At the end of 2025 I got the usual thing in the mail saying that my Sirius XM car-radio subscription was going to renew and replace my current promotional price ($107.88/year) with the standard monthly price ($24.98/month). So, as usual every year, I called Sirius to get the promotional price back.

This procedure is fairly mechanical and foolproof. However, in my experience it always involved at least a little bit of social performance: “I don’t understand! You’re going to charge me more this year? How can this be? Can’t I just get the old price back?” And sometimes you end up with a promotional trial of yet another feature: “well, since you’re already on Plan A, I’m not allowed to give you the promotional price for A; but if you upgrade to A plus B, then I can give you the original promotional price for both A and B together.”

So yesterday I called Sirius’s billing line… and I got the voice of an AI assistant! After some preliminaries establishing my account — even before I’d had a chance to explain my “problem” — the AI volunteered cheerily: “I have a great deal for you! If you renew today, I can give you the same plan you have today for the promotional price of $7.99 per month all in.” (Some AIs love “both—and—”; Sirius XM’s AI loved the phrase “all in.”) “Would you like to take advantage of this offer?” Yes, I would. The AI read me the terms and conditions, which as usual included that the price would go back to “an estimated $24.98 per month” at the end of the promotional term. “Do I have your consent to accept the terms and conditions of this offer and charge your credit card now?”

At this point I thought to ask the AI: “$7.99 is okay, but can we do better? Could we do $6.99?”

“Sure thing!” it said (or words to that effect). It read me the terms and conditions for a $6.99/month ($83.88/year) promotional price. “Do I have your consent to accept the terms and conditions of this offer and charge your credit card now?”

Yes, I said, feeling like I’d gotten away with something. We ended the call and I got email confirmation of my new $6.99/month plan. Immediately I felt some regret that I hadn’t kept pushing; would the AI have given me a $4.99/month plan? A $1.99/month plan? A completely free plan? (After all, as I understand it, Sirius is a broadcast over-the-air technology, like radio; unlike gas/electric, even unlike cable, the marginal cost of a customer to Sirius is literally zero dollars: there is no price point where Sirius would ever lose money on a customer. Every cent they get from me is gravy.)

This experience presents some lessons and open questions:

• If you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000 who didn’t know that you can save money by calling Sirius and asking the representative to extend your promotional price: Now you know!

• Sirius’s AI assistant really does streamline the process, and perhaps even surfaces it to callers who don’t know about it (if they happen to call for some other reason). That’s very customer-friendly. Good for them.

• AI assistants lower the social cost of asking “Can you sell me that Chevy Tahoe for $1?” You needn’t worry that a human representative would ever say yes to that; therefore a customer will rarely even ask that of a human. But with a chatbot, the social cost of just asking is much less.

• Can you in fact get a Sirius XM subscription for $1.99/month? For free? That never expires? One interpretation of my experience is that maybe $6.99/month was still within Sirius’s bailey: the AI might indeed have refused to offer prices below some “reasonable” floor, located somewhere below $6.99.

• I believe the “call and ask” tactic also works to get or extend promotional price deals in the phone, cable, and Internet spheres (Verizon, Comcast, Cox, etc.) where there’s a lot of money sloshing around and they operate mostly on the “profit by obscurity” model. But these are in some sense old-school companies. Does it work on current-generation, Silicon-Valley-colored “profit by obscurity” companies like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon, Audible?

• Does the tactic work on companies with marginal costs, such as utilities (Con Edison)? I’m guessing no. Calling Con Ed may still help people with actual financial hardship enroll in programs like New York’s HEAP, but that’s not the tactic I’m talking about in this post.

Teddi Deppner complains (March 2025) about “profit by obscurity” at Audible, but never tried calling Audible’s phone number. In my experience, the operative factor is always that you have to call on the phone; I’d never expect to be able to get a discount via email, online chat, or any other medium where there wasn’t an individual named person on the other end of the line who was socially invested in a happy and timely resolution.

That’s why I found it so noteworthy that Sirius XM’s AI assistant actually did give me the deal — in fact volunteered it! in fact sweetened it on request! I would have expected an AI with no social investment in the conversation to be frustratingly inflexible. (But if it had been, then I would have pressed 0 until a human showed up. Sirius presumably knows this, and knows that it can’t save money on call centers unless people like interacting with its AI.)