Since October 2024, when I was first introduced to Agentic AI via a training I did with “crewai,” I have been trying to create an overall mental architecture for how we can integrate this new and game-changing technology/overarching framework into 2 key domains:
1- Finance – Valuation
2- Pricing – B2B Pricing
Regarding Valuation, I’m already more advanced and currently developing a pilot project to assist me in my personal investments. However, in the pricing domain my vision is still being built, developed, and shaped.
In both domains the key question is: “How can we materialize/harness all the potential exponential value that Gen and Agentic AI can bring into the domain?”
It is within this context that the article from McKinsey — B2B Pricing: Navigating the Next Phase of the AI Revolution (attached) — provided me with significant insights and food for thought in the definition of my vision and mental framework for the pricing domain.
What I fully agree with in the presented thesis — which strengthens my prior beliefs and allows me to start laying down my conceptual structure — is the following:
· Initial claim – Gen and Agentic AI have an enormous and latent value on how B2B prices will be defined, deployed and communicated. The value will impact on both fronts – from an effectiveness (do the right things) and efficiency (do the things right) perspective.
· A paradigm shift – the use of Gen and Agentic AI will not just generate incremental value and change, but it will create a new order, where the winners will take the full potential value and the laggards will be cast aside with significant and detrimental impacts to the pricing function and the organization (creative destruction will be observed).
“…Pricing is moving from human-led processes supported by analytics to AI-orchestrated systems capable of using analytical insights at greater scale and consistency with human oversight….”
· The key areas where it will generate the most impact:
o cleaning and repairing data;
o ingesting customer requests for proposals;
o clarifying customer requests and developing response options;
o synthesizing market signals, customer feedback, and deal data;
o guiding pricing strategy;
o updating prices dynamically;
o notifying sales and customers; and
o even negotiating terms with customers, with clear escalation rules, human oversight, and audit trails
What I miss and that for me is a make it or break it variable: Change Management.
I wholeheartedly believe that you can only promote this type of change if you keep front and center the change management that will be required in all impacted areas. For each €1 invested in the technology, you should at a minimum invest €2 in change management.
Only with that laser focus on change management will you be able to significantly increase the probabilities of success from a pricing standpoint — and consequently, given its relevance, for the organization overall.
Conclusion:
I’m a firm believer that Pricing is one of the few key levers any organization has at its disposal to impact the value it can generate; however, it is hugely and surprisingly undermanaged and overlooked in most of the companies.
Only the companies that embrace this paradigm shift (macro impact) in the organizational structure, but also and especially in Pricing, will be the ones that will thrive in their industry.
As happened in evolution, it is not the biggest or the strongest that will prevail and be successful, but the one that can adapt/react quickly and harness the value that this new technology/organizational framework will unleash for those willing to change.
Finally, ask yourself an honest and direct question:
Where are you in this “silent” arms-race for your company’s survival and value-accretive change?
B2B pricing: Navigating the next phase of the AI revolution
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