The CPG rewards reality: work isn’t simpler, just more urgent

If you lead compensation in a global CPG organization, you’re not short on priorities.

You’re short on time, clean data, and the ability to answer “simple” questions without starting a multi-week project.

The business wants speed. The committee wants confidence. Your HRBPs want answers that hold up in front of a plant manager, a country GM, and Finance.

And yet the work bottlenecks in the same places, over and over.

I keep hearing the same problems on calls with rewards leaders across CPG—problems that sound different on the surface, but share a common root.

The market and the organization move faster than the compensation operating system that’s supposed to keep up.

Global job mapping is a permanent tax

CPG companies operate in hundreds of countries, managing local job titles, local structures, and local “truths.”

That’s not a flaw, it’s a reality that shows up every time you try to benchmark globally. One CPG Total Rewards leader described it plainly:

“We have disparate sets of data and we’re searching for the right way to marry them without having to spend hours line by line doing it.”

They shared the challenge of juggling multiple layers at once: a global job architecture with 3,500+ combinations, a smaller set of 300–350 prototype roles they actually want to benchmark, and vendor frameworks that don’t map cleanly to either.

It forces a constant choice between accuracy and speed. Every “quick market cut” turns into a debate about whether the job match is even valid.

For HRBPs and business partners, it feels like comp is always asking for “one more week” because the foundational mapping isn’t stable. They don’t experience it as harmonization—they experience it as delay.

CPG comp grinds through the same strategic analyses every year

Recurring work is frustrating because it’s both mission-critical and deeply inefficient.

Your best people are stuck rebuilding the same models every year. The business assumes comp is slow, when the truth is comp is buried under manual processes.

You can’t get ahead of anything—because the calendar is already full.

CPG rewards teams run recurring, high-stakes processes like annual pay structure updates, market competitiveness checks, merit budgeting, and job evaluation at scale. One customer told me they complete 3,000+ job evaluations annually, sharing a desperate need to automate both evaluations and retention risk, not just benchmarking.

“Our global rewards analysts vary widely in Excel and data skills, leading to inconsistent, time-consuming outputs and midnight work to meet deadlines.”

For a comp leader, this is one of the hardest problems to address. It’s not a policy issue but an operating model issue.

Some regions can answer quickly while others can’t. Quality varies by who happens to be on the request. You’re constantly editing, rechecking, and reconciling outputs, especially before anything goes to leadership.

Speed to insight is now the expectation, not the bonus

Many CPG organizations buy dozens of surveys. The issue isn’t the purchase but the integration.

They’re loading Workday employee data, loading external survey data, trying to compare base, STI, LTI, and TTC across dozens of key markets… and it’s still not apples-to-apples.

Transformation work needs market intelligence faster than this antiquated process can provide.

Take one massive CPG brand's go-to-market transformation as an example. Merchandisers are 75% of the salesforce and they’re transforming 170+ beverage selling locations over two years. Key locations need immediate attention requiring zip code-level wage data to complete site assessments for warehouse, sales rep, driver, and all those merchandising roles.

Still, they see patterns like hours spent on ad hoc requests, days to pull market benchmarks, and weeks to model scenarios.

The business expects high speed responses, even proactive risk analysis but comp remains in reactive, manual loops. Every CPG comp team struggles to create a consistent approach to flagging at-risk employees using tenure, performance, position-in-range, and unvested equity.

AI standardizes, accelerates, and makes CPG comp work defensible

These problems aren’t “lack of expertise” problems. They’re scale and operating system problems.

This is where AI fits—because it’s designed to take the highest-friction compensation workflows and make them repeatable, fast, and consistent across regions.

With proper configuration, it’s uniquely suited to solve CPG comp’s problem set.

You need an engine that integrates directly with your HR systems and syncs on a weekly schedule so analyses like market competitiveness checks, pay structure refresh inputs, and retention risk cuts run on current data without rebuilding the pipeline.

“That’s how you move analysts from “grinding” to “creating value,”” said one leading CPG executive.

Recurring work is exactly where AI shines.

It provides a common layer of structured prompts, consistent logic, and consistent outputs. Business partners get the same quality of answer whether they’re working with Region A or Region B.

What AI looks like in practice for a CPG rewards team

Instead of assembling a new spreadsheet and a new narrative every time, the team prompts (often on a recurring, automated schedule) AI agents:

“Map these 300 prototype roles to our global job architecture and flag low-confidence matches for review.”

“Run our annual pay structure refresh inputs across eight markets and summarize where competitiveness moved.”

“Build and validate a blended peer group (CPG + retail + pharma/medtech + manufacturing) for specific job families and geographies.”

“Identify retention risk globally using tenure, performance, position-in-range, and unvested equity, and quantify the budget to intervene.”

The value isn’t that AI replaces comp judgment.

It’s that it removes the manual tax that keeps comp judgment from showing up where it matters.

The goal isn’t to do more work, it’s to finally do the work that only you can do.

The throughline across all CPG leaders my team has spoken with is clear.

You need harmonization without line-by-line work. You need data you can defend and recurring analysis that doesn’t consume your best people.

You need speed—hours and minutes, not days and weeks.

That’s what AI is built for and that’s why Compa is resonating in CPG right now.

Your problems aren’t new but the expectations are.

The business shoots forward and it’s time comp catches up.

Remember, the market always moves.

Do you?