Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI

General News
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Delta Air Lines is leaning into AI as a way to boost its profit margins further by maximizing what individual passengers pay for fares

By the end of the year, Delta plans for 20% of its ticket prices to be individually determined using AI, president Glen Hauenstein told investors last week. Currently, about 3% of the airline’s flight prices are AI-determined, triple the portion from nine months ago.

Privacy advocates noted Delta’s development with concern.“They are trying to see into people’s heads to see how much they’re willing to pay,” said Justin Kloczko, who analyzes so-called surveillance pricing for Consumer Watchdog, a California nonprofit. “They are basically hacking our brains.”

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I honestly just expect machine learning pricing models are a baseline enshittification at this point. With how much data they have, even not selling it to third parties or getting additional bought info, it’s trivial to be able to make the decision between having more customers buy plane tickets with lower fees or maximizing money through a configurable value. It’s what they’ve been doing for years, it’s just automated now.

Every company of any size that can do this is definitely doing this. Any place with fees I’d assume does this.