AI's Pricing Love Language is Different Than Yours
If you are a pricing leader in your company, you may be wondering what your future looks like as AI evolves its capabilities in pricing science. At Price Space, we say never fear! We are staying on top of AI trends and see a fantastic future together. Used correctly, AI toolsets can catapult your capabilities in pricing analytics, pricing intelligence, and value-based pricing.
However, your ability to develop negotiation competencies and bring your customers and internal team along in the pricing journey has not been mastered by the Bots yet, and we don't see that happening any time soon. At the risk of sounding like a marriage counselor, here's how we suggest you navigate your relationship ahead:
1) Divvy up your responsibilities with your bots now while you are early in your relationship.
-
Assume it will be more efficient and error-proof in analytics than you will be in the not-too-distant future. In the short term, you will have to check its work, but we believe it won't be too long before AI is doing Ph.D.-level pricing science.
-
Give AI credit for its ability to pull pricing intelligence and create value-defensive narratives that will be very convincing.
-
Leverage its powers to automate as many pricing administrative tasks as you can.
2) Recognize that the "people side" of pricing is about to become way more important because the technical side is about to evolve much more quickly.
-
You will need to build trust in the Bots' outputs with your internal teams. Don't underestimate your need to understand and over-communicate the Bot's work to others. No one likes a black box
-
Pricing is still a scary subject for many. Let's assume your Bot doesn't have your level of empathy for now (well, let's hope not). Shifting your focus into being a value advocate and value defender of your organization will help you take the Bot strategy and make it real in the market.
At Price Space, we are excited and proud to be on the cutting edge of leveraging machine learning tools to help our clients drive momentum in their technical capabilities. We are equally proud to serve as partners and coaches to pricing teams as they work with their leadership to develop a culture of excellence in pricing and value management.