We recently spoke with PDI Technologies Chief Technology Officer Raghu Bongula about the emerging trends he’s seen around Artificial Intelligence (AI), along with its growing business impact. He shared his insights and provided some recommendations on how businesses can maximize the value of AI, particularly in the fuel and convenience retail channel.
Q: What’s one key topic about AI that’s top of mind for you today?
A: We now hear about AI every day in our personal lives and professionally. So there’s currently a lot of information overload and hype in the system. As a company, you have to separate that hype from reality.
I think you can do a few things as a company that’s trying to go on an AI transformation journey. The first is to start with what problems you’re trying to solve. Look at problems where AI can help you make some decisions or where there’s a high-value outcome you can achieve. Try to break it down and figure out if AI can help you find tools or mechanisms that you can inject into your everyday workflows to see if you can achieve the outcomes you’re expecting.
I recommend looking at outcomes from a KPI perspective. Identify what you want to achieve from AI and test it often—and iterate often—to see if you’re able to achieve that or not. Don’t necessarily look at a standalone tool, because you’re probably not going to get the same outcome versus embedding AI into your day-to-day workflows.
“Look at problems where AI can help you make some decisions or where there’s a high-value outcome you can achieve.”
Q: How should businesses in the fuel and convenience industry think about using AI?
A: There’s already a lot happening in the convenience retail space. If you look at the retail industry as a whole, 80% of retailers were planning to have some amount of AI by the end of 2025. However, not necessarily everything is going to be successful.
Right now the failure ratio of AI projects is double that of any other type of IT project. The reason for such a low success rate is that we aren’t starting from a problem and trying to find a solution. In many cases, the AI tools are already purchased, so IT teams are trying to inject them wherever they can. The reason these failures are occurring is because the AI tools aren’t necessarily embedded into the standard processes and workflows to generate the best outcomes.
“As a company, you have to separate AI hype from reality.”
Q: What advice would you recommend to avoid such a high failure rate?
A: My advice is to first look at a specific problem and then see how you can solve that problem. This is where PDI can help. We’ve been in the industry for 40 years and we’re here for one purpose, which is “Connecting Convenience.” We want to figure out ways to make the industry succeed, and we’re here to help our customers succeed.
At PDI we have access to a lot of industry data sets and we’re building AI solutions specific to the convenience retail industry. We can take some of your problems, partner with you, and figure out how to solve the problem for your business and for the broader industry as a whole.
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