AI's real "contribution" to humanityWas this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Daily Prospect Monday through Friday. [link removed]

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**DECEMBER 2, 2025**

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Our series on the drivers of the affordability crisis tries to tackle the subject in a different way: looking at the practical and even psychological causes of why it feels so much harder to get by in America. My contribution [link removed] is about technology, which is taking the guesswork out of business hypotheses about demand and pricing through data-dependent algorithms that anticipate and exploit customer needs and desires. I first wrote about surveillance pricing last year, and there have been a ton of developments, from real policy gains at the state level to innovations in deception to keep AI-fueled pricing (and the many consultants selling it) ascendant. 

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**–David Dayen, executive editor**

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Illustration by Richard Borge

Prices in the Machine [link removed]

AI can depict you as an anime character. It can respond half-intelligently to questions about the Franco-Prussian War or concentrations of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. It can delight and distract and maybe help you get work done. But none of that is as prized by corporate America as its data-driven approach to the previously conjectural world of pricing.

Earlier this year, a slightly balding man in spectacles, a black T-shirt, and bright high-top sneakers gave a presentation [link removed] about how his computer can predict what you want to buy. His name is Dr. Uri Yerushalmi, co-founder and chief artificial intelligence officer of Fetcherr [link removed], an Israeli-based pricing consultant used by a half dozen airlines around the world. Trained on years of market data—prices, orders, competitors, regulation, stock prices, even the weather—Fetcherr’s “business agents” aim to simulate market dynamics, assist pricing analysts, and even automatically price tickets.

One presentation slide stuck out. It showed price fluctuations before the use of Fetcherr’s system and after. In the before graph, prices are relatively static and straight. After Fetcherr, the jagged lines pulse with staccato rhythms. “The dynamic is much more similar to dynamics in NASDAQ or capital markets where the prices change much more frequently,” said Yerushalmi, “because every time something in the market changes, there is an immediate response.”

Yerushalmi once ran AI for a high-speed stock trading firm. He approaches pricing like a science experiment, engaging in constant real-time testing and tweaking to maximize corporate profits. Fetcherr boasts of delivering annual “revenue uplift” of over 10 percent. The guinea pigs for these tests, the ones being separated from their cash, are you and me.

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