Tim Ouimet: Co-Founder, Engage3 Solutions
AI-Powered Pricing Takes Center Stage at NRF 2025
At NRF 2025, AI emerged as a game-changer in pricing, reshaping shopping experiences and competitive strategies. As founder of Engage3, I appreciated how AI-driven price optimization, competitive intelligence, and personalization are transforming retail.
Again and again, experts spoke about change, uncertainty, & transformation. Shoppers demand ease but struggle with affordability amid inflation, tariffs, and shifting preferences. Fast-trending sentiment impacts shopper needs and preferences at granular levels that challenge legacy systems and processes. Against this backdrop, it’s never been more difficult to create and maintain a consistent price image.
One retailer showcased how predictive analytics and GenAI help balance competitiveness with satisfaction—something every retailer wishes to master. Another talk looked at how tariffs, inflation, and shifting consumer expectations make AI-driven pricing models a necessity. These models allow retailers to adjust prices in real time, ensuring they remain competitive while maintaining profitability.
AI-driven price optimization, competitive intelligence, and personalization are transforming retail, reshaping how we think about pricing and customer engagement.
Another theme, AI-native pricing, highlighted a shift to self-learning pricing systems. AI-powered pricing agents made intelligent store-level recommendations, ensuring that retailers optimize pricing at scale while responding to sentiment at local levels.
The trend toward AI automation also cast light on the need for larger volumes of diverse data. Underscoring a growing need for data scientists skilled in acquiring, quality-assuring, curating, and integrating complex data at scale.
My biggest takeaway? AI is disrupting legacy pricing. Companies must now build value propositions at deeper levels of granularity. Data pipelines must integrate with AI to model shopper preferences across time, banners, brands, and channels. From this, AI can balances shopper perceptions with market dynamics to generate consistent, compelling, and profitable pricing strategies.
At Engage3, we build for this AI future, helping retailers create loyalty by aligning offers and margin discounts with what shoppers value most. NRF 2025 made it clear: AI-powered pricing isn’t optional—it’s foundational to winning and keeping shoppers.
Are you ready for the shift to AI powered pricing?
MAR 2025
