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Amigos,
A few weeks ago I sat down as a guest on the Comp & Coffee podcast by PayScale. I was the freshman in the room, and I leaned right into it.
For the record, my coffee order tells you how a day is going. Cappuccino first thing, because I'm Italian and I want the chocolate powder on top. Freddo espresso by midday, out of respect for the Greeks. Espresso martini by the evening, because my cousins’ surname is Martini.
What we actually talked about stayed longer with me than the caffeine did. AI in comp has gone from a few of us experimenting on the side to whole teams being told to adopt it now. And the more I build, the more I think the building was never the hard part. AI gets you a prototype by Friday. Whether it survives real data, real policy and a nervous works council is a different sport.
So this issue is about that gap, and how we keep our hands on the wheel while everything speeds up.
PS: My Comp & Coffee episode is here if you want the full conversation.
Listen →
RECENT EDITIONS
New here, or just catching up? Two good places to start.
What Bolt's comp team built when they stopped waiting — Evert Kraav on building AI tools his managers actually use.
The Comp AI Starter Kit — set up Claude for compensation in 5 steps, no coding.
THE BREAKDOWN
Start with the problem, not the tool. But don’t fall in love with the problem.
Most of us reach for the tool first. We hear AI and our brain jumps to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, then we go hunting for something to point it at. That's backwards. Which tool you use is a drop in the ocean next to the strategy. Ask someone their approach to peer reviews and have them answer Excel, and you can feel the mismatch.
It helps to know where you actually sit. Most of us are at level 1, using a chatbot to polish comms, draft a job description, or explain a regulation. Level 2 is building custom tools, your Gemini gems, your custom GPTs, a NotebookLM knowledge base. Level 3 is rare and a bit lonely: code, agents, the terminal. Maybe a dozen people I know in comp work there, usually on their own.
Excel turned 40 this year. For most of that time the job was processing, and judgment got whatever minutes were left over. AI flips that. It compresses the processing, so you can pour the time you win back into the part that actually needs you: the call, the trade off, the awkward stakeholder conversation. The point is better decisions. The time you save is the bonus.
On build versus buy, I keep coming back to a kitchen. Vendors are restaurants, known for one dish they do brilliantly. AI just handed you a full kitchen, every utensil, the good ingredients. You can cook almost anything now. The real question is whether you should. Order a pizza with cheeseburger, bacon and pineapple and most chefs will quietly refuse. That edge case, the one nobody else will cook for you, is where building your own earns its keep.
And the trap I fell into for months: I fell in love with problems. Comp people love a good problem to solve. Plenty of weekends went into tools I never used again. So now I try to fall in love with the solution instead. Agree the outcome with your stakeholders first, then reverse engineer the steps to get there.
The bottleneck used to be building. Now it's trusting what you built.
RANGE PODCAST
Josh Lemon builds everywhere, except the decision
Josh Lemon, Senior Director of Total Rewards at Resideo, came on the Range podcast and made the same case from the inside. He starts from pain, not from tech. His test is simple: what do you come home and complain about? Build there.
He's put AI into job matching, a global holiday calendar across 35 countries, and offer support. What he won't do is let any of it make the call. No personal data, no decision about a specific person's pay. That's how he keeps legal, IT and the works council comfortable, and it's why his entry point is a couple of hundred dollars of tooling rather than a 30k a year platform. Small, proven, trusted.
My favourite part is the job matching tool that quietly kills title inflation. Try to bump a role up a level and the tool raises the bar to match, new competencies, new accountabilities. The goalposts move with the title.
Where to find Josh
Josh Lemon is Senior Director of Global Total Rewards at Resideo, leading reward across 32 countries and an early mover on AI in HR. Find him on LinkedIn.
FROM THE COMMUNITY
Pushed to adopt, or held back
This week the room split over something very real: how much room any of us actually gets to adopt AI.
One camp is being pushed hard. Leadership wants 2 to 3x growth without 2 to 3x headcount, and AI is the plan. Go and figure it out, on top of the day job.
The other camp is boxed in. Cautious policy, data privacy walls, a couple of approved tools and not much else. A few are quietly working around outright bans with shadow AI, just to make any progress at all.
Two ideas came up that I keep turning over. One member called it the patience paradox: the learning curve looks a lot like the early internet, but nobody has the patience for that kind of iteration any more. Another named the durability problem: you build something genuinely useful, then IT policy catches up and switches it off.
So which camp are you in this week, pushed or held back?
ON THE RADAR
A few things worth your time this week.
Comp teams are lagging on AI, and the data is blunt — A new benchmarking study scored 525 reward pros on AI maturity, and the average came back at 4.3 out of 16. An honest read on where most of us really are. Read →
The AI pay premium just hit 62% — A 2026 global jobs barometer, built on more than a billion job ads, on what AI skills are now worth. Useful before your next pricing call. Read →
The EU pay transparency deadline has passed, now what? — Most member states missed the 7 June transposition date. A practitioner-grade read on what comp leaders actually have to do next. Read →
REWARD REWIRED 2026
We've been scouting the room
Quick one before you go. This week I went to see the venue for Reward Rewired 2026, our in person gathering for the people deeply engaged with AI adoption in Total Rewards.
The first round of in-house speakers and the first sponsors are confirmed, and I'll share names soon.
If you want to join Range members at the event register your interest at range.community/events.
Limited seats available.
 | That's all from me this week. This is technically where the newsletter ends, but we don't have to end here. I'd love this to be a two way thing, so hit reply and tell me what you found helpful, what you're building, or where you're stuck with AI. I read every one. Until next week, Giac |
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