The convenience retail and petroleum wholesale industry stands at a pivotal moment. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming what’s possible and PDI Technologies has a comprehensive AI strategy that’s purpose-built for this industry.
We spoke with Jeff Hassman, VP of Brands and Consumer Strategy at PDI, to explain the company’s AI strategy and why we’re introducing a new AI-powered foundation known as PDIQ.
Q: What makes AI different from other technology disruptions you’ve experienced?
A: The rate of change is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Most of us have been through significant technology shifts in our careers, but AI is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Today, we’re seeing businesses use AI in more important ways thanks to enterprise-scale capabilities that simply didn’t exist before now.
Q: From your perspective, how is AI transforming business operations?
A: We see AI enabling business in two crucial ways. First, AI allows employees and executives to learn about their business through data. AI tools excel at consuming large amounts of information and presenting meaningful summaries. As models have improved their ability to detect anomalies and exceptions, we can now create systems of AI agents that inform business professionals about what’s happening in their operations far more efficiently.
Second, agentic AI can now automate business processes and workflows like never before. Today’s models are smarter—they can reason, work autonomously, and handle ambiguity. In some ways, they’re like a junior employee or intern. Given the right context and instructions, they can complete increasingly complex tasks reliably and efficiently. Business processes that weren’t worth automating before now have a clear ROI, freeing humans to focus on what humans do best in more strategic and rewarding roles.
“Agentic AI can now automate business processes and workflows like never before.”
Q: What is PDI’s AI strategy, and what is PDIQ?
A: Our AI journey started several years ago. We could see where the models were heading, so we made a concerted effort to bring AI into PDI internally first. We developed governance frameworks and proper controls to deploy AI safely. We wanted to understand AI’s capabilities and limitations in our own business before bringing solutions to customers.
Now we’re working on embedding AI capabilities across our products and services through the AI foundation known as PDIQ. You can think of PDIQ like Alexa, Siri, or IBM Watson—it’s our indicator that you’re using cutting-edge AI that we’ve built, tested, and vetted specifically to help your business.
Our strategy has three core objectives: introducing tools at scale in a safe, governed way across our entire product suite, enhancing existing products with AI capabilities, and leveraging AI in our managed services to better serve customers.
Q: Why is PDI the right choice to deliver AI solutions to this industry?
A: What makes AI projects successful is your ability to understand the context of where and why you’re deploying them. How well do you know the business processes? How well do you understand industry nuances?
Our expertise is in the convenience retail and fuel market, so our success is directly tied to the industry’s success. Deep industry expertise, combined with a comprehensive suite of products spanning the entire enterprise, allows us to apply AI systemically rather than as point solutions. Plus, we prove everything in our own systems before we productize it for customers.
“What makes AI projects successful is your ability to understand the context of where and why you’re deploying them.”
Q: What new offerings are part of PDIQ?
A: We plan to introduce two major new capabilities. First, PDIQ Insights is a new business intelligence and reporting platform that sits above individual products. Instead of product-centric reports, PDIQ Insights focuses on roles within your business. What does the head of operations need? What does marketing need? What does the CFO need? It will deliver KPI dashboards, guided discovery, and embedded AI to make data truly actionable for each role.
Second, the PDIQ Agentic Studio is a place to create agents and automate workflows. It’s a canvas with connectors to PDI systems and your own systems, featuring pre-built workflows for common business processes. You can also customize your own agents to meet your specific needs, or the PDI professional services team can build and manage them for you.
Q: What about data security? Is PDIQ trained on customer data?
A: This is critical to understand. When you use free, open versions of AI models online, anything you input can be used to train those models. You should never use your own business data in those environments.
PDIQ is completely different. We use professional versions of AI models designed for businesses. We don’t train models on your data. The models use only data you provide in the context of specific prompts, so it’s a controlled environment.
Q: When can users access PDIQ?
A: We already have beta customers, and we’ll continue to expand beta testing, specifically for wholesale operations with PDIQ Insights. We’ll keep learning and improving it right up to Connections Live 2026 in August, where we’ll share full product, bundling, and availability details.
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