AI is being called many things—a revolution, a fleeting moment or a gamechanger, depending on who you ask.

“I think a lot of people are in denial that AI is not here to stay and that it’s a fad. But people said the same thing about the internet, too,” said Babir Sultan, owner of Fav Trip, a chain of five stores in Missouri.

Sultan is one of many retailers on the forefront of implementing the technology, using it for everything from creating marketing materials to gathering data about customers, inventory and pricing.

“It’s the way forward, as long as you’re approaching it with a practical, solution-oriented mindset.”

“There’s no excuse for operators nowadays—no matter the size of your business, there’s no reason why even smaller operators cannot dabble in AI. They should experiment,” he said. “It’s the way forward, as long as you’re approaching it with a practical, solution-oriented mindset.”

For Sanjeev Satturu, SVP, chief information officer at Casey’s General Stores, an Iowa-based retailer with around 2,900 stores across 20 states, AI’s biggest opportunity lies in how it can streamline operations for retailers. “Having clarity and aligning [use cases] to your business goals is very important,” he said. “First, what are your business goals? What are you trying to enhance, and what are the outcomes you’re trying to achieve?”

From streamlining corporate processes to improving the customer and employee experience in store, here are a handful of ways that retailers and industry thought leaders say the convenience industry can leverage AI.

Fav Trip

Sultan has found myriad ways that AI can make employees’ jobs easier, help Fav Trip better serve his customers and cut down on time and energy spent doing repetitive tasks.

Social media and marketing: A few months ago, Sultan created his first-ever commercial for Fav Trip. It was fully generated by AI. The script was written using ChatGPT, and the video, voiceover and music were generated through a handful of AI software platforms. “It’s hard to get customers and employees to give testimonials on camera because they’re often shy, so we turned to AI and were able to get very realistic looking AI-generated videos,” he said. “They’ve been very easy for us to generate and the two that we’ve made took me literally less than half an hour each.”

Sultan is also using AI to create social media content and generate ideas for his YouTube channel, which has over 100,000 subscribers and 19 million views. “AI is like a smart college friend that gives you ideas, where you can go back and forth in something like ChatGPT and figure out if this is a good idea or a bad idea.”

Voice analytics: Fav Trip uses a vendor that places microphones around the store to capture audio and AI to analyze customer sentiment and feedback from within the store. For example, if the system registers that customers are complaining about not getting receipts, Sultan is alerted to the issue and can contact a store manager to quickly figure out the problem. “It could be a problem with the pump, or it could just be that the receipt paper is out and the clerk doesn’t know. But something as simple as that can help with the customer experience,” he said.

Voice analytics can also help with employee retention, he said. “Maybe it picks up employees talking about wanting more or less hours, or a different shift schedule of mornings versus evenings. AI can analyze those sentiments and tell us that there might be a cultural issue we need to address, and we can easily avoid three or four employees leaving over something that can be easily fixed.”

“AI is like electricity. It’s all around us. Who will tap into and use that energy?”

Understanding the customer base: AI cameras can track customers throughout the store, generate heat maps of high-traffic areas and collect general demographic information about customers that helps operators tailor offerings to their customer base. “Our cameras give us demographic data and age data, so we can make better decisions. How should we paint a store? Should we have certain products? What should we carry? Does the store or inventory need to be more college friendly or support a local team?” he said. License plate recognition technology also helps Fav Trip track how many repeat customers are coming to the store.

“Restroom usage is another important one to track—the cameras can tell us if there are enough people to pass a certain threshold going into the restroom, and our staff are alerted to pay attention to the restroom or maybe clean it at a certain time because of heavy usage,” he said.

Tracking fuel prices: Fav Trip uses ChatGPT for competitive analysis of surrounding businesses and their gas prices. This used to require a manager taking a chunk of time each day to drive around and manually record data. “We added a task feature in ChatGPT where every morning at 5 a.m. and again at 2 p.m., before he leaves, without fail, the system will tell the manager what all of the surrounding gas prices are,” said Sultan. “That’s been a game changer, because humans forget to do things or get busy, or sometimes there is just human error. It also frees up so much time for him to do other things in the store.”

Casey’s

When deciding how and where to deploy AI, Casey’s always considers “how automation and AI can help us be more efficient in our business. In convenience retail, efficiency and scalability are not just necessities, they are foundational,” said Satturu. “So our focus in deploying AI and identifying use cases is all about how we deploy agents to streamline mundane tasks and play a role to solve complex challenges that enhance business operations and outcomes.”

On both the corporate and in-store operations side, Satturu said Casey’s is using AI to increase productivity for team members and cut down on mundane tasks that take employees’ attention away from serving guests. The goal is to “free up time and dollars to be reinvested back in the business.”

“AI is like electricity. It’s all around us,” Satturu said. “Who will tap into and use that energy?”

Accurate order-completion times: When customers place a digital order, Casey’s provides them with a “smart promise time,” or the time for how long that order will take to make or get delivered if they’re using a third-party service.

“The narrative is not that AI will be replacing humans, but that with AI, humans will become more powerful.”

“This is one place where we’ve started using AI technology to better provide a smart promise time based on the guests’ location, whether they’re inside or outside the store, and whether they’re ordering from a delivery service,” Satturu said. “We use the AI logic to help us deliver a more accurate smart promise time.”

IT support: A lot of employee engagement is dependent on what kind of support and service they receive from the IT department, Satturu said. “We have connected the dots that if the service is not good or they’re just calling the help desk waiting for someone to respond, it impacts employee engagement and also creates labor inefficiencies.”

Casey’s has started using AI to proactively find tech issues that may be happening at the store before an employee reports the problem. AI creates tickets and assigns priority levels, and in some cases even applies proactive measures to bring a system or a network back online if its gone down.

“We also use AI to help our IT team members provide a better experience and support to our store team members. For example, our footprint is now in Texas, so if someone is calling from Texas, we use AI to help train the agent to create that connection, maybe talking about the weather or even picking up the accent or using common nomenclature that they use in Texas,” he said.

Accenture

“The narrative is not that AI will be replacing humans, but that with AI, humans will become more powerful,” said Richard Taylor, senior manager, strategy and consulting (energy, mobility retail) at Accenture at the 2025 Conexxus Annual Conference in January.

Taylor noted that while AI is quickly growing, there are still privacy concerns and education that needs to occur as retailers implement AI into their business.

“There’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Consider who your employees are, what the culture in your organization is like, how you want to tackle these new technologies and what kinds of training and skill development your employees will need,” Taylor said.

For Taylor, there are three practical use cases for generative AI that convenience retailers can get started with.

Gauging call center customer sentiment: Retailers can use AI to enhance the customer experience while speaking to customer service agents and increase customer satisfaction from the call. One of Accenture’s clients with 1,000 sites receives about 4,000 calls per month.

“In order to get a sentiment analysis, you normally have to go through a good portion of those calls to understand if the customer is happy, and if not, why. It’s about 500-man hours per month. But by running them through AI, we have been able to process them and get a sentiment analysis in 15 minutes,” Taylor said. “You can see top issues people called in with, how the agent handled it and how the customer is feeling at the end of the interaction. The rich data provided allows retailers to take these insights and drive better results.”

“People say AI will take jobs away—AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI will.”

Personalizing offers to customers: In Argentina, Accenture is testing AI analysis that will help retailers learn more about their consumers so they can give them better experiences. “We’re able to leverage video and camera footage to understand a whole host of different information and data points about a customer profile. When a car pulls into the forecourt, does the customer have children? What’s the mood of the person when they turn into the site? How much will they want to spend based on the look and feel of their car? What’s the weather outside? All of these data points come together in a matter of seconds as a car approaches the pump,” Taylor said. That information can then be used to present the best product offer or promotion to that customer at the pump to convert them into the store.

Forecasting fuel demand: Many factors contribute to how much fuel a retailer needs to order, and AI can make those calculations more precise, said Taylor. Beyond customer data and location data related to your site, Taylor said that AI can also add macroeconomic and geopolitical data and generate an analysis for more accurate fuel pricing. “In particular, Microsoft Copilot is constantly monitoring all this data and can say for example ‘Your brand has lost 2% market share in southern Florida, amounting to a lost margin of $80,000,’ and will make recommendations for what to do next. It can tell you to take an aggressive pricing strategy or adjust an average of three cents across all the locations to capture increased volumes and recommend how to best manage your fuel supply,” Taylor said.

Staying Solution Oriented

If you’ve seen the animated movie “Up,” you’ll remember the running joke that Doug, the dog, gets easily distracted by squirrels, and will shout “squirrel” mid-sentence when he sees one. That’s what Sultan said evaluating new AI technologies can feel like some days.

“With all the latest AI news and things coming out at a rapid pace, there’s the squirrel effect—as a retailer, it’s easy to get excited and you want to try everything,” he said. “The challenge is staying focused, and you do that by starting with the problem and reverse engineering from there. Identify the problem and then figure out what tool you’re going to use to solve it.”

Satturu takes the same approach at Casey’s. “We firmly believe that 80% of the solution is in defining the problem. This is where having the right evaluation criteria to define the problem by tying it back to your business initiatives is very critical. If you start looking at technology first without doing that, then it’ll be scattershot and you don’t want to apply AI to a bad process. Don’t use AI as a silver bullet. It should enhance what you’re doing,” he said.

Satturu also stressed that its critical to have robust governance over your technology and work within a responsible AI framework. “How do you create responsible AI for yourself? Because if you do not, then you’ll actually create a lot of inefficiencies and let a lot of technology debt into your operations. And being compliant is very important, because if you’re not, then you are opening yourself up to a cyberattack, which could be extremely debilitating to your business.”

And while AI can do a lot, it still can’t do many things a human can. That’s why Satturu thinks of it not as a replacement, but as co-intelligence. “AI will give you options, but at the end of the day, a human still has to collaborate with it,” he said. “People say AI will take jobs away—AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI will.”