AI as a Multiplier for Pricing with Emanuel Martonca

Emanuel Martonca, founder of Soft Fight, reveals how agentic AI is solving one of the biggest challenges in IT services: coordinating pricing decisions across hundreds of people in decentralized organizations.  After his career journey from product management to sales management to discovering pricing at a Simon Kucher workshop, Emanuel shares how his bootstrapped company evolved from traditional consulting to building AI-powered pricing agents that act as an ever-present pricing manager- coaching teams, improving proposals, and recommending pricing models without sending a single byte of data outside the client's infrastructure. In this episode,  learn why AI should augment rather than replace pricing teams, why deterministic calculations still matter, and how to quantify value in IT services without universal quality standards.   Why You Have to Check Out Today's Podcast: Discover how AI solves coordination problems in large IT services companies where hundreds of people make pricing decisions without pricing expertise. Learn why AI should augment pricing teams, not replace them, and why deterministic calculations still matter more than probabilistic AI outputs. Understand how to quantify value in IT services using measurable quality attributes instead of universally accepted standards.   "Pricing is leverage. It allows you to have an impact with very few actions, with little effort."  – Emanuel Martonca   Topics Covered: 01:32 -Emanuel's transformational discovery of pricing at a Belgian retail bank workshop that revealed a world he didn't know existed—launching 18 years of pricing-focused work. 02:37 - Why pricing is the ultimate leverage tool, especially in B2B tech where "it's just communication"—what you write in Excel, on websites, and in proposals. 03:28 - How the pandemic transformed Emanuel from a globe-trotting sales manager into a pricing consultant, then bootstrapped Soft Fight to solve the value extraction gap in tech companies. 04:41 - How large IT companies lose money when hundreds of non-experts across five functions (finance, marketing, sales, delivery, executives) make pricing decisions on every custom project. 06:59 - The evolution from deterministic SaaS pricing rules to AI-augmented agents installed in client infrastructure—solving pricing problems in hours instead of years without sending data externally. 08:00 - Why new deals lack technical depth and renewals lack value articulation—and how AI coordinates knowledge without restructuring organizations. 11:00 - Eight AI agents (four for understanding, four for justifying) with access to all systems but zero external communication—no security or privacy risks. 13:00 - All pricing calculations remain deterministic because AI makes too many mistakes—it's used only for reading RFPs, emails, and meeting notes to improve value communication. 14:17 - How AI acts as a coach recommending pricing models with ready-made arguments, eliminating months of change management—with email as the main interface. 16:17 - Why determining "how long will this take?" is unpredictable and varies by person and timing—and how AI solves the costliest unknown in custom projects. 18:00 - Mark's perspective on why costs matter less than value, and why companies avoid alternative pricing models despite knowing hourly billing hurts both sides. 21:00 - When AI tools cut development time, hourly pricing becomes self-defeating: "You're cutting your own revenue"—forcing the industry to finally sell value, not time. 21:56 - Starting with measurable quality attributes on invented scales that competitors can't compare—getting 80% of the way just by having the quantification discussion. 23:00 - Mark's framework for B2B value and why results translate to economic impact through customer KPIs like reduced complaints, not abstract "quality" metrics. 25:00 - Unlike automotive suppliers with nanometer specs, IT services vendors can define their own quality metrics—putting them two steps ahead of alternatives. 26:00 - The necessity of industry knowledge for value conversations (increase revenue, reduce costs, mitigate risk) and how AI enables understanding of new sectors that would've taken years. 27:30 - Final Advice: AI as Your Pricing Force Multiplier Using AI for research, analysis, and domain understanding when teams are too small or mandates unclear—plus how to connect with Emanuel on LinkedIn.   Key Takeaways: "AI is a huge multiplier for pricing experts—not for calculating prices, I agree with you on that, it's not there yet. But for everything else around pricing, whether we want to call it product management, analysis, or research, it can help us overcome typical challenges." - Emanuel Martonca "Pricing is a change management problem. It can be done, it'll take months, sometimes years, and they have to experiment and they have to make mistakes." - Emanuel Martonca   Resources Mentioned: Simon-Kucher: https://www.simon-kucher.com/en    Connect with Emanuel Martonca: Website: https://www.softfight.com/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emartonca/    Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: [email protected]