HUNTSVILLE, Texas, June 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Prominently featured in The Inner Circle, Debra K. Durda is recognized as a Pinnacle Professional Member Inner Circle of Excellence for her contributions to Engineering Professional Dedicated to Innovation and Process Excellence.

Debra K. Durda has built a strong career in engineering, recognized for her expertise in developing process systems, creating efficient operational procedures, and supporting organizations through strategic contracting and consulting services. Her work has impacted engineering projects on a statewide scale, and she continues to be acknowledged for her leadership, precision, and problem solving abilities.

As of April 1, 2026, Ms. Durda has advanced to the role of Director of Engineering, further reflecting her leadership and continued growth within the field.

Ms. Durda is affiliated with the Order of the Engineer and the Texas Society of Professional Engineers, demonstrating her commitment to ethical engineering practices and professional advancement. She is also actively involved in her local community, contributing her time and expertise to support meaningful initiatives.

Outside of her professional life, she enjoys traveling and spending time outdoors. She credits her success to the love and support of her father, James Durda, and her uncle, Frank Joseph Durda III, in whose honor she continues to pursue excellence and growth in her field.

Looking ahead, Ms. Durda plans to expand her work in consulting, applying her knowledge to help organizations improve performance, strengthen systems, and achieve long term success. And to utilize her knowledge to help organizations improve performance, strengthen systems, and achieve long term success.

Contact: Katherine Green, 516-825-5634, editorialteam@continentalwhoswho.com

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SOURCE The Inner Circle

Pave’s new benchmark study of 525+ compensation leaders reveals most organizations remain in the early stages of AI adoption, with an average maturity score of just 4.3 out of 16.

A clear five-step path to ROI: standardized job architecture, a documented compensation philosophy, AI-powered benchmarking, data quality processes, and integrated compensation data.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Pave, the AI compensation platform, today released its 2026 AI Maturity in Total Rewards Benchmarking Report, the largest dataset assembled to date on how compensation and HR leaders are actually adopting AI. Based on responses from more than 525 total rewards professionals collected in April and May 2026, the report measures actual implementation against a consistent 16-capability framework.

The study found that the average AI maturity score is just 4.3 out of 16, placing most organizations in the early stages of adoption. More than half (52.5%) have adopted fewer than five of the 16 capabilities measured, and only 8.7% have reached the two most mature tiers.

A Persistent “Say–Do Gap” in AI Application

The report identifies a persistent “say–do gap”: organizations are 2.4 times more likely to have the data foundations they need in place than to actually deploy AI use cases that leverage that compensation data. Data readiness capabilities have an average adoption of just over 53%, while AI implementation averages only 22%. For example, more than 80% of companies with a documented compensation philosophy are not using AI for pay recommendations, and three-quarters of those with integrated data are not using AI for pay equity analysis.

The barrier is rarely technology or budget. When pay sits in one system, equity in another, and job architecture in an outdated spreadsheet, teams rationally hesitate to let AI generate recommendations based on fragmented inputs.

“Most teams assume their biggest barrier is AI capability. The data says otherwise — it’s data readiness and governance,” said Alex Cwirko-Godycki, GM of Market Data at Pave. “The maturity model shows leaders where to invest first, not just where they want to end up. The organizations proving ROI aren’t the ones with the most tools — they’re the ones who first standardized, then documented, and finally activated, with governance and implementation moving together.”

AI-Powered Benchmarking Accelerates Business Impact

The report identifies AI-powered benchmarking as the clearest accelerant. Organizations using it are over six times more likely to adopt AI for pay recommendations, nearly three times more likely to use AI for pay equity analysis, and more than twice as likely to demonstrate measurable business impact. Benchmarking, where AI gathers market data and matches jobs while humans retain decision-making authority, is low-risk, immediately actionable, and builds the foundation for further AI adoption.

Five Capabilities Drive AI ROI in Total Rewards

Five capabilities appear in a majority of the 15% of organizations demonstrating measurable AI ROI:

Standardized job architecture (67%)Documented compensation philosophy (59%)AI-powered benchmarking (57%)Data quality processes (53%)Integrated compensation data (51%)

These five capabilities are intentional and align with a progressive data readiness sequence. Job architecture and a compensation philosophy provide the structural consistency required for AI. Data quality and integration ensure reliable inputs. AI-powered benchmarking serves as the activation point, marking the first use case in which AI enters a real workflow and begins to build organizational confidence.

Organizations that follow this sequence typically expand into pay equity, pay recommendations, and cross-functional HR integration at much higher rates. Those who skip foundational steps and move directly to advanced use cases often experience stalled progress.

Additional key findings include:

Governance and implementation, together, are the key. Teams strong in both report a 50% business-impact rate – nine times the 5.6% rate of those with neither. Governance alone delivers process (16%); implementation alone delivers results with risk exposure (31%). Notably, more than 40% of organizations with human-oversight protocols have deployed no AI tools at all — a pattern the report calls “oversight theater.”Mid-market companies are moving fastest. Firms with 201–1,000 employees lead on both maturity and implementation.Impact is observed closest to the work. Team Leads report a 25% impact rate, while C-level and CHRO respondents report none, indicating a gap in visibility and reporting.

“AI’s promise in the workplace will only be realized when organizations pair strong data foundations with clear human oversight,” said Cwirko-Godycki. “With the upcoming EU AI Act, companies need to focus on transparency and governance – not just technology – to build trust and deliver measurable results.”

Availability

The full report — including the complete 16-capability framework and breakdowns by industry, company size, and role — is available to download at https://explore.pave.com/2026-ai-maturity-total-rewards.html. Compensation leaders can benchmark their own organization across all 16 capabilities with Pave’s AI Maturity Assessment at https://explore.pave.com/ai-maturity-assessment.html.

About Pave

Pave is the AI compensation platform. Compensation leaders use Pave to benchmark pay, price jobs, build pay ranges, run merit cycles, and communicate total rewards — all in one place. By connecting directly to HCM, EMS, and ATS platforms, Pave creates a unified, real-time data layer for compensation decisions teams can defend. More than 9,000 companies rely on Pave to move off stale survey data and error-prone spreadsheets, making it home to the world’s largest real-time compensation dataset. Learn more at pave.com.

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SOURCE Pave

The combined platform is the only agentic marketing solution built to capture first-party customer context, decide what to do with it in real time, and execute across owned channels, in a single stack

BOSTON, June 17, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — BlueConic, the customer growth engine for B2C brands, today announced the acquisition of Blueshift, the AI-powered cross-channel marketing platform. Together, they close the gap between what a brand knows about each customer and what it does next: capturing first-party behavior as it happens, deciding the next best move, and executing across web, email, push, in-app, and SMS in a single system. As AI agents take over more of how marketing runs, that closed loop is what separates personalization at scale from generic output.

The combined company serves more than 600 customers across CPG, retail, DTC, and travel and hospitality. Trusted brands including ASICS, Free People, Marmot, and L’Oreal use BlueConic today; Blueshift has built deep traction among growth and lifecycle teams at brands including StitchFix, Five Below, Tuft & Needle, Udacity, and Lending Tree.

Every platform now has agents. What they don’t have is the behavioral context that keeps those agents from being generic. An agent can only decide as well as the data it works from, and most of that data is stale by the time it arrives, copied from systems that captured it hours or days earlier. BlueConic is the only B2C platform that originates the signal directly: what each customer did, what the brand has already shown them, what worked and what didn’t. Agents working from that produce relevance. Agents working from an imported snapshot produce noise at scale.

“Marketing is going through its biggest reset in two decades,” said Melissa Murray Bailey, CEO of BlueConic. “Real-time context is the new competitive moat. Brands that own how they capture, decide, and act on first-party behavior will be structurally harder to compete with as agents become the primary operating model. That’s what BlueConic and Blueshift deliver together.”

BlueConic builds the profile from first-party behavior across web, app, and offline — including what the brand has already shown, tested, and learned from every prior interaction. It makes decisions in milliseconds, at the moment a customer is on-site, reaching a layer that warehouse-native platforms are structurally unable to reach. Blueshift extends that decisioning to email, push, in-app, SMS, and web, executing across owned channels without routing through a separate tool. The result feeds back as new behavioral signal, not as a reported outcome imported after the fact. The loop closes on data BlueConic originated, which is why it gets sharper with each interaction.

The data foundation is consolidating into the warehouse, the lakehouse, or wherever a brand chooses to keep its data. Unlike platforms built around a single data architecture, BlueConic is designed to work across all of them, turning customer data into the next best action and executing it across owned channels, regardless of where that data lives. As agents become the primary way brands engage customers, the winners will own that full loop, not just the storage layer underneath it.

“For ten years, Blueshift has helped leading brands deliver hundreds of millions of personalized customer experiences a day, and we’ve spent the last several years building toward an agent-first future,” said Vijay Chittoor, CEO and Co-founder of Blueshift. “Joining BlueConic means customers get a single platform where unified customer understanding, AI decisioning, and cross-channel execution work as one, with AI agents as first-class operators from the start, not retrofitted features.”

About BlueConic

BlueConic is the Customer Growth Engine for commerce brands. It turns first-party data into a living, real-time customer profile and uses that intelligence to coordinate next best actions across onsite experiences and channels. By closing the loop between data capture, activation, and measurement, BlueConic helps brands reduce wasted spend, increase conversion and repeat purchase, and drive measurable, profitable growth.

About Blueshift

Blueshift powers AI-driven customer engagement for B2C brands, combining an AI decisioning engine, cross-channel execution, and closed-loop learning that continuously improves from real customer outcomes. As part of BlueConic, Blueshift brings the execution and intelligence layer that completes the full-stack Customer Growth Engine.

Media Contact

Meredith Portnoy, BlueConic, 1 484-542-0965, meredith.portnoy@blueconic.com, https://www.blueconic.com/

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SOURCE BlueConic