Unlocking value with Gen AI in fuels and convenience retail

Picture this…. You walk into your favorite convenience store, and there it is — a brand-new product that immediately grabs your attention. It's fresh, it's innovative and it’s perfectly tailored to your preferences. Who's the mastermind behind it? It's none other than Generative AI (Gen AI).

We’re at the start of a new era that will fundamentally transform the way information is accessed, content is created, customer needs are served, and companies are run.

95% of both B2C and B2B executives told us that they believe their customers are changing faster than they can change their businesses. The Life centricity playbook

The power of Gen AI is reinventing the fuels and convenience retail industry. How? It has the ability to process sales data, collaborate with manufacturers, and tap into social media to spot trends and propose captivating new products specific to that exact location. In today's fast-paced world, speed, personalization and instant gratification are non-negotiable. If you blink, you might miss out on something incredible.

We’ve been working with clients around the world to help them take advantage of Gen AI at the enterprise level to drive value and growth.

Let’s explore how Gen AI is helping the fuel and convenience retail industry redefine themselves and how they operate. How Gen AI can provide hyper-localized consumer experiences, streamline operational management, and help industry players make more informed decisions faster.

#1. Consumer: Hyper-personalization and localization

Consumers love a great deal, especially when it comes to their beloved on-the-go snacks. However, merely understanding what consumers want isn’t enough.

Retailers need to find innovative ways to communicate and deliver these offerings. Whether through social media, enticing window displays, or well-timed push notifications via the retailer’s app.

Gen AI stands ready to decode consumer behaviors and provide valuable insights for delivering a more personalized offering and experience.

Imagine being able to load in detailed information on your customer segments. From there, you can have Gen AI generate new offers, promotions, and content that can be tested against one another to see which ones will drive actual customer behavior.

The incorporation of Gen AI technology seeks to boost loyalty and engagement at the store level by fine-tuning offerings to align with where consumers shop.

#2. Retail site (dealer): Deep customer insights and intelligence

To sell effectively, retailers must address fundamental questions: What sells the most? What products should I have specifically in my store based on the consumers within my area? Where does it sell best? When is the optimal time for sales? Most importantly, who's making these purchases?

Gen AI technology will play a pivotal role in constructing comprehensive customer profiles, learning trends and patterns, and assisting retailers in grasping people's needs, behaviors, and motivations to achieve meaningful outcomes.

Deep insights into your customers will drive profitability by promoting the sale of the right products and services, while also reducing costs through effective inventory management. It's all about knowing who is walking into your store.

#3. Wholesale customer: Revolutionizing the wholesaler experience

Sometimes, we crave quick answers. How often have you felt frustrated by a virtual assistant that couldn't understand your request? With Gen AI, retailers can cultivate a knowledge base enriched with machine learning capabilities that continually enhance accuracy.

This technology enables the creation of real-time chatbots armed with genuine knowledge, reducing wait times, providing instant support, and boosting customer satisfaction. The result? A stickier customer relationship.

#4. Head office: Streamlining operations for efficiency and accuracy

What if you could generate a summary table of every contract the company holds with its vendors? What if your territory managers could learn the top 5 actions that their specific wholesaler should take to drive growth in their local market?

This isn't a dream but a reality with Gen AI. It can swiftly read, summarize, and analyze complex contracts in seconds, even cross-referencing them with invoices for accuracy. Furthermore, it can learn to autonomously generate invoices, improving contract management and decreasing revenue leakage while lowering liability exposure.

Bringing this data, together with external data in the market will provide additional insights that can be tailored to an individual site or wholesaler. Overall, this technology empowers your sales teams to focus on higher-value customer-facing tasks, thereby boosting productivity and driving growth across your organization.

#5. Terminal operations: Enhancing reliability with advanced forecasting

Relying on Excel spreadsheets, overanalyzing current events, and making decisions based on early morning news readings is a thing of the past. Gen AI is the new business analyst in your corner. Accenture analysis reveals 46% of working hours across industries can be impacted by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI.

It has the ability to compile historical data, monitor market trends, pull in related 3rd-party data, and incorporate real-life events to provide tailored recommendations for managing day-to-day terminal operations. Integrating predictive analytics into terminal operations can enhance performance, unlock new growth opportunities, and generate operational efficiency.

Conclusion

The Fuel & Convenience Retail industry is on an exciting journey of growth, innovation, and technological advancements.

98% of global executives agree AI foundation models will play an important role in their organizations’ strategies in the next 3 to 5 years. A new era of Gen AI for everyone

GenAI has arrived and is here to stay, revolutionizing consumer-centric experiences, enhancing operational efficiency, and continually bolstering our clients' profitability. As the industry evolves, GenAI remains the driving force behind these transformative changes.