Draw the range, name the survey it came from and count the employers standing behind the cut, then hold that number, with its provenance attached, for a named reward officer to approve.
A range is drawn, and the survey beneath it is named on the face of the output.
02
A source cannot be traced to a survey, and it is marked unusable rather than blended in.
Reason
03
A benchmark thins to a few reporters, and that reporter count is printed beside the number.
04
OFCCP EO 11246 rules were rescinded by final rule on 21 August 2026, so no audit duty is assumed.
05
An EEO-1 rescission reached OIRA on 14 May 2026, so no form is assumed to still be there.
Decide
06
Art. 9(6) puts accuracy on the employer's management, so the agent puts its name to nothing.
07
A gap is explained by a control that sits downstream of it, and the model is held, not shown.
Out
08
A number resists sourcing, and the failure to source it is what goes into the record.
09
Write back to range records only inside the approval boundaries agreed at implementation.
→Product statement
Drawing, matching and holding belong to the agent. The number a pay decision rests on belongs to a named reward officer, who approves it and owns where it came from.
Example workflow
One market range, sources to approval
AgentHuman
1Sources receivedPublished survey cuts, job records, internal pay history or a vendor extract
2Matched and datedWhich survey, which cut, how many employers reported into it and the day it was collected
3Range drawn and cells countedThe benchmark, the internal spread, the reporter count and the vintage carried forward
4Controls appliedProvenance checks, cell-count checks, vintage checks and match confidence
No human action required
Stages 1 to 4 run unaided, and no range is approved at any of them — the agent is drawing, and the officer lane opens at the approval gate.
5DecisionSplits at the approval gate
Provenance traced end to end
Goes to the named reward officer to approve.
Anything untraced
Adds a senior reward read first.
Reward review
The range is held with the surveys under it, the reporter counts and the sources it could not trace.
Approve · Attach source · Send to reward review
Approved — by the named reward officer▼
6Range and job-architecture records updatedOnly where write access and retention policy permit it
7Outcome evaluatedProvenance capture, source currency, officer corrections and what review found
Corrections
Each reward correction is counted in the evaluation.
What should not run autonomously
Human approval stays in control
Outside the boundary — human approval required8 items
Approving a range for use in a pay decision.
Confirming the accuracy of a pay-gap report.
Deciding a source is lawful to bring into the corpus.
Setting the market position a job family is paid at.
Automation boundaryAgent acts unaided
✓Write the survey and its vintage beside the range.
✓Characterise each source by who collected it and how aggregated it is.
✓Print how many employers reported into a cut.
✓Carry the vintage of each survey forward into the range recommendation.
No range is approved except by a named reward officer, inside the agreed boundaries.
Judging whether a job matches a survey benchmark.
Telling a works council a category gap is justified.
Choosing which market a job family is benchmarked to.
Changes to a range, a grade or a pay decision.
Example output
One market range, annotated
This serves a reward team who may have to reconstruct, six months after a pay-gap report was submitted under Art. 10(1)(c), which survey a benchmark came from; below is one range exactly as the agent leaves it.
Market range · single job familyIllustrative example
Range
Recorded as
Survey
Evidence of record
Confidence
Held for
Range review, senior engineering family
Traced to a named survey cut
Reporter count, printed
Survey cut, 3 August 2026
Held unapproved
The named reward officer
As receivedDrawn from a third-party survey cut and the internal job architecture, and it claims nothing past them.
What the record holdsThird-party surveyJob-architecture recordInternal pay ledger
Why no approval hereApproving a range is a judgement that the named reward officer makes.
ActionApproveAttach sourceSend to reward review
What the score decidesBelow the configured threshold a range gets a reward read before the officer sees it.
Value
Where AI adds value
The same four claims, placed at the point in the workflow where each one applies.
Where the value landsValue 01 – 04
Each rangeFrom the survey that carries it
03Evidence
Where the evidence is used
The agent does not vouch for a survey, only for who ran it, when it was collected and how many employers stood behind the cut; the same Guidelines reach a tool generating wage recommendations.
01Approved path
Whose numbers are these
Read in the January 2025 Guidelines: an exchange may be unlawful whether or not that effect was intended, and a competitor stands behind the cut.
02Human review
What was checked, and not found
No safety zone for information exchange appears in the January 2025 Guidelines. The 1996 statements that carried one were withdrawn by DOJ on 3 February 2023 and rescinded by the FTC on 14 July 2023, and the 2016 guidance they sat under is still downloadable — availability is not currency.
04Build an evidence trail
The range, the survey it came from and the officer who approved it stay together.
Integrations
Typical integrations
Five system groups connect to the same agent. Which of them are in scope is decided in discovery.
Third-party survey dataSurvey vendors · published cuts Benchmark ranges by job family
Job architectureGrades · families · job records Matches and scope of work
Internal pay ledgerPayroll · pay history · headcount Current pay by job and grade class
Agent
Compensation benchmarking
Reads the sources Draws the range Holds for the officer
Reporting and filing recordsPay-gap reports · filing archive Category cuts and past submissions
A function-level correction figure can read clean while hot-market technical families carry most of the corrections. Nestack reports the correction rate by job family, not only in total.
Slice performance — reported separately, not only in aggregateIllustrative example
Slice
Failure rate
Lift
Lift vs. threshold
Status
Hot-market technical families
9.4%
3.7×
Review
Newly created hybrid roles
6.6%
2.6×
Review
Multi-country job families
4.1%
1.6×
Watch
Established core job families
1.9%
0.7×
Normal
Bar: correction-rate lift vs. core-job-family baseline · scale 0–4.0× · tick marks the 2.0× review threshold2 of 4 slices over threshold
Evidence-linked improvement
What an untraced number costs
A cycle ends when the number traced to a competitor is a standing case. That suite is what the next review round is measured against.
Improvement cycle · five stagesSwitchback — the path turns at Improve and returns at Learn
01Detect
Correction rate rises on hot-market technical families.
02Diagnose
The benchmark that came from a peer spreadsheet rather than a survey, and read exactly like one, is worked backwards until a single cause is left standing.
03Improve
The range goes out numbered, and the sources beneath it ride with it.
04Verify
One provenance case still failing is enough to hold the round back.
05Learn
The case stays on, and the sourcing rules are redrawn beside it.
Learn → DetectThe return edge. The next range is measured against a suite one case longer.
Typical build scope
Twelve workstreams across six weeks
The build scope read against the delivery timeline. Week structure follows the six-week plan — discovery, sources, range drawing, evaluation, integration, then production validation and handover.
WorkstreamWeek 1Week 2Week 3Week 4Week 5Week 6
01Job-matching review and automation-boundary scoping.
02Survey, job and pay-ledger sources.
03Source-to-range and provenance-coverage mapping work.
04Survey source ingestion.
05Survey, match and job-family binding.
06Cell-count scoring and review routing.
07Reward officer approval workflow.
08Reward-system integration.
09Provenance and matching cases.
10Guardrails and recommendation controls.
11Source-trail instrumentation.
12Deployment, documentation and Agent Care handover.
12 workstreams · 6 weeks · bar shows the weeks a workstream is active — several run in parallelFinal scope and sequence confirmed in discovery
Engagement tiers
What each tier includes
Rows are the capabilities named in each tier's scope. Higher tiers include everything below them.
Capability✓ in scope · — not at this tierPilotOne job family, one roundProductionProduction reward workflowAdvancedMultiple families / markets
Introduced at Pilot
Range drawing to your job architecture✓✓✓
Named officer approval✓✓✓
Job-architecture baseline✓✓✓
Introduced at Production
Reporting by job-family class—✓✓
Reward review workflow in your systems—✓✓
Approved write-back—✓✓
Survey-and-ledger integration—✓✓
Introduced at Advanced
Multi-source provenance rules——✓
Cross-market range packs——✓
Large survey libraries——✓
Multi-market range controls——✓
Build priceFrom $5,000From $8,000Custom quote
Final build priceConfirmed after discovery based on integrations, workflow complexity, survey volume, approval controls and deployment requirements.
Separate from buildBuild pricing is separate from recurring Agent Care, which covers managed monitoring, evaluations, incidents and verified improvements after launch.
What we need from you
What you bring, and what we build with it
Each input maps to a piece of build scope and a week in the delivery timeline.
You bringWe build with it
01Your live job families and the survey each is benchmarked to→Source capture and vintage versioningWeek 1
02Representative survey cuts, job records and pay history→Source binding, match logic and the job-architecture baselineWeek 2
03Your pay calendar and the reward officers it names→Source mapping, provenance capture and the automation boundaryWeek 1
04Access to relevant APIs, feeds or exports→Survey, job and pay-ledger assessment, then integration setupWeek 2
05Ranges you would not want subpoenaed→Provenance cases and the market roundWeek 4
06What no range may be called→Cell-count scoring, review routing, guardrails and approval controlsWeek 3
07A named reward officer who approves the range→Handover to the named reward officer, then pilot and production validationWeeks 5–6
Nothing else is requiredDeployment, documentation and Agent Care handover are ours.
Delivery timeline
Four phases across six weeks
Widths follow the work rather than the grid, which is why one band is drawn beneath another in week five.
PhaseW1W2W3W4W5W6
DiscoveryW1
BuildW2 – W3
EvaluateW4 – W5
Pilot & LaunchW5 – W6
Week focusW1Source discovery, vintage versioning and the automation boundaryW2Survey integration and the job-architecture baselineW3Range drawing, match logic and approval controlsW4Evaluation suite, provenance cases and the failure roundW5Reward-system integration, pilot ranges and targeted correctionsW6One pay round run under the reward lead, then Agent Care handover
Reading the bandA bar spans only the weeks its own work is named for, and week five carries two.
At the end of W6When the source record validates, Agent Care takes the agent on.
DurationSix-week plan shown · typical delivery 4–6 weeks depending on scope confirmed in discovery.
Next step · Reward AI agent
Build a compensation benchmarking agent around the provenance your last range never carried.
Show us one job family you benchmark each year and the survey the last range came from. In Dorrell, No. 1:25-cv-02251 (D. Md.), one defendant settled in May 2026 and the case was then dismissed largely without prejudice on 5 August 2026. Cost arrived before vindication did.
