ATLANTA — Atlanta-based Delta airlines said it expects 20% of its ticket prices to be determined by artificial intelligence by the end of the year.
That has privacy experts and lawmakers concerned about what that actually means.
Delta told Channel 2 consumer investigator Justin Gray that the company is not using personal information for ticket prices.
“Today we’re about 3% of domestic, and that’s our goal, is to have about 20% by the end of the year,” Delta’s president said during a recent investor call. “We like what we see, we like it a lot, and we’re continuing to roll it out.”
The call has drawn big concerns about what the use of artificial intelligence for airline tickets really means.
A group of U.S. Senators sent a letter to Delta demanding answers, asking if the AI pricing means personalized pricing.
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner is concerned your personal information could be used to set your ticket price.
“It means that if the AI tool knows that you’ve had a death in the family or knows that you have a relative in a disaster-stricken area and you have to go there, they can target you and jack up the price,” Warner said.
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But Delta is adamant that is not what they are doing with AI pricing, telling Channel 2 Action News in a statement:
“There is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing, or plans to use that targets customers with individualized offers based on personal information or otherwise. A variety of market forces drive the dynamic pricing model that’s been used in the global industry for decades, with new tech simply streamlining this process.”
“I don’t see how that fits with what they have said they are going to do. And also, with the profits that they are anticipating getting from this,” said Georgia Sloven, a data privacy advocate with the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Sloven points to Delta’s own public statements on this, like at another investor presentation last year.
“We will have a price that’s available on that flight, on that time to you, the individual, not a machine that’s doing an accept reject and a static price grid,” Delta said at the time.
“This is something new. They’ve said it’s new. They’ve set it’s going to change their profit outlook. So, I think we need to take a careful look,” Sloven said.
Delta maintains the AI is doing what a whole department of analysts at the company already do -- looking at things like weather and fuel, and timing to set price.
Lawmakers are unconvinced, stating in the letter to Delta headquarters here in Atlanta that they are concerned that “prices could be dictated not by supply and demand, but by individual need.”
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