They’re giving AI the pricing work. The rest, they’re keeping.

Let's back up. We asked compensation professionals to imagine they had a magic wand. What kind of magic wand? AI of course! What would they most want it to handle?

More than 200 people weighed in. The results say a lot about where trust in AI currently lives in the comp world and where it doesn't.

Poll: "If you had a magic wand, what would you MOST want AI to help with?" (May 15 – June 15, 2026, iMercer.com)

Market pricing wins by a mile

Thirty-six percent of respondents said they'd point their AI wand squarely at market pricing. Not surprising, given that "chasing the market" topped our companion poll on comp planning priorities the following month. The pattern is consistent: getting pay benchmarks right is consuming an enormous amount of comp team bandwidth, and people want relief.

The appeal of AI here is obvious. Market pricing is data-intensive, repetitive in structure, and time-consuming. This is exactly the profile of tasks where AI can genuinely accelerate work. Pulling comparators, flagging outliers, surfacing aging data, running sensitivity analyses: these are tasks AI tools are increasingly capable of doing faster than a human with a spreadsheet.

The question isn't whether AI can help with market pricing. It's whether the underlying data powering the AI is credible enough to trust. Garbage in, garbage out. That's a data quality problem, not an AI problem.

Pay equity: the second biggest ask

Twenty percent of respondents said they'd use AI for pay equity analysis—and this result deserves some attention.

Pay equity work is analytically demanding, often functioning in spreadsheets that were not designed for it. It involves controlling legitimate pay drivers, identifying unexplained gaps, and doing that across job families, geographies, and demographic groups. The appeal of using AI to handle the computational heavy lifting is understandable.

But pay equity is also one of those areas where the stakes are high enough that the human has to stay in the loop. AI can surface a gap. It takes a human to understand why it exists, whether it's defensible, and what the remediation path looks like. The teams that will use AI most effectively here are those who know the analysis well enough to interrogate what the model is telling them.

Pay recommendations and the curiosity gap

Fifteen percent of respondents said they'd most want AI helping with pay recommendations—taking a candidate or employee profile and surfacing a suggested number. This is where AI is moving fast in the vendor landscape, with platforms like Workday, SAP Joule, and Mercer’s PayAI™ [LA2.1]building recommendation engines directly into compensation workflows or simplifying in other ways.

Only 7% said reporting and insights should be an AI priorityJust 1% of respondents said they’d want AI to help with employee communications. This low response is interesting, because AI's ability to help draft "here's why your pay is what it is" communications is arguably one of its most mature applications in HR. The low response likely reflects a different concern—the fact that the communications challenge feels like a strategy problem first, a writing problem second.

Just came to see the results

A fifth of respondents opted out of the hypothetical entirely, and we respect that decision. Some comp professionals are, reasonably, skeptical that AI is going to swoop in and solve their hardest problems anytime soon.

But here's the thing: the AI tools that are already embedded in compensation platforms aren't coming later. They're here. The question is less "will AI change this work?" and more "are you shaping how it does?"

The comp professionals who will navigate this best aren't the ones waiting to see what AI can do. They're the ones feeding it the right data and that starts with having reliable market data to begin with.

We'll keep watching how this conversation evolves. The appetite for AI assistance in compensation is clearly real and equally concentrated in the most data-heavy parts of the job. That tells us something important about where the work is, and where it needs to go.

Have an idea for our next poll? Send it our way via email to surveys@mercer.com or give us a call at 855-286-5302.

About the author

Rebecca Hall, Principal

Rebecca spent much of her career working in compensation in various corporate roles then transitioning to consulting with Mercer. Her current role, as the Content Leader for imercer.com, allows her to leverage her knowledge of human resources and talent strategy to create materials supporting Mercer’s Products & Services in North America.