Blog | 7 mins read
August 7, 2026
Pricing teams have access to more market information than ever before. Competitor prices can change throughout the day, promotions can reshape demand, and cost fluctuations can place immediate pressure on margins.
However, greater visibility does not automatically lead to better decisions. When every market movement generates a new alert, pricing teams must determine which signals require action, which need further investigation and which should be ignored.
During our recent webinar, Pricing in the AI Era: Compete Faster, Protect Margin, and Price with Confidence, three pricing and market intelligence leaders explored how businesses can manage this growing complexity:
- Saurabh Sharma, Global Product Lead at eClerx, who leads product strategy and innovation across market intelligence and digital shelf analytics solutions.
- Jimmi Rai, Founder and Principal of Margin Command Center Advisory and former Vice President of Pricing and Analytics at HD Supply.
- John Pradeep, Founder of RevPro and a global pricing leader with experience across eCommerce, retail and digital marketplaces.
Moderated by Adam Curran, Head of Product Marketing at eClerx, the discussion examined how organizations can interpret competitor movements, establish a reliable view of the market, strengthen pricing governance and use AI to turn fragmented signals into confident action.
Here are five of the most important takeaways from the discussion:
1. Moving faster does not mean reacting to every price change
One of the central questions explored during the webinar was deceptively simple: when a competitor changes its price, should your business respond, hold its position or investigate further?
John Pradeep discussed why automatically matching a competitor can be dangerous. A lower price may reflect excess inventory, a temporary promotion, a regional decision or a product nearing the end of its lifecycle. Responding without understanding that context can lead to unnecessary discounting and place pressure on margin without delivering meaningful competitive benefit.
Pricing teams need to look beyond the movement itself and must consider whether the competitor and product are genuinely comparable, whether the change is isolated to one channel and whether it represents a sustained market movement or a short-term exception.
The goal is to understand the situation faster and make a deliberate decision based on the available evidence, not just automatically react faster than every competitor.
Watch the webinar to hear the specific questions pricing teams should ask before matching a competitor’s price and how the panel weighs the cost of reacting too quickly against the risk of waiting too long.
2. The market price must be constructed, not assumed
A single competitor price rarely provides a reliable picture of the market.
Products can differ in features, availability, delivery terms, service levels and brand strength. Prices may also vary by geography, channel, customer group or purchasing volume. This makes it difficult to identify one obvious market benchmark, particularly in complex B2B categories.
Drawing on his experience building and leading pricing organizations, Jimmi Rai discussed the importance of developing a more dependable market baseline. Instead of treating every visible price as equally meaningful, businesses need to identify comparable product groups, examine historical movements and understand how pricing patterns differ between channels and customer segments.
This baseline helps teams separate a genuine shift in the market from a temporary outlier. It also gives pricing leaders a clearer rationale for explaining why the business changed a price or why it deliberately chose not to follow the market.
The panel also addresses how to construct a useful benchmark when products, customers and channels are not directly comparable.
3. Price is only one part of the market signal
Competitor pricing is important, but it rarely explains the full situation.
A lower competitor price does not always signal a genuine competitive threat. The product may be in limited supply, subject to long delivery times or discounted through a short-term promotion that generates interest without profitable demand. Even a competitively priced product can underperform if customers are shifting toward a different brand, configuration or sales channel.
The panel discussed why pricing decisions should incorporate signals such as availability, demand, promotional activity, channel behavior, product comparability and margin impact. Connecting these data points allows teams to understand not only what has changed, but why it has changed and whether it is commercially significant.
This is where connected market intelligence becomes particularly valuable. Instead of presenting teams with a stream of disconnected alerts, it can reveal relationships between price movements and wider market conditions.
One of the webinar’s most practical discussions focuses on which signals deserve priority and how organizations can avoid turning better data into a larger pile of alerts.
4. Strong governance can help teams move faster
Pricing technology can identify opportunities and risks, but it cannot compensate for unclear ownership or decision rights.
During periods of volatility, teams may face pressure to make quick exceptions in response to rising costs, supply constraints or aggressive competitor activity. Without defined rules, those exceptions can accumulate across products, customers and channels, creating hidden margin leakage.
The panel discussed the need for clear approval thresholds, escalation paths and agreement over which decisions can be made locally and which require central oversight.
Jimmi connected this challenge to the concept of a margin command center; a coordinated system that brings together market signals, decision-making and execution. Rather than treating pricing as a collection of isolated changes, this model helps organizations understand how individual decisions affect the wider commercial strategy.
Effective governance helps teams move faster by clarifying which decisions they can make independently, when exceptions are appropriate and when leadership involvement is required.
The full webinar considers how a margin command center can connect market intelligence, governance and execution while preserving the flexibility required to respond to changing conditions.
5. AI should prioritize decisions, not replace pricing judgment
AI can process far more market information than a pricing team could review manually. It can identify anomalies, connect related signals, recognize patterns and highlight products or decisions that may have the greatest effect on revenue or margin.
Saurabh Sharma discussed how AI-powered market intelligence can help teams move beyond static dashboards and fragmented alerts. The real opportunity is not simply to automate more analysis. It is to help decision-makers understand where their attention is required, why an issue matters and what action they should consider next.
However, AI recommendations will only create value when users can trust them. That requires reliable data, explainable outputs, appropriate business rules and human oversight. Recommendations must also fit into existing workflows rather than forcing pricing teams to navigate another disconnected system.
As these capabilities mature, pricing professionals can shift their focus from collecting and reconciling data to interpreting market dynamics, evaluating AI-generated recommendations and making more strategic decisions.
AI can accelerate analysis and prioritize opportunities, but the business remains accountable for the final pricing decision.
Watch the webinar to hear how the panel distinguishes useful AI decision support from automation that simply produces more noise.
From faster reactions to better decisions
The central message from the webinar was not that AI will make pricing automatic. It was that AI and connected market intelligence can make growing market complexity more manageable.
Pricing teams do not need to chase every competitor move; they need to identify which changes are meaningful, interpret them in the broader market context and respond within a clear decision-making framework. The strongest organizations will be those that turn market intelligence into better decisions by combining technology with commercial expertise and human judgment.
Watch the webinar on demand to learn how experienced pricing leaders evaluate competitor movements, establish more reliable market benchmarks, prevent margin leakage and apply AI without removing human judgment.
To learn how eClerx Market360™ helps organizations monitor competitive activity, identify pricing risks and turn complex market signals into actionable intelligence, visit the eClerx Market360™ website.
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