What are the most significant challenges facing payroll and reward professionals today?

The hardest challenge is not a new regulation or a new tool. It is that payroll and reward sit downstream of decisions they do not own, and in most organisations the two functions barely talk to each other. I am not saying it never happens. I just do not see it often. Total reward and payroll usually live in separate parts of the organisation, even when both sit inside HR, and the collaboration that should connect them is rarely there.

That separation matters because payroll is the moment of truth where every upstream decision becomes real, legally binding, and visible to the employee. Job architecture lives in HR. Hours live in time and attendance. Headcount lives in finance. None of those systems were built to talk to each other, and neither, too often, are the people who run them.

So the real challenge is accountability without authority. We are asked to guarantee an outcome built on inputs we did not control and cannot always trace. Everything else, compliance pressure, pay transparency, AI, is a symptom of that single structural gap.

What excites you most about participating in Reward & Payroll Summit this year?

It is a rare combination: senior, global leaders in one room, with a genuinely strategic focus. That mix is unusual, and it means you can have an honest conversation about operating model, not just process.

I am looking forward to the international speakers, Max among them, because cross-border complexity is where the most interesting problems live and where the easy answers fall apart. I also value being in Europe for this. You get both the UK and the wider EU perspective in the same conversation, and those views are not identical. That range is exactly what makes the discussion worth having.

Which session or theme are you most looking forward to, and why?

As a theme, the sessions that treat technology as an operating model question rather than a feature question. AI is the obvious headline, but the more useful conversation is what has to be true underneath it for any of it to work. I am drawn to anything that connects the tooling back to ownership and governance.
Specifically, I am looking forward to hearing about how Max van der Klis on the Global Payroll Operating Model session goes. His framing, that you cannot unlock the power of data until you understand your tech stack and how data travels, is the foundation everything else in our AI panel depends on. It sets up the harder questions well.

What’s a common misconception people have about AI & automation in payroll & HR, and how does your session challenge that?

The biggest misconception is that AI fixes broken processes. It does not. It accelerates them. If your inputs are inconsistent, your ownership is unclear, and your workflows live in people’s heads instead of in the business, AI will not clean that up. It will run it faster, at scale, with more confidence than the underlying data deserves.

The second misconception is that this is a technology readiness question. It is not. It is a process question. “Are we ready for AI?” is the wrong thing to ask. The right question is whether your source-to-gross data and processes are clean enough that you would trust an automated decision built on them, with no human in the loop, in front of an auditor.

There is a determinism point the market keeps missing. Payroll is a deterministic obligation. It must produce the identical result that is legally correct and defensible every single cycle. A probabilistic system is a powerful assistant, but it cannot be the system of record for an obligation that has to be exactly right and auditable every time.

And there is a human reality underneath all of it. Payroll professionals do not trust what they cannot see and reverse engineer. That instinct is correct, it is what keeps pay accurate. You cannot easily reverse engineer an AI output, which is precisely why knowing where AI belongs, and where it must not sit, is the actual skill. Not access to the tool.

How does technology connect to broader organisational strategy or business performance?

Payroll is the largest governable cost in most organisations and the one process that, if it fails, stops the company. That alone should put it in a strategy conversation, yet it rarely is. Technology only connects to performance when it is chosen to fit a redesigned operating model, not bolted onto the existing one.

The pattern I see most often is centralisation, or outsourcing, or a new system and a new vendor, all without transformation. That is just relocation. Moving a broken process to a lower-cost location, a third party, or a newer platform does not improve it. It compounds the problem and adds vendors into the mix. Redesign the work first, fit the technology second, and decide the location third. Done in that order, technology drives performance. Done in reverse, it just makes the existing fragmentation more expensive.

What do you hope attendees will take away from your session at Reward & Payroll Summit?

One idea, stated plainly: AI is not a technology play. It is a process play. That is the single thing I think most people still get wrong. The tool is the easy part. The work is upstream.

The second takeaway follows from it. The role has shifted. It is now about orchestration, and not just across departments and datasets, but across technologies and across AI itself. Governance and owning the inputs are part of that orchestration, not separate from it. The professionals who lead the next decade will be the ones who orchestrate the whole picture, not the ones with the most tools.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation in reward and payroll over the next 2-3 years?

The biggest opportunity is the orchestration layer that nobody owns yet. Agentic AI will take on a large share of routine back-office work, and the centre of gravity shifts from doing the work to governing the inputs that feed the agents. That is a genuinely new role, and the profession that claims it will lead.

Here is the tension I would put to the panel. Most of the innovation conversation is about automating the calculation and the service. I think that is the wrong frontier. The calculation is largely solved. The unsolved problem is upstream, and it is during transformation and consolidation that it is still wildly manual.

We talk about payroll like you push a button and it all happens. Everyone in this room knows how much work sits behind getting to that button. The staging is the hard part. Once everything is in place and connected, it runs. So deploy agentic AI on top of ungoverned, un-staged inputs and you do not innovate. You automate failure at scale, and you do it faster than anyone can catch it. Get the staging right and the agents are extraordinary.

One thing you’re hoping to learn from other speakers at the summit?

How leaders outside the US are handling cross-border fragmentation in practice, not in theory. And I mean the whole of it. It is regulatory. It is cultural. It is vendors and technology. It is perceptions and attitudes about what payroll even is. The reality of running pay across Europe is different from the US conversation, and the international speakers here have lived all of those dimensions at once. I learn the most from the specifics of what actually broke and what they did about it.

Coffee or tea before your big session at Reward and Payroll Summit?

Champagne, and it is always champagne first. But when in London, I am going tea, with milk. Coffee is fine when it is excellent and has a clear owner. It is simply not built for the demands of an afternoon payroll panel in London.
Cheers!

Find out more about Joe’s session, AI & Automation in HR and Payroll, and everything else on offer at The Reward and Payroll Summit 2026 - Click here to find out more