“Instacart was trying to figure out how much money they could make on Target shoppers,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative.

Variable pricing is nothing new, but artificial intelligence has made it easier for companies of all sizes to leverage dynamic pricing – and “when something is easier to use, it becomes easy also to take advantage of,” said Pascal Yammine, CEO at Zilliant, an AI-driven pricing strategy firm.