AI Ends Spreadsheet Era, Forging New B2B Pricing Advantage

AUSTIN, TX – January 27, 2026 – A quiet but seismic shift is reshaping B2B commerce, as crippling market volatility and persistent inflation expose the dangerous fragility of a decades-old business tool: the spreadsheet. For years, manual pricing was a manageable, if tedious, process. Today, it’s a direct threat to profitability. In response, a new generation of AI-driven platforms is moving to fill the void, transforming pricing from a source of corporate anxiety into a strategic competitive advantage.

Leading this charge is pricing software vendor Zilliant, which capped a year of significant momentum by securing a key partnership with German chemical distributor Julius Hoesch GmbH & Co. KG. The deal highlights a broader industry trend: businesses are urgently seeking to escape the limitations of manual processes and embrace intelligent, automated systems that can navigate economic uncertainty with speed and precision.

The Spreadsheet's Breaking Point

The economic landscape of the last two years has been a stress test that manual pricing systems have largely failed. According to a 2025 study on the business impact of tariffs, 45% of businesses cited tariffs and rising supplier costs as their primary pricing challenges, with 44% of U.S. firms planning to pass these costs directly to customers. The problem, however, lies in the execution.

Zilliant’s 2025 Pricing Technology Trends Report revealed a critical disconnect. While executives understood the need to adjust prices, their organizations were hamstrung by outdated methods. The report found that a staggering 42% of companies still rely predominantly on Excel for pricing, with 19% using it exclusively. This reliance creates a dangerous lag, with most organizations requiring 31 to 60 days to implement price changes—a lifetime in a volatile market. Some 21% reported needing over 60 days, all but guaranteeing margin leakage and missed opportunities.

“Pricing should create advantage, not anxiety,” said Zilliant CEO Pascal Yammine in a statement. The reality for many, however, has been the latter. The slow, error-prone nature of spreadsheet-based pricing has left companies unable to react swiftly to cost fluctuations or market shifts, turning a critical growth lever into a reactive, defensive scramble.

A New Wave of AI-Powered Pricing

Recognizing this vulnerability, Zilliant rolled out a series of strategic product innovations in late 2025 designed to directly address the shortcomings of manual systems. In October, the company unveiled Agentic AI, featuring what it calls the industry's first Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server. This technology allows autonomous software agents to securely and instantly retrieve pricing data, eliminating the manual data-gathering bottleneck that plagues many organizations and enabling rapid, intelligent responses to market events.

Following this, the company launched Pricing Plus in November. The solution is designed as a streamlined on-ramp for businesses looking to graduate from spreadsheets. It effectively productizes the “pricing waterfall”—a model for tracking revenue leakage from list price to pocket price—and combines it with AI-guided insights to centralize and govern pricing strategy. This allows companies to forecast the impact of pricing changes in simulated scenarios before rolling them out, preventing costly missteps.

These products are consolidated under the company’s Precision Pricing Platform, which aims to provide a single source of truth for pricing strategy and execution. “Our mission is to democratize pricing by bringing world-class capabilities to every business,” Yammine explained. “This is the next era of pricing, and we are leading it.”

The Chemical Industry Litmus Test

The practical impact of this technological shift is powerfully illustrated by Zilliant’s new partnership with Julius Hoesch. As a leading chemical distributor founded in 1865, the company faces extreme pricing complexity, including daily cost swings and the need to manage thousands of customer-specific price points. The firm selected Zilliant’s platform to modernize its pricing in parallel with a major corporate migration to the SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud.

Julius Hoesch will use Zilliant as a central pricing engine within its Salesforce CRM, which is deeply integrated with its new SAP back end. The goal is to automate cost pass-throughs, provide salespeople with explainable pricing guidance, and ensure price consistency across all sales channels.

“In chemical distribution, where cost volatility is the norm, calculating prices was long perceived as high-value seller work,” noted Stephan Andreas, Managing Director at Julius Hoesch. “Now technology can handle this complexity, and our salespeople will spend more time developing customer intimacy and delivering fair prices faster.”

This sentiment touches on a key benefit of pricing automation: empowering human workers. By offloading complex calculations, the technology frees sales teams to focus on relationship-building and strategic consultation. Lukas Thuir, Marketing Director at Julius Hoesch, added that the unified system “remove[s] manual effort, support[s] fair, consistent pricing and strengthen[s] customer lifetime value.”

From Anxiety to Advantage in a Crowded Market

Zilliant’s success reflects its position in a rapidly growing and competitive market for B2B profit optimization software, which includes established players like Vendavo, PROS, and Pricefx. To stand out, the company has leaned heavily on its AI capabilities and deep integration with enterprise ecosystems, a strategy validated by significant industry recognition.

Throughout 2025, Zilliant was named a Representative Vendor in the Gartner® Market Guide for B2B Profit Optimization Software and a technology leader by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions. Its strategic partnership with SAP was further cemented when its CPQ solution became available on the SAP Store in March, simplifying adoption for the thousands of businesses running on SAP systems.

By addressing the market's most pressing pain points with targeted, AI-driven solutions, Zilliant is helping to define a new best practice for B2B commerce. The move away from manual spreadsheets toward intelligent, integrated pricing platforms is no longer a matter of simple efficiency; it has become a fundamental requirement for survival and growth in an unpredictable global economy.