Travel and Transportation
Dynamic pricing for car rentals with Agentic AI
Business challenge and opportunity
Flight delays or cancellations, adverse weather, sports events and competitor discounts can all significantly impact demand for rental cars. To ensure rates are competitive and commercially viable, rental companies need to understand and anticipate a complex, constantly changing web of variables.
Many companies today rely on rigid, rules-based pricing engines that require significant manual input and lack the capacity to incorporate real-time data. This approach puts revenue per unit (RPU) at risk. With ridesharing and peer-to-peer platforms putting pressure on revenues and margins, rental companies urgently need a new approach.
Agentic AI can transform the rate-determination process to boost revenue, growth and customer satisfaction.
Technical challenges
AI agents can gather and interpret demand signals from multiple systems in real time, using the information to optimize rental rates and fleet utilization. However, leaders looking to adopt Agentic AI solutions often face a host of challenges:
Lack of integration between data sources restricts comprehensive insight into factors affecting optimal pricing.
Low-quality or duplicative enterprise data hinders effective pricing strategies.
The business-critical nature of pricing systems demands utmost care when deploying AI agents and ensuring accuracy in their responses.
Legacy IT infrastructure complexity and interdependencies can limit modernization opportunities and agility when deploying new solutions.
Our solution
Using the Kyndryl Agent Builder within its Agentic AI Framework, Kyndryl enables car rental companies to:
Build a dynamic rate engine by integrating enterprise data with publicly available data on weather, flights, public events and more.
Gain insight into competitors’ pricing by deploying an AI agent to collate market-analysis data and make favorable pricing decisions based on the data.
Adjust proposed rates in real-time for each location according to predicted demand, inventory levels and real-time external factors, resulting in base point margin uplift at high‑demand locations.
Present rate recommendations to employees backed by explanations of relevant parameters and confidence levels.
Enable pricing tailored to personas and channels. Help boost conversions and value by customer segment – like leisure, corporate, or loyalty tier – and booking channels – like web, mobile, partner, or counter.
Cut time-to-value by customizing pre-built AI agents and workflows from an industry-specific catalog and use context-trained LLMs to create execution plans for AI agents and validate their output.
Reduce operational and compliance risk by deploying observability platforms and validation agents to supervise the actions of other AI agents and LLMs. Keep humans in the loop for complex or nuanced decision-making throughout the rate engine process.
Benefits you could achieve
Provide exceptional medical care and improve focus on innovation while reducing operational overhead. Kyndryl experts and the Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework can help to enable:
- Improved RPU: With dynamic demand forecasts and optimal rate calculations, fleet utilization and location footprints can be optimized, reducing inventory idle time.
- High productivity, lower costs: AI agents automatically collate, clean and analyze data from multiple sources, reducing manual effort and freeing human decision-makers to focus on strategy and customer loyalty.
- Enhanced customer experience: With optimized pricing and fleet oversight, customers can choose from a selection of well-priced and available cars, boosting their experience.
Accelerate your journey to AI-native
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Why Kyndryl?
With decades of mission-critical operations experience, we bring deep expertise in designing, building, and managing AI across complex IT estates.
The Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework enables businesses to move beyond isolated pilots to integrated, intelligent systems. It combines secure, scalable agent orchestration with real-time observability and governance, powered by Kyndryl Bridge.
Through Kyndryl Consult, we align AI strategy with business outcomes. Kyndryl Vital provides proven user-centered design and rapid prototyping. And our trusted delivery experts ensure frictionless integration and help with reskilling and upskilling to build the foundation for success at scale.
We apply a forward engineering approach — using insights from existing systems to design and deploy future-ready AI agents and architectures that are adaptive, resilient and scalable. Our method is grounded in open ecosystems, data sovereignty and transparent decision-making.
And with one of the broadest alliance ecosystems in the industry — across cloud, data, and AI — we bring the right partners and technologies together to design fit‑for‑purpose solutions and orchestrate AI at scale without disrupting the business.
With Kyndryl, AI becomes a core capability — not just a tool — driving productivity, innovation and growth.
What’s your enterprise vision for AI?
Let’s co-create it together.