Could AI make you pay more? New concerns over personalized pricing

You could be paying more than someone right next to you for a product and never know it. It's called personalized or surveillance pricing, and Boston 25's Cale Thompson has been looking into it since 2025. This morning, Cale uncovered new concerns from consumer watchdogs about technology being developed by the world's largest retailer. Using AI technology to set and change prices. It's happening more now. But late last month, Walmart posted a letter to customers promising it won't be using that technology for personalized pricing. It's not clear if there are actual legal guardrails in place to prevent it. Highly technical patent filings are not something we're normally telling you about on TV news, but these are from retail giant Walmart, AI technology that could be used to set prices. If a company has a technology that's going to allow them to earn more money from consumers, I don't see why they wouldn't use it. In a 2025 Boston 25 News investigation into so-called surveillance or personalized pricing, we tried to catch it on camera. We teamed up with our sister stations from across the country, asking dozens of shoppers in eight cities to check the price of six products three times a day at some of the nation's most popular stores. Emily Peterson-Casson from the Consumer Federation of America says companies can set personalized prices, and it can be hard, if not impossible, for customers to spot. Companies know there's money to be made by surveilling us, by learning things about us that point to the highest price we're willing to pay. In our test on a Walmart TV, one of our price checkers was given a price over $1,000, while the rest of us were all under $900. Walmart just posted this letter from its CEO to its website denying that it's using or intends to use surveillance pricing, writing quote we price the product not the person we don't set prices based on who you are or the time of day and we won't we only notice this because we were actually looking for there is a new FTC rule being proposed that would require companies to disclose when they are using your personal data to set prices here in Massachusetts two bills are in the House and the Senate that would prohibit surveillance pricing in grocery stores based on personal data collected from consumers.