can be a part of a discussion.”

A sign that says 'Close The Pay Gap' is held by Nancy Reichman, a member of Colorado's Pay Equity Commission, during a rally in downtown Denver, CO on April 28, 2009.

Why pay transparency hasn’t closed the gender pay gap

More than a dozen US states require employers to share salary ranges, but these efforts haven’t yet closed the gender pay gap. 

Pay transparency promised pay equity. Is it working? 

Colorado workers will be entitled to an additional 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave starting next year if they have a child being treated in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

 the state’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) program on May 30. Colorado is the first state to offer extended leave to parents with babies in the NICU.

NICU parents can receive double the amount of leave. 

Nearly all employees in Colorado are already entitled to receive up to 12 weeks of leave to bond with a new child. The state’s paid family leave law went into effect last year after it was passed via ballot initiative in 2020. Mothers, fathers, and individuals acting as the parent to a child (“in loco parentis”) can apply for the benefit.

Starting Jan. 1, 2026, workers with children in the NICU may receive double the amount of leave, a total of 24 weeks. The additional 12 weeks of leave should be taken for the duration of time a child is receiving treatment in the NICU, according to the bill’s text.

One of the bill’s sponsors, state Rep. Yara Zokaie, previously described working from the hospital when her child was in the NICU. “Having a child in the NICU is one of the most terrifying moments as a parent, and the last thing they should be worried about is having to choose between spending time with their child in the hospital and keeping their jobs,” she said in an 

 paid family and medical leave systems in place, with laws granting eligible workers anywhere from six to 12 weeks off to bond with a new child or care for a loved one.

Though Colorado is the first state to extend paid leave for NICU parents, some states have found other ways to enhance their benefits for workers with families in recent years. New York, for example, 

 employers to offer 20 hours of paid prenatal leave to pregnant workers annually.

Some employers have incorporated enhanced leave offerings into their total rewards, as well. Both Pinterest and Morgan Stanley offer NICU leave to their employees.

Legislative Lowdown recurring feature illustration

Colorado extends paid parental leave for NICU stays

It’s the first state to enhance paid family leave for workers with babies receiving treatment in a neonatal intensive care unit.

Legislative lowdown: Colorado extends leave for parents with children in the NICU

New Jersey is the latest state to enact a pay transparency law. As of June 1, employers with 10 or more workers doing business in the state, and that take applications for employment within New Jersey, must share information about salary and benefits when they post new jobs or transfer opportunities with their organizations.

Gov. Phil Murphy, who signed the New Jersey bill into law last November, said the legislation is part of his administration’s “efforts to make the Garden State more equitable, ensuring that critical salary and benefits information and career advancement opportunities are accessible to our workers,” according to a 

This latest law is part of a broader movement to require employers to share more information about how they pay employees in the hopes it will even the playing field during salary negotiations, and help close pay gaps.

What New Jersey’s pay transparency law requires. 

Covered employers must now include the following information when they post new jobs or transfer opportunities with their organizations:

Either the hourly wage or salary, or a range, for the position;

Any other compensation programs for which an employee would be eligible if they took the position

Salary or hourly wage ranges also must have a start and end point, 

 published by New Jersey’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Posting that a job simply pays “up to $35.00 per hour,” for example, is insufficient.

New Jersey is among a handful of states that require businesses to share information about the benefits they offer employees, in addition to compensation. The law asks employers to provide a “general description” of benefits, while avoiding phrases that lack details, such as “health insurance and more.” Colorado, Illinois, and Washington are among the states that also require employers to publish a description of their benefits.

As part of the New Jersey law, employers must also make “reasonable efforts” to notify employees of promotion opportunities in their departments when they arise.

Fourteen states and Washington, DC will have 

 on the books by the end of 2025. The wave of legislation in recent years has spurred more employers to include salary ranges when they post open roles, even if they’re not based in jurisdictions where it’s required. As of February 2025, 53% of job postings from New Jersey employers included salary information, 

Some experts have questioned whether pay transparency laws can affect employee motivation and engagement. For instance, one recent study found disclosing not only pay, but also performance rank, can influence how aggressive workers are in negotiating salaries, with top performers more likely to ask for significantly higher raises. As such, the professor who led the study 

 that pay transparency warrants a “nuanced” approach, with employers carefully considering how to share compensation information.

New Jersey is the latest state to require pay transparency 

The law, effective June 1, requires employers to include information about both compensation and benefits when they publish open jobs or transfer opportunities.

Legislative lowdown: New Jersey pay transparency law takes effect

Recent executive orders (EOs) aimed at dismantling DEI and restoring “meritocracy” haven’t changed laws intended to protect workers from discrimination, and ensure equal pay in the workplace.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration’s actions have created uncertainty among HR leaders about their legal obligations when it comes to fair pay, according to a recent show of hands at WorldatWork’s Total Rewards conference in Orlando, Florida.

At a session focused on global pay equity, Katie Bardaro, chief customer officer with pay equity platform Syndio, reminded attendees that the EOs in question don’t change federal laws that inform employers’ compensation practices. Still, “it is creating confusion among organizations,” she noted, that are seeking to understand, “how do I balance all those compliance changes that are coming at us with what is true for our business and business imperatives?”

While the EOs indicate that the administration is shifting its enforcement priorities when it comes to issues like fair pay, employers should continue to monitor for inequities and fix them when they discover them, experts told HR Brew.

Which Trump EOs are tied to pay practices? 

Among the EOs that touch upon employers’ pay practices is 

 that was issued on Jan. 21 and rescinded several previous orders affecting the federal workforce. One such order, issued by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, had required federal contractors to “take affirmative action,” and conduct annual pay equity audits as part of these efforts.

, takes aim at “disparate-impact liability,” or the legal theory that certain policies and procedures can discriminate against a protected class of individuals, even if they seem neutral on their face. The order directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to stop enforcing laws and regulations that rely on this theory.

Just because the Trump administration will no longer pursue disparate-impact claims on behalf of workers doesn’t mean employers are immune from pay discrimination lawsuits, Bardaro said.

The expectation is that states and plaintiffs’ attorneys will continue to take up these cases. In addition, state laws can and sometimes do go beyond federal law when it comes to pay equity and other protections.

Sara Hillenmeyer, senior director of data science with Payscale, said recent actions at the federal level don’t seem to have slowed employers’ efforts to monitor pay equity and transparency within their workplaces. “Equal pay is still the law…we’re not seeing a softening in the market. Our companies are still doing it, engaging with us and our services, to make sure that they’re doing a good job,” she said.

When gauging how these actions may affect compensation practices, it’s worth remembering, “all the executive order [on disparate impact] did was announce enforcement priorities for the federal government,” said Lynn Clements, senior director of people insights at Berkshire, an HR technology and consulting firm. “They can’t change the law, and so pay discrimination is still illegal under 

While the Trump administration’s scrutiny of DEI has prompted many employers to reexamine their employment practices, “we have not really seen a lot of employers stepping back from the issue of pay equity,” she said. “In fact, I would say that part of our business, in many cases, continues to grow,” due to the 

 taking effect at the state level and globally. Such laws behoove employers to closely examine their compensation systems, and make sure they’re working as intended, Clements said.

If total rewards leaders are worried about their compensation programs in relation to these recent executive orders, it may be worth revisiting why those programs exist in the first place, Syndio’s senior director of total rewards and solutions, Nancy Romanyshyn, told HR Brew.

Pay equity analyses fulfill “the spirit” of these executive orders, she noted, “in the sense that you want to make sure that no group is favored.” To ensure that’s the case, HR leaders should focus on explaining why variations in pay do exist, when they occur. They may ask, “Are we paying the way we intend or not, for things like experience and skills and the job?” she said.

Employers should be looking out for potential pay disparities in “all directions,” Romanyshyn said, regardless of the gender, race, or ethnicity of workers being affected.

Monitoring compensation not only helps employers remedy pay inequities if they occur, but also show workers that fair pay is part of their employee value proposition, she added.

Two stacks of cash with a businessman standing on one and a businesswoman standing on the other depicting pay equity

HR leaders prioritize pay equity, despite DEI executive orders

Some executive orders touch upon employers’ pay practices, but don’t change their obligations to monitor pay discrimination in the workplace.

 Trump’s anti-DEI priorities may cause confusion for comp pros, but equal pay is still the law

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.

Representatives from several compensation firms at the conference discussed how their platforms are now using “

,” 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.

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.”

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.

 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.”