AI and data availability are transforming the way businesses tackle pricing challenges. Karl Larsson, Vice President of System Solutions at Vendavo, explores the common obstacles pricing teams face, how AI can help solve them, and the importance of blending human expertise with technology for smarter, faster decision-making. Here’s how the right strategy will help your organization stay competitive amid shifting technology to drive profitable growth.
Businesses can’t afford to fall behind in today’s fast-moving markets. The key to staying competitive lies in harnessing the combined strength of AI, data, and human expertise to tackle complex pricing challenges head-on.
As AI technologies like generative AI transform industries, companies need smart strategies and solutions to drive profitability and outpace disruption.
Let’s take a look at how to harness them to stay ahead.
The Pricing Challenges Businesses Face Today
Many organizations struggle to adopt their pricing strategies effectively across multiple regions, business units, and product lines. Managing pricing through spreadsheets or disconnected systems slows teams down, introduces errors, and prevents businesses from reacting quickly to market shifts.
Key challenges include:
- Maintaining consistent business rules and logic
- Monitoring data in real time
- Identifying new strategies for specific sales channels
- Adapting to e-commerce trends and multiple pricing channels
- Losses to the top- and bottom-line
As markets grow more complex, pricing leaders need to move faster, with more precision, and without expanding their teams.
Simply expecting AI to solve your problem is a problem in itself. If you can’t clearly define and articulate your goals, AI won’t be able to help you reach them.
AI becomes powerful only when it aligns with a clear business objective, whether that’s defining optimized pricing strategies or helping pricers monitor and react to market trends in real time.
Why AI and Human Expertise Go Hand-in-Hand
AI is an enabler, not a replacement. It’s an efficiency tool. Pricing professionals need tools that empower them to focus on strategy rather than getting bogged down by manual processes. That’s why Vendavo emphasizes the importance of blending AI with human insight. (Read more about our guiding principles for AI here)
Our customers need to price more, price faster, and price more precisely – but they can’t add additional overhead. They need to leverage technology.
Through AI-powered pricing tools, Vendavo helps pricing teams set, manage, and maintain millions of price points worldwide, making it possible to streamline processes and unlock profitable growth. This starts with quality data.
AI and Data: The Perfect Partnership
One of the most critical factors in making AI effective is the availability and reliability of data. AI models need a strong foundation to deliver meaningful insights, and that foundation is data.
Without it, even the most advanced AI models fall short.
At Vendavo, we focus on providing our customers with the tools to maintain business rules and logic, ensuring they have complete visibility into what’s happening with their data. Solutions like Vendavo Pricepoint, help users spot trends, monitor pricing effectiveness, and identify the most impactful actions.
How Vendavo Pricepoint Helps Solve Pricing Challenges
The best business impacts are typically achieved when you combine an organization’s business experience with the right people, process, and technology, you will execute straightforward, scalable price management and optimization across your organization. You’ll automate your processes for scalability and speed of execution and optimize your business rules and price strategies. Building on opportunities to deploy specific AI models that are aligned with the business objectives will create even better results.
The operational pricing processes below are examples on processes typically managed in Vendavo Pricepoint:
- Manage and control the pricing strategies – a centralized, streamlined strategy increases continuity and has long-term benefits
- Update your price lists over time – whether a global, local or price list, keep up with competitive and market conditions
- Integrate and operationalize your pricing master data – undo silos to build a stronger business case for all prices that sales teams ultimately add to quotes and request approvals for
- Operationalize pricing governance – data needs to be easy to use and accessible in your ERP of choice allowing changes to be pushed bidirectionally
- Manage pricing indices and corresponding formulas – address changing prices actively based on indices and other benchmarks (found in commodity heavy environments)
To learn more, check out DeLaval’s story. They went from disparate prices, branding risks, and sales team confusion with nonuniform pricing to improved customer relationships, consistent, easy to explain, and improved pricing with stronger governance and internal management.
What’s Next? Disruptive Business Models on the Horizon
2025 promises to be a transformative year for pricing. Technologies like AI will merge with shifting commercial landscapes, creating opportunities for disruptive business models. Companies that combine technology with a clear strategic focus will see more success than their peers.
We’ll see exciting new technologies and business models disrupt the market.
Vendavo has some predictions of our own. Check out Vendavo’s 2024-2025 Top Growth Drivers Report for Manufacturing and Distribution to see how more than 300 leaders are positioning their businesses for financial success.
Achieving Profitable Growth with Vendavo
At Vendavo, our mission is simple: We partner with customers to help them achieve profitable growth. By aligning business processes, enabling precise execution of pricing strategies, and providing operational excellence, we empower companies to thrive in a competitive landscape.
With solutions like Vendavo Pricepoint, users manage pricing efficiently and at scale, without adding overhead. The result? Fewer errors, faster decision-making, improved margins, business success, and even personal career growth for pricing leaders.
As the market becomes more dynamic, businesses need technology that keeps up. Vendavo provides the tools, expertise, and AI capabilities to ensure pricing teams are not only adapting but excelling. Whether it’s setting a new pricing strategy, monitoring data in real-time, or optimizing prices across channels, Vendavo is here to support every step of the journey.
Because in today’s world, pricing is about leveraging the right combination of AI, data, and human expertise to unlock your full potential.
Are you ready to start your profit transformation? Reach out today to request a demo or speak with an expert about your business needs.