Maxime Cohen, academic director of McGill’s Bensadoun School of Retail Management, has spent 16 years at the intersection of pricing, retail operations and AI. He and Michael LeBlanc agree that this moment in pricing technology is similar to the internet era, when prices became transparent and could be changed by code every few seconds. Generative AI is the next wave, and it puts those capabilities in far more hands.
His core idea: stop treating price as a number and build a system that learns. That system draws on cost data, competitors, customer behaviour and strategy to keep testing what shoppers will pay.
Making these tools available to everyone comes with caveats. Maxime’s research shows large language models tend to confirm the price a user already has in mind, and hallucination and collusion are real risks. Retailers still need guardrails, vendor constraints built in and clear human accountability.
Michael and Maxime also look ahead to agent-to-agent commerce, as AI shopping agents begin dealing directly with retailers’ agents. Maxime closes with five practical principles for retailers getting started.
Topics include:
- Generative AI for independent retailers
- Pricing as a learning system
- LLM confirmation bias in pricing
- Guardrails and pricing governance
- Agent-to-agent commerce
Presented by Konek, Canada's Way to Pay. Visit Konek.ca to learn more.
Michael LeBlanc is the president and founder of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc, a senior retail advisor, keynote speaker and now, media entrepreneur. He has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.
Michael has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, CanWest Media, Pandora Jewellery, The Shopping Channel and Retail Council of Canada to his advisory, speaking and media practice.
Michael produces and hosts a network of leading retail trade podcasts, including the award-winning No.1 independent retail industry podcast in America, Remarkable Retail with his partner, Dallas-based best-selling author Steve Dennis; Canada's top retail industry podcast The Voice of Retail and Canada's top food industry and one of the top Canadian-produced management independent podcasts in the country, The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois from Dalhousie University in Halifax.
Rethink Retail has recognized Michael as one of the top global retail experts for the fifth year in a row, the National Retail Federation has designated Michael as on their Top Retail Voices for 2025 and 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him on of the Top 50 global thought leaders in retail. If you are a BBQ fan, you can tune into Michael’s cooking show, Last Request BBQ, on YouTube, Instagram, X and yes, TikTok.
Michael is available for keynote presentations helping retailers, brands and retail industry insiders explaining the current state and future of the retail industry in North America and around the world.
