Ger Perdisatt will be speaking at the German-Irish Business Forum 2026. With both Germany and Ireland implementing the EU Pay Transparency Directive, the conversation about AI-assisted compliance is no longer theoretical — it is operational.
I am pleased to be speaking at the German-Irish Business Forum 2026, hosted by AHK Ireland (the German-Irish Chamber of Industry and Commerce).
The forum brings together business leaders from both countries at a moment when shared regulatory obligations — particularly around AI governance and pay transparency — are creating practical challenges that cross borders.
Why pay transparency matters at a German-Irish forum
Germany and Ireland are both transposing the EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) into national law. The Directive requires employers across the EU to ensure their pay structures are based on objective, gender-neutral criteria, to disclose salary ranges in recruitment, and to conduct pay equity analyses that go well beyond headline gender pay gap reporting.
For multinational organisations operating across both jurisdictions — and there are many in the German-Irish business corridor — this creates a dual compliance challenge. Pay structures, job architectures, and reporting mechanisms need to work under both national implementations of the same Directive.
The question I keep hearing from Irish and European employers is the same: how do we do this at scale, within the timeline, without building an entirely new HR infrastructure?
The AI dimension
This is where the conversation becomes practical rather than theoretical. The work the Directive demands — evaluating every role against objective criteria, identifying comparable positions, running multivariate pay equity analyses, modelling remediation costs — is analytically intensive. For organisations with hundreds of roles across multiple countries, traditional consulting-led approaches simply do not scale within the compliance window.
AI-assisted approaches can compress this work significantly:
- Job architecture development. AI can parse and standardise job descriptions across jurisdictions, produce draft role evaluations against a common factor framework, and identify inconsistencies that manual review would miss.
- Cross-border role comparison. For organisations operating in both Germany and Ireland, AI can map roles across different national structures and identify where positions that carry different titles or sit in different reporting lines are in fact performing work of equal value.
- Pay equity analysis. AI-powered multivariate analysis can process compensation data across multiple entities, currencies, and benefit structures simultaneously — producing the granular, defensible analysis the Directive requires.
- Ongoing monitoring. Unlike one-off consulting exercises, AI-assisted tools can run continuous pay equity monitoring, flagging emerging gaps before they become compliance issues.
The governance question
Using AI to solve a regulatory compliance problem creates its own governance requirement. The EU AI Act classifies AI systems used in employment and HR contexts as high-risk. Any AI tools used for role evaluation, pay analysis, or compensation decisions must meet specific standards around transparency, human oversight, and bias testing.
This is a point I will be making at the forum: the organisations that get pay transparency right will be those that treat AI governance and pay transparency compliance as connected workstreams, not separate projects. The tools you use to comply with one Directive must themselves comply with the other.
What I will be discussing
My contribution to the forum will focus on the practical intersection of these themes:
- What the Pay Transparency Directive actually requires of employers — beyond the headlines
- Why job architecture is the missing foundation most organisations need to build first
- How AI-assisted role analysis and pay equity tools work in practice
- The governance framework needed to use AI in compliance contexts responsibly
- Lessons from Irish organisations that have already started this work
The German-Irish business relationship is built on precision, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to doing things properly. That is exactly the approach pay transparency compliance demands.
If you are attending the German-Irish Business Forum 2026 and would like to discuss how AI-assisted approaches can support your pay transparency compliance — in Ireland, Germany, or across both — I would welcome the conversation. You can also get in touch directly.