Compference26 is a wrap — but we have you covered
Well, that's a wrap on Compference®26! More than 4,000 people registered — this year, attendees had a chance to earn up to 9 HRCI/SHRM credits across eligible sessions and heard from Payscale compensation strategists and product leaders, along with outside voices like award-winning economist Katica Roy, who unpacked findings from more than 1 billion data points across 6,250 organizations to explore how AI (very much the talk of the town) is reshaping talent and pay strategy.
After three days tailored to the compensation questions organizations are facing today, we’re recapping the sessions that resonated and the stories that stuck with attendees.
Day one: compensation has solidified itself as a strategic lever
Delivering the first keynote, Katica Roy made the case that AI has gone beyond changing jobs to reshaping the data compensation teams need to plan around.
From there, Payscale's Breda Hurley and Victoria “Tori” Prince (Senior Compensation Strategist) walked through what it actually takes to earn a seat at the strategy table. Prince shared a story from her past: after building out the salary ranges at her organization, the data surfaced a problem — employees were sitting below the range minimum, and the budget was too limited to fix it all at once. Her value wasn't picking who received raises first; it was laying out the trade-offs — internal equity, market competitiveness, budget, risk — so leadership could decide on the right course of action.
The data backs up why this shift matters: 45% of organizations are now operating at an "advancing" or "optimizing" level of comp maturity, up 12% in a single year. Three forces are pushing the change — 57% of organizations are already posting pay ranges, AI is compressing the time between question and insight, and 68% of executives now view compensation as a strategic lever.
Day two: connecting the data behind your strategic decisions
Day two opened with Payscale Chief Product Officer Peh Teh, who unveiled the vision behind the Payscale Intelligence Cloud — Ascent, JobNav, and Paycycle working as one connected system, built on the idea that while everyone has AI now, the difference is what it's standing on (the model it learned on and who built it).
Payscale VP of Data Science Sara Hillenmeyer added context by suggesting a simple test: ask a generic AI tool, "Is Bob underpaid?" and it'll pattern-match against public data and say yes, give him a raise. What it can't see, however, is that Bob's peers were all promoted on schedule and he wasn't — he isn't underpaid, he's mis-leveled. Only your own company data can provide this, not the internet.
The day concluded with a session around job architecture that zeroed in on a similar (data) challenge. Bob Lazenby (Sr. Director, Total Rewards at Hays) described leading a global leveling project where the same work was being called "Account Manager" in one part of the business and "Client Engagement Manager" in another — same customers, same outcomes, different titles, different pay. And Payscale's Kelsey Cerullo shared a client story where a benchmarking project had to be scrapped and redone from scratch after the team discovered the job description they'd been pricing against was ten years old.
Day three: where AI actually helps, and where it doesn't
Day three's AI panel, with Ruth Thomas, Payscale Chief Compensation Strategist, Novo Insights founder Paul Reiman and Range community founder Giac Soliman, got specific about where teams get tripped up. One example: a company building an AI tool for job leveling discovered their HR business partner team was separately building a tool that wrote job descriptions to a predetermined level — meaning the leveling call was effectively being made before compensation ever saw it. As Soliman put it, "what looks like an AI problem to people is actually more of a governance problem, made fast." Reiman's closing take on the biggest misconception about AI: "it's magic." It isn't — it's a prediction engine, and it's only as good as the data and the sequencing behind it.
The pay transparency panel, with Amber Castelli (Bio-Rad Laboratories) and Kimberly Da Silva (J. Arthur Trudeau Memorial Center), tackled the EU Pay Transparency Directive, which — unlike many U.S. state laws — requires organizations to justify pay decisions to employees directly. Their advice: solidify your compensation philosophy and job architecture before going live, and don't hold on for perfection. As Castelli put it, "you don't have to wait to have all of your ducks in a row before you can begin."
The comp intelligence era is here
If you missed Compference26, you can always watch the recording or catch it live next year (details to come)!
In the meantime, one clear takeaway is that the event surfaced an undeniable shift: compensation teams that wait for annual data and operate across disconnected tools are falling behind (fast). The market moves month to month and talent moves week to week.
That's the premise behind the Payscale Intelligence Cloud — a connected system where Ascent brings market intelligence, JobNav ensures consistent job architecture, and Paycycle operationalizes every pay decision, all on continuously refreshed data. Because it's not about having more data; it's about having the right data, connected and current.
Ready to move beyond working with disparate systems and data to true compensation intelligence? Explore how Payscale Ascent, JobNav, and Paycycle work in unison in the Payscale Intelligence Cloud today.
