Sophisticated pricing once required big budgets, deep data and in-house data scientists. McGill University professor Maxime Cohen, author of the new book "Pricing in the Age of AI" (MIT Press), explains how generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are putting AI-driven pricing strategy within reach of independent retailers and businesses of every size. Presented by Konek.
Maxime Cohen, academic director of McGill’s Bensadoun School of Retail Management, has spent 16 years at the intersection of pricing, retail operations and AI. He and Michael LeBlanc agree that this moment in pricing technology is similar to the internet era, when prices became transparent and could be changed by code every few seconds. Generative AI is the next wave, and it puts those capabilities in far more hands.
His core idea: stop treating price as a number and build a system that learns. That system draws on cost data, competitors, customer behaviour and strategy to keep testing what shoppers will pay.
Making these tools available to everyone comes with caveats. Maxime’s research shows large language models tend to confirm the price a user already has in mind, and hallucination and collusion are real risks. Retailers still need guardrails, vendor constraints built in and clear human accountability.
Michael and Maxime also look ahead to agent-to-agent commerce, as AI shopping agents begin dealing directly with retailers’ agents. Maxime closes with five practical principles for retailers getting started.
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