As COVID restrictions continue to ease, meeting up more frequently with our customers again has been fantastic. During the pandemic, we have all learned that you can achieve a huge amount with online meeting tools, but it cannot fully replace a face-to-face meeting. There is different energy between participants, and it sparks many smaller discussions, whereas, in an online forum, everyone wants to get it done as quickly as possible.

This week we had one of our Performance Workshops with a long-time customer in Finland. As part of our PriceCast Fuel service delivery, we provide performance development services. Along with our monthly status meetings, we arrange two extensive performance workshops each year where we cover every aspect of the customer’s use of our product and services. We can also offer unique analyses and provide strategic market insights per the request of our customers.

A critical aspect of the performance workshops is that we review our roadmap for PriceCast Fuel and ensure that whatever new functionality we are working on aligns with our customer’s goals, challenges, and roadmap. Lately, and also in this visit, we have been discussing dynamic EV charge pricing extensively.

When the EV charging market moves from complementary- or low-fixed-price charging, there is a need to have a dynamic pricing solution ready. As demand for EV charging is increasing heavily in the last six months, so does the need to ensure retailers have the right tools to price dynamically. It is a new and exciting space, and we are enthralled to tell our customers about the pilot projects we are running in this area and capture their requirements so that we have all use cases covered when this becomes ready for production.

Another topic in our recent performance workshops has been our completely re-built user interface for the product. While delivering the product over the last ten years, we have collected many use cases and workflows from our customers. We are very excited to show the result of incorporating these use cases in a completely new user experience, driven by modern UI/UX technologies and a visual, action-oriented interface.

In the services team at A2i, we are very excited about our upcoming customer workshops to inspire and be inspired and continue to drive the use, development, and evolution of PriceCast Fuel. We hope we’ll meet with you soon!

The A2i team enjoying a late lunch before they make their way to a customer meeting
By Emil Erlandsson

It’s been an interesting situation to be in.  Approaching a customer with PriceCast Fuel, only to hear, “Yes, others are talking to us about artificial intelligence too!”  Then when they sit down and listen to our pitch, they realise, “actually, yours seems different…”

There are a good number of reasons for that, which we would like to outline here:

• Our AI solution has been running for years – A2i’s first installation took place ten years ago.  Since then, we have expanded across the global to multiple customers.  It’s online, it’s installed, it’s working, and we not only have the results, but we have the references willing to prove it.  This isn’t an idea, it isn’t a Powerpoint vision; this is reality.
• It’s built from AI, not added as an after-thought – Our AI solution was built with the AI front and centre.  It is designed as a customer-centric AI fuel pricing solution, which fully understands your customers and prices against them.  It is not a competitor-follower solution with some basic AI or Machine Learning added on top of it.  It’s a true AI-first solution.
• It is our own built-from-scratch neural-net AI, not an off-the-rack one-size-fits-all AI solution, nor a simplistic Bayesian solution or anything like that – We have employed thousands of manhours and Ph.D. level thinking, to create a world first self-learning solution which drives increases in volumes and margins like no other solution.  We’ve not tried to make a square-peg fit a round hole. 

The next thing they usually say is, “this ROI calculation of days or weeks can’t possibly be true!”  Or, “our market is very complex and conservative.  Your AI won’t understand our customers – they only want the cheapest fuel!”

• Not only is it true that the ROI is fast – We have the references to back it up.  If you want to know just how fast, send us your average annual volumes per site, and your number of sites, and we can send you a calculation.
• We’re sure your market is complex – Which is why AI makes more sense than trying to work things out as a human.  AI is critical to understanding an increasingly complex and often more conservative market as it can correlate parameters and data points in much higher dimensions than we can as humans. 
• It’s not suited to our market – Our solution has been installed in some of the most difficult retail spaces in the world, where fuel regulations have left very little wiggle room, and still it has found success.  If something needs to be changed or adjusted to factor in the specificities of your market, it is usually a minor task. 

We love our customers and we love the chance to answer these questions.  We love the fact that our customers are constantly happy to be references for us, because it just goes show the value we bring them.  We want to bring the same value to you.  Contact us today to discuss how we can do that.