Get started with Pave Agent
Get started with Pave Agent
What is Pave Agent?
Pave Agent is a compensation analyst you work with in conversation. Ask it a question in plain language and it answers using the data your company stores in Pave, plus Pave's market data and insights, returning tables and analysis rather than a report you have to configure.
It is built for the work compensation teams already do: building bands, evaluating offers, benchmarking employees, and planning merit cycles. It can also turn its analysis into finished reports and interactive dashboards that you can download and share.
What can it do?
- Answer questions in conversation. Ask it questions and follow-ups the same way you would a colleague.
- Work with your data. Pave Agent uses the data your team stores in and integrates with Pave. You can also upload files such as your compensation philosophy or past analyses to your file library (Context, then Files), and Pave Agent can use them in any conversation.
- Show its work. Source chips under an answer link to the market data, SEC filings, support articles, Pave research, and Skills behind it, so you can trace an answer back to where it came from.
- Build shareable deliverables. Ask for an artifact by describing the format: an interactive dashboard, PowerPoint deck, Word document, Excel workbook, PDF report, or chart image. Preview it, ask for changes, and download it from the Artifacts section of the panel on the right. Add formatting notes to your Guidance and Skills to get the same design every time.
How do I set it up?
Pave Agent works out of the box, and it gets sharper the more it knows about how your company thinks. The two main ways to teach it are Guidance and Skills. Both live in Context, which you open with the Context button (the sliders icon) in the Pave Agent chat header. Both are shared across your whole company, so Pave Agent speaks the same language for every member of your compensation team.
Pave Agent is available to people with the Admin role, and Pave turns it on for each person. See the article on who can use Pave Agent.
The more of your data is in Pave, the more context Pave Agent has. Key pieces that improve answers are employee compensation history, a job architecture, a live band set with employees matched to it, a market data source, and your jobs matched to that market data. See the article on preparing your data for Pave Agent.
What is Guidance?
Think of Guidance as the onboarding notes you would hand a new analyst on day one. It holds the details that apply to every question you ask, so you do not need to repeat yourself. That might include:
- Your compensation philosophy.
- How your team's processes work today, including market pricing and planning.
- Which market you compete with for talent, and how you position yourself against it.
- Key terms your team uses, and what they mean.
- Whether you use compa ratio or range penetration.
- How you approach benchmarking.
If this already lives in documents, upload them to your file library from the Files tab in Context. Pave Agent can draw on them in any conversation.
Everyone at your company shares one Guidance document, and saving overwrites it, so agree on changes first. Not sure where to start? Load Pave's Skills first (see the next section), then ask Pave Agent to help you set up Guidance. It interviews you and drafts it for you to paste in. See the article on setting up Guidance.
What are Skills?
If Guidance is who you are, a Skill is how you tackle a particular task. Each Skill is a saved, step-by-step playbook for a workflow such as evaluating an offer, pricing a new job family, or investigating a pay complaint. Each Skill's description tells Pave Agent when to use it, and Pave Agent loads the relevant Skill automatically based on your question.
To start with Pave's ready-made Skills, open Context, go to the Skills tab, and select Load Pave Skills. This is a one-time step for your company. You can edit, turn off, or delete any of them. To write your own, ask Pave Agent to help you draft one, then paste it into the Skills tab. See the article on setting up Skills.
What's next?
A few tips to get better answers:
- Update your context early and often. The more Pave Agent knows about your team, the more likely it is to give you the best answer from the first question. What Pave Agent picks up in a conversation stays with you, so ask it to suggest updates to your Guidance and Skills based on your chats, and add the ones the whole team should share.
- Be specific. Less ambiguity means fewer follow-ups. For example, when pricing a new role, include the job description, level, location, and market to point Pave Agent in the right direction sooner. You can also use Guidance to set how much clarification you want Pave Agent to ask for.
- Follow up and clarify. Ask Pave Agent to explain its thinking to confirm its results or find what to change. This often shows you how to improve its answers and test its findings.