FEBRUARY 28 - 29, SF BAY AREA  |  Stripe and Roblox comp teams co-host SF event for top tech execs
Research brief

The Compensation
Analysis Gap

June 24, 2025 • 4 Min Read

There’s a backlog building.

Across enterprise comp teams, critical analysis work is piling up—quietly, invisibly, and at massive cost.

Everyone wants to analyze:
How pay compares by skill, level, and region
Pay equity and fairness
Where offers deviate from policy
Whether the market moved this week
If a grant was timed right
Which roles are drifting from guidelines
Whether they're paying fairly or just guessing
But let's be honest, most of this never gets done.

Comp teams know what to analyze, they just can’t get to it

In our conversations with top comp leaders, the same theme emerged: They want more comp analysis, but there aren't enough people on the team to do it.

Headcount is lean and the business wants answers fast. So comp teams triage and focus on the fires: offers, ranges, merit cycles, and calibration.

This leaves strategic analysis to be bumped, deferred, and forgotten.

Until the CFO asks why a $3M grant is misaligned, or an SVP wants to know why their department’s attrition spiked.

Where the comp analysis gap hurts most

The work is clear and the value is proven, but the gap keeps growing.

PLAN
Skills-based pay variances
REALITY
Deferred until “next quarter”
PLAN
Internal equity across roles and levels
REALITY
One-off audits that miss the full picture
PLAN
Pay compression and range drift
REALITY
Mentioned, not measured
PLAN
Offer-to-market misalignment
REALITY
Spotted anecdotally, not systemically
PLAN
Grant effectiveness and timing
REALITY
Analyzed only when questioned
PLAN
Policy compliance across thousands of offers
REALITY
Reviewed manually, with risk of inconsistency
PLAN
Trends in market shifts, by role or location
REALITY
Pulled together weeks after they mattered
0
%

63% of comp leaders want analytics that surface trends and outliers. AI isn’t just for efficiency, it’s a new lens for comp strategy.

Read the report

This isn’t a data problem. It’s a bandwidth problem.

You already have access to:

Benchmarks
Comp philosophy
Ranges
Internal data
Real-time market data
Surveys

What you don’t have is time.

Not for a new dashboard, a quarterly refresh, or one more request that starts with “Can you look into...?”

Enter
AI agents

Comp agents don’t just accelerate analysis, they complete it.

Every offer is reviewed, ranges are monitored, and no deviation goes unflagged.

The backlog?

Gone.

What used to take hours now runs in seconds.

Using agents in comp isn’t a productivity boost; it’s a second team. One that doesn’t sleep and always enforces policy.

0
%

79% of TA teams want an on-demand comp partner. Recruiters are ready to self-serve if the agent can deliver clear, trusted guidance.

Read the report

Four takeaways for comp leaders

1.

Analysis isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a margin issue.

When billions in pay go unexamined, so do millions in potential savings and missed opportunities. You can't optimize what you don’t analyze.

2.

Strategic comp work gets squeezed out by urgent tasks.

If your team is buried in approvals, you won’t have time to spot policy gaps, misaligned ranges, or market shifts. That’s not bad prioritization, it’s reality.

3.

Agents don't just assist, they get stuff done.

They can identify patterns and surface insights without waiting to be asked, and best of all, shrink your analysis backlog to zero.

4.

The analysis gap will define the next generation of comp teams.

The difference between teams that act and teams that react? Agents. One group spends, the other stewards.

The analysis comp leaders wish they could do already exists but it’s buried under a mountain of manual work.

The only question is:
Will you keep deferring it, or let AI do it for you?

Learn about Partner AI

Discover the future of compensation

When the market moves fast, you can't rely on surveys. Remove uncertainty and gain confidence with Compa.