Delta Air Traces stated Friday it won’t use synthetic intelligence to set customized ticket costs for passengers after going through sharp criticism from lawmakers.
Final week, Democratic Senators Ruben Gallego, Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal stated they believed the Atlanta-based airline would use AI to set particular person costs, which might “likely mean fare price increases up to each individual consumer’s personal ‘pain point.’”
Delta has stated it plans to deploy AI-based income administration expertise throughout 20% of its home community by the tip of 2025 in partnership with Fetcherr, an AI pricing firm.
“There is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing or plans to use that targets customers with individualized prices based on personal data,” Delta instructed the senators in a letter on Friday, seen by Reuters. “Our ticket pricing never takes into account personal data.”
The senators cited a remark in December by Delta President Glen Hauenstein that the service’s AI price-setting expertise is able to setting fares based mostly on a prediction of “the amount people are willing to pay for the premium products related to the base fares.”
Final week, American Airways CEO Robert Isom stated utilizing AI to set ticket costs might harm client belief.
“This is not about bait and switch. This is not about tricking,” Isom stated on an earnings name, including “talk about using AI in that way, I don’t think it’s appropriate. And certainly from American, it’s not something we will do.”
Delta stated airways have used dynamic pricing for greater than three many years, during which pricing fluctuates based mostly on quite a lot of components like total buyer demand, gasoline costs and competitors however not a selected client’s private info.
“Given the tens of millions of fares and hundreds of thousands of routes for sale at any given time, the use of new technology like AI promises to streamline the process by which we analyze existing data and the speed and scale at which we can respond to changing market dynamics,” Delta’s letter stated.
It added that AI can “assist our analysts with pricing by reducing manual processes, accelerating analysis and improving time to market for pricing adjustments.”
