When processing time collapses, the bottleneck moves to thinking

When processing time collapses, the bottleneck moves to thinking.

Giac Soliman had me on the Range podcast on AI adoption in comp and HR - with Pay Equity as center showcase. The work actually changes once agents can run the middle of the workflow.

A few things we spent real time on:

the old model was input → processing → output; for most comp cycles, processing was the bulk of the job (templates, lookups, copy-paste, commentary assembly). That layer is shrinking fast

what replaces it isn't free time - it's validation, iteration, and specifying what you want before you rerun

how to get started inside a large company: prove it to yourself on synthetic data, then bring one ally, then slice the use case into steps IT and legal can approve

why domain expertise matters more, not less - you need to know what a good output looks like to catch drift

where this goes next: from individual productivity to shared team workspaces (the way engineering teams already work)

Pay equity and pay transparency were the concrete example throughout - building the analysis in-house, EU data handling, walking through the markdown repository on screen. Serious work, not a demo.

For comp and total rewards leaders figuring out adoption beyond the pilot phase.

Links in the first comment.

Thanks Giac and Range