I was speaking with an executive today whose company provides AI software applications. They recently developed one for pricing. Essentially, it crawls the web and provides information on the best prices in retail electronics. I took a look at the site and thought there were some compelling elements to it. Firstly it shows hot deals and how recently the deal was located (often within the last 60 seconds). Secondly, it provides a graph showing the price history over the last number of days or weeks. You can see exactly how deep the price discount is. The savings I saw were pretty impressive.
They have developed an app for iPhone so that you can browse this data when you are in a store and it will provide the prices for the same product but at competing stores in the neighbourhood……..a personal pricing bot for your own neighbourhood!
It is still too early to tell if this type of information is data overload or highly valued information. But I would guess that someone is going to make a killing in this space at some point. After all, we all love a good price!
