Your Pricing Legacy is a Mind Shift Away
I recently had the pleasure of recording a podcast with Kevin Mitchell from the Professional Pricing Society (PPS). In this episode of “Let’s Talk Pricing,” we explored what the agentic AI revolution means for pricing professionals. Rather than a displacement of jobs, our conversation revealed how you, as pricing professionals, can make yourself completely indispensable in the age of AI. However, it does require a fundamental mental shift that many pricing professionals resist.
You can listen to our conversation here on Spotify:
This podcast is also available on other platforms:
Thriving Amidst Volatility Requires Fast Adaptive Pricing
We started the conversation about how the world has become chaotic and volatile, and pricing must adapt accordingly. This marks the death of the traditional master price list. Because by the time you create and distribute that list—whether it takes days, weeks, or months—the market conditions have already changed. Tariffs can change within hours; supply chains can be disrupted overnight; and customer preferences evolve in real-time.
The solution isn’t just “dynamic pricing” as most understand it. True competitive advantage lies in real-time dynamic pricing. That is the ability to compute and generate prices at the exact moment they’re needed, not hours or days later. This requires ingesting countless market predictors simultaneously, which traditional segmentation-based approaches simply cannot handle due to data sparsity challenges.
This is where neural networks become essential. They provide a “segment-free approach” to pricing, allowing you to predict willingness to pay for any customer-product combination without being limited by insufficient historical data across all possible variable combinations.
Understanding GenAI’s Promise and Limitations
While generative AI (GenAI) offers incredible capabilities for research, strategy development, and communication, it comes with critical limitations that pricing professionals must understand. The most dangerous is the hallucination problem. GenAI will confidently create information that doesn’t exist. In mission-critical pricing applications, you cannot tolerate AI inventing prices.
GenAI also struggles with tabular data analysis. Language models excel with text and images because of strong internal correlations (seeing a few words or pixels helps predict neighboring ones). Tabular data lacks these correlations. If predicting the next data point were easy, we’d have solved stock market forecasting long ago. When you ask GenAI to analyze data, the first thing it does is write code, acknowledging its own limitations with direct data analysis.
However, the evolution from Large Language Models (LLMs) to Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) represents a significant advancement. LRMs don’t just provide answers—they show their reasoning process. Together (LLM and LRM), their capability makes them more suitable for complex pricing analysis while maintaining the transparency needed for mission-critical decisions. These systems can help with research, analysis, strategy creation, and cross-functional communication in ways that dramatically enhance productivity.
The Strategic Evolution of Pricing Professionals
Speed has become a critical currency in pricing. A good enough price right now often beats the optimal price two weeks from now. Win-loss analyses consistently show that quote speed frequently matters more than whether the price was high or low. This reality demands embracing AI even when it performs suboptimally compared to human analysts. Here’s the crucial mindset shift: Clinging tightly to your routine tasks and computing every price yourself makes you more replaceable, not less.
Pricing professionals must evolve into strategic managers who oversee multiple AI agents and systems. They must ensure compliance with industry regulations, align pricing strategies with moral and ethical standards, and maintain human connections across functional teams. The biggest barrier isn’t technical—it’s psychological. Many pricing professionals want complete control over calculations, wanting to know exactly how each price is computed. This desire for control, while understandable, becomes a liability because it prevents you from leveraging AI’s speed.
Becoming Indispensable in the AI Era
The phrase “AI won’t replace you, but someone using AI will” captures the essential truth. However, pricing professionals have a unique opportunity to become completely indispensable by serving as change agents for the inevitable AI transformation.
Every company will eventually integrate AI throughout its operations, just as every company adopted computers decades ago. Pricing professionals possess the perfect skill set to guide this transformation. As pricing professionals, you already influence without authority, navigating complex organizational dynamics. You speak different “languages” to sales, finance, marketing, product, and executive teams. You’re accustomed to implementing strategies that affect every revenue dollar while balancing multiple constraints and stakeholder interests.
The companies that thrive will combine AI’s speed and analytical power with uniquely human capabilities: creative problem-solving. You need to solve for novel situations, build relationships, educate stakeholders, and provide strategic visions to choose which AI strategies fit specific contexts. While AI excels at pattern recognition and can surface every pricing strategy ever documented, humans must choose which strategies fit their specific situation and guide organizational understanding of complex pricing decisions.
You must learn to trust AI systems while maintaining appropriate oversight. You must think like the best leaders who delegate effectively rather than micromanaging every detail. This doesn’t mean relinquishing all control, but rather ceding appropriate control to achieve strategic objectives and focusing your energy on the high-value activities that only humans can perform.
Conclusion: The Inevitable Future
This transformation isn’t optional—it’s inevitable. Just as computers didn’t eliminate jobs but transformed them, AI will reshape pricing careers. The question isn’t whether this change will happen, but whether you’ll position yourself to lead it or be left behind.
The pricing professionals who embrace this mental shift will learn to cede some control to AI and elevate their strategic focus, and become organizational change agents. They will find themselves not just surviving but thriving in the age of intelligent agents. The revolution is here, but the choice is yours. And you can embrace it and become indispensable in ways you never imagined possible.