AGENDA

Opening Remarks

Chair: Markus Husemann-Kopetzky – Guest Researcher at FU Berlin & CEO – Price

Project ChOP: How to Spend $1 Billion Building Walmart's Grocery Pricing Strategy

• Developing the strategy and analytics behind Walmart's largest pricing investments.
• Prioritizing where price matters most across products, markets, and competitors.
• Lessons on influencing enterprise decisions and executing strategy at scale.

Philip Carls – VP of Pricing – OLX Group

AI for Retail: Separating Hype from Effective Decision-Making

• Distinguish high-value AI use cases from costly experiments in retail pricing.
• Turn AI into commercial impact by embedding it into pricing, promotions and markdown decisions.

Ingo Reinhardt – Co-Founder & MD – Buynomics

The Shopper Schism: When AI Agents Become the Buyer

• Agentic commerce is already here: understand the paradigm where autonomous AI agents — not humans — execute purchasing decisions, creating the first permanent separation of the consumer, who experiences value, from the shopper, who transacts.
• Explore the frameworks — Agent Intent Optimisation, Algorithmic Readiness and the Trust Paradox — that will define competitive positioning in this new era, and what they mean for how brands and retailers set prices.

Paul F. Accornero – Architect of Agentic Commerce

Reward, Not Resentment: How Shoppers Judge Personalized Pricing

• Shoppers assess a personalized price by their position relative to others, not by their own gain. The same 10 percent difference is judged fair by around two-thirds when it reads as a reward, and unfair once it reads as being singled out.
• The cheapest lever is also the strongest: a reason. Explaining why a price differs, rather than discounting more deeply, roughly halves the share of customers who would switch store.
• The rules of fairness travel; the tactics do not. A survey of 1,522 shoppers in grocery, DIY and electronics identifies what works, what backfires and the figures behind both.

Anna-Katharina Schmidt – Principal & Tilo Neumann – Associate Director Pricing – BCG

The Future of Pricing Talent: Building the Skills That Matter in the AI Era

As AI reshapes pricing and revenue management, what skills will define tomorrow's leaders? Join us for a discussion on evolving talent profiles, cross-functional expertise and how to future-proof pricing teams.

Jig Plowright

The Cost Battle Behind the Price War

• Why retail pricing decisions are becoming harder as costs move fast.
• How hidden costs across vendors, logistics, duties, returns, tariffs and channels reshape profitability.
• Why the same shelf price can produce very different margin outcomes across products, stores and channels.
• How better cost visibility helps retailers defend margin without relying only on price increases.

Alexandra Correa – Retail Industry Principal & Diego Ezquerro – Senior Manager, Retail Solution – Vistex

Pricing Gladiators: Conquer the Arena of Competitive Retail & E-Commerce

• Strategic counter-tactics and differentiation: how to compete effectively in a market increasingly influenced by Chinese e-commerce players and ultra-aggressive discounters.
• Identify your true competitors — not just the obvious ones — to anticipate their moves before they happen and make data-driven decisions that drive real growth.

Alessandra Bosco – Director Brand E-commerce – 11teamsports
Dominik Prugger – Principal Product Manager – Zalando

Automation in Retail Pricing: Streamlining for Agility and Precision

• From electronic shelf labels to AI-powered rules engines: see how retailers are implementing fully automated pricing workflows that reduce human latency without losing strategic control.
• Understand the change management reality behind automation projects and how to build organisational readiness before flipping the switch.

Chiel Messelink – Manager Pricing & Promotions – GAMMA

The Competitor Illusion: When Your Benchmark Set Becomes Your Blind Spot

• Competitive benchmarking is one of the core pricing pillars, but it can contain well-hidden traps. Is the benchmark set reflecting the most dominant competitors in the price corridor?
• Understand how a data-driven framework can redefine who your real competitors are, why earning cross-functional trust in the data is half the battle, and how solving this unlocks pricing that reflects how consumers make decisions.

Matteo Spano – Pricing & Analytics Specialist – Levi Strauss & Co. Europe
Aris Karytinos – Pricing & Analytics Specialist – Levi Strauss & Co. Europe

Priceless: When Value Trumps Discount

• Learn how to command better prices in a market where purchasing power has decreased and discounting has become the default.
• Move beyond basic price matching into loyalty-driven value propositions that make price comparison feel irrelevant.

Alan Milner – Commercial Director – Cromwell

Closing Remarks