A note from Giac
I talked to Evert Kraav a few weeks before this went live. He leads Compensation at Bolt, and he’s been building AI tools for his comp team since before most people in this space were paying attention.
What he built isn’t impressive because it’s technically complex. It’s impressive because it was exactly what his managers needed, and it didn’t exist anywhere else. So he made it.
That’s the story this week.
— Giac
PS: Reply with the word Hello. Keeps this edition out of your promotions tab.
THE BREAKDOWN
What Bolt’s comp team built when they stopped waiting
Evert Kraav is a compensation and pay transparency leader with experience both in-house and as a consultant. He has worked with companies including Bolt, Testlio, and Swedbank. He is also an active trainer and lecturer on fair pay and reward practices.
Evert's comp team at Bolt spent years working around Workday's reporting limitations. The EU Pay Transparency Directive changed the calculation. Managers across the business would need to have conversations about individual pay they'd never had to navigate before. Workday's output for those conversations: a plain text export with no interactivity and nothing a manager could use in the room.
What we were able to create in a matter of minutes or hours blew us away.
What the tool actually does
Managers download their team data from Workday and upload it to Evert's tool. Everything runs in the browser with no data leaving the device, which matters when you're handling pay data for a whole team. The output is an interactive view: who's at what level, their performance rating, where they sit relative to the salary band, and talking points for their specific situation.
The talking points are specific to each person's data. A high performer at the top of the band gets different language than an under-performer sitting mid-range or a new hire still in the quartile gap. The tool reads the data and drafts the conversation opener. The manager reads it and decides what to say.
The salary band build underneath it
The manager dashboard was the visible output. The deeper build was the salary band tool that feeds it.
Most comp teams review their bands once a year. The reason isn't a shortage of data, it's the time it takes to turn vendor survey data into a usable structure. Evert's tool takes the market data, applies configurable benchmarking logic (median-based, multiplier-based, or a custom approach), flags outliers, and outputs a clean band structure with validation built in. His team now runs the review four times a year. Same headcount. The tooling costs around 20 euros a month.
What stayed human
Every pay decision. Evert kept returning to the same principle: the tool surfaces the context, the manager makes the call. AI assembles, people decide.
The real test came when one of his managers built an upgraded version with additional features that made their way back into the central tool. When someone takes what you built and improves it, it's actually useful.
The full conversation is on Spotify and YouTube. Evert gets into the technical decisions, the data security approach, and what self-directed AI learning looks like when every online course is outdated before it ships.
ON THE RADAR
A few things worth your time this week.
EU pay transparency is now law for large employers — What changed on 7 June and what comp teams should have in place. The regulatory context behind why Evert built what he built. Read →
The ChatGPT chatbot still can’t price a role — The everyday chatbot people open to ask what a role should pay. An independent test across 10 job families in four countries found 83.8% of its salary estimates fell outside an acceptable margin. Useful for writing about pay, not for pricing it. Read →
Ivan Nosov on the Range Podcast — pay equity analysis without a data scientist — How Campari’s Ivan Nosov ran pay equity analysis in-house with Claude Code, and built a protected pay equity repository from scratch. Listen on Spotify → Watch on YouTube →
Josh Lemon on the Range Podcast — small, risk-free AI wins — Resideo’s Josh Lemon on embedding AI into HR without writing code, and why starting with small, low-risk wins beats waiting for the big transformation. Listen on Spotify → Watch on YouTube →
One question before you go: what does your comp team reach for when your HRIS can’t give managers what they need for those conversations? Hit reply. I read every one.
Giac Soliman
Founder, Range
Free is the signal. The room is the substance.
Range Weekly is free, and it stays free: what's shifting in AI and comp, out in the open.
What it can't give you is the room. Inside Range, members show the actual builds: the prompts, the Claude setups, the band-building workflows, the things that only get shared when no vendor is listening and nobody's performing.