We recently spoke with PDI cybersecurity experts to understand the growing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on both cyberattacks and threat prevention. View their videos for the latest insights on how AI continues to reshape the fuel and convenience retail channel.
Kevin Clark, Chief Information Security Officer at PDI Technologies
Discover how the rapidly expanding role of AI is strengthening modern cybersecurity practices for retailers. Watch as Kevin Clark explains why AI has become indispensable in uncovering subtle behaviors that humans often overlook—an essential capability as malicious actors rely on increasingly sophisticated attack techniques. Clark notes that advanced AI models, including generative AI, are now at the forefront of helping security providers identify threats faster and more accurately to reduce business disruption.
Read the transcript
Hi, I’m Kevin Clark. I’m the Chief Information Security Officer here at PDI.
What role will AI play in cybersecurity?
You could get specific, but I’ll say that the role it plays here is not any different than any other vertical. It’s transformative, right? It’s going to transform user and customer experiences. And sometimes that’s not necessarily a good thing, right? I mean, we’ve got bad guys that are leveraging that same technology to do the same malicious stuff that we just talked about. Thankfully, PDI, we approach that from a different angle. We’re trying to make sure that our customers are protected, make sure that their business interests are safe, and they can have efficient and effective operations.
I don’t know if there’s any security solution, whether third party or home grown, they don’t leverage it to some degree today. Now, the difference is how mature that AI implementation is. It’s great at anomaly detection, which is really what we’re looking for. So malicious actors use what we call living off the land techniques, which they try to hide themselves as regular users. What AI can help us do is identify that minutia that makes them different. Where human eyes may gloss over it, electronic eyes, especially in the case of agentic AI, when it’s doing predictive analytics, it can tell you based on a set of circumstances what that probabilistic outcome is going to be. I think that it’s going to help us, for lack of a better term, sort the marbles faster.
Doug Matthews, VP of Global Solution Engineering at PDI Technologies
Explore how AI is reshaping both the threat landscape and the defensive strategies retailers rely on. Doug Matthews explains that cyberattacks have become considerably more advanced due to the widespread use of AI and automation. Threats now come from individuals equipped with “a whole lot of robots”—making attacks faster and significantly harder to detect. In this evolving threat environment, Matthews underscores the value of using AI as a defensive tool that acts as a force multiplier in modern cybersecurity.
Read the transcript
I’m Doug Matthews at PDI Technologies, and I’m the VP of Global Solution Engineering. I just joined in January of this year. So relatively new to the company.
I have been in and out of the retail industry now for about 10 years, and relatively new to cyber security, but I’ve been working on security stuff, probably, again, on and off for about 20 years.
The most important thing, and this is why it’s the foundation of all our cybersecurity solutions, is awareness, and that’s awareness at the employee level. You can have the best security protections in the world, the best firewalls, the best intrusion detection, but if your employees don’t know not to click on a suspicious email, then everything just gets right past all your safeguards. So having that awareness, and we offer security awareness as a training service, for example, that actually trains employees on what looks suspicious, what not to click on, what not to do, and that combined with the awareness at the higher levels when something actually does happen, those are the recipes for success. All the technology in the world isn’t doing you any good if people don’t know how to use it and people don’t know how to take advantage of it when something does happen.
Convenience retail is all about brand loyalty, and so anyone who is in the business of taking care of personal information, loyalty information, payment information, a customer is entrusting the convenience retailer with that information every time they shop. As soon as that trust is breached, it’s hard to go back to that same store, and convenience retail is all about those repeat visits. If you lose that trust, you lose that loyalty, and you lose that recurring revenue. On top of that, there’s baseline stuff, right, and liability. A lot of the convenience retailers that we work with are connected to the major oil networks, Shells, Marathons, Citgos, and they’re literally a way into these massive payment networks. So in addition to the trust that you have with your consumers, you’ve also got the trust of the people who you have a payments and oils relationship with, and if you fall down on the job that’s why they have requirements for what it takes to be a major oil branded retailer. If you fall down on the job, you’re letting people right into these major highly valuable networks.
Everybody talks about AI all the time. And if there’s one theme right now in 2025 and 2026 it is automation, that threats used to come from people. They still do come from people, but those people are armed with a whole lot of robots now. What we’re seeing is one of the big things we used to do in training, for example, to say, hey, when you get a suspicious email, see if the grammar is a little weird. See if the spelling is a little weird. See if the punctuation is a little weird, guess what? AI is really good at punctuation, really good at grammar, and really good at spelling. So a lot of the stuff that you used to be able to do to catch a bad actor who was a person, it doesn’t apply anymore, because now, not only do you have AI and bots that are able to write things that look super professional, they’re also able to send them really, really fast. And so, the volume of threats that we’re seeing is very much increasing, and unfortunately, the professionalism of those threats has increased now, and it’s really hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
AI is like any tool, right? It can be used for good. It can be used for evil. And like I was just saying, the bad guys have found it. The bad guys are absolutely using it. The good news about that is that we’re ahead of them. We are using AI and on a couple of different layers. One is, there’s so many threats now that it’s actually hard for a retailer or even a security professional to keep track of everything that’s happening. So, we’re using AI right now to filter through the noise, filter through 100,000 events, to find the three that are really sketchy, and then we can do something about the three without the distraction of the other 99,000 that also happened. The other part that’s really cool about AI, though, is that AI can take the threat that you get. So, something comes in, somebody’s trying to do something bad, and you got a record of it, you got an alert, you got a log. AI can go look at that log, and it can grab all the context around that and say, okay, this I recognize this address, but I also recognize that this address comes from Russia, and I think I’ve seen this pattern before. So let me go look around in my own history and see if this is maybe a threat that I haven’t found yet, but it looks kind of like another one that I have found, or if this is a threat that I have found, and I can immediately say, go do this, because I know this one. I got this one. And again, AI is going to be so much faster than human beings trying to scroll through logs that we’ve been leveraging really heavily in our learning and also in our diagnostic and forensics.
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