Inflation, tariffs, and AI-driven dynamic pricing have raised the stakes for retail pricing. While AI enables faster decisions, it also means mistakes scale faster. Yet the challenge today isn’t whether to use AI, but how to move beyond blunt, rule-based discounting toward pricing that is intelligent, demand-shaped, and perceived by customers as fair while preserving pricing and brand integrity.

The first step is understanding the full universe of possibilities within a retailer’s business. Pricing is not a series of isolated decisions. It’s a system shaped by the interaction of products, prices, promotions, and competitive responses. Rule-based approaches narrow that universe by locking retailers into predefined moves. Optimization expands it, revealing which combinations of actions actually deliver the desired outcomes.

We help retailers do this by bringing together several critical elements. Central among them is Price Image, our proprietary science for measuring and managing shopper pricing perception. Price Image identifies the specific items that disproportionately shape how fair or expensive a retailer feels. More importantly, it makes perception actionable. Retailers can deliberately improve how they are perceived without indiscriminately lowering prices or sacrificing margin. Focusing on the wrong items wastes investment and erodes trust. Price Image ensures effort is applied where it truly matters.

We pair this insight with localized, like-item competitive pricing data, down to the store-item level. Customers don’t experience pricing in national averages. They experience it locally, item by item, across grocery and general merchandise categories alike. Precision at this level is essential to earning trust.

These and many other inputs come together through optimization, enabling retailers to execute tactically toward clear objectives. Crucially, we optimize not just for gross profit, but for price perception, allowing retailers to protect margin while increasing trips, share of wallet, and long-term loyalty. At the same time, 2025 has reinforced a critical lesson. Not everything should be automated.

The most effective pricing organizations integrate art and science by design. Human judgment remains essential in setting strategy, defining objectives, and guiding like-item product linking so competitive comparisons reflect how shoppers actually evaluate value. Oversight is also critical when systems recommend significant price changes, challenge established business rules, or encounter scenarios outside historical norms.

To be explicit on this point: this isn’t a fallback, but rather an operating model to design a pricing center of excellence around. The goal is targeted engagement, where the appropriate stakeholders are brought in precisely when judgment adds value. We must avoid burying these professionals in routine execution.

In an era of rising costs and accelerating complexity, intelligent pricing isn’t about speed alone. It’s about outcomes, combining rigorous science with human judgment to deliver pricing customers trust and retailers can sustain.