Automation is increasingly becoming a priority for convenience retailers as the industry looks to simplify the employee and customer experience. As the second-largest c-store chain in the U.S., Alimentation Couche-Tard — parent company of Circle K — has adopted several AI initiatives over the past handful of years, from automated self-checkout machines to messaging systems that assign daily tasks and collect employee feedback.
Couche-Tard’s tech and AI selection process is rigorous — so much so that the company has a council that reviews any new platforms it’s considering bringing to its c-stores, Chris Edwards, director of global retail platforms for Circle K., said during a panel discussion at the Refuel USA forum last month.
“It's very important for us to think about transparency and ethical deployments,” Edwards said. “There are a lot of regulations that are starting to come into play, both in Europe and in the U.S., that we need to make sure that we’re compliant with.”
Edwards said the roughly 20-person council — which he is a member of — meets every Tuesday and reviews a tech vendor’s proposed use case at Circle K. If the council decides the program is worthwhile, they’ll run a small pilot to see if it matches the company’s criteria for a full rollout.
But all proposals go through several other vetting steps before reaching the council, Edwards said. Whoever is pitching the technology has to first speak with Circle K’s building architects and information security team.
“If they get through those initial stage gates, then they’ll come to the council, where there's more of a high-level, deeper review of what they're thinking about,” Edwards said.
Just ask ChatGPT
Most convenience retailers don’t have the size, scale and resources that Couche-Tard — operator of over 7,000 c-stores in the U.S. — has to evaluate new technologies.
Even if a small or mid-size c-store operator can’t start its own council, there are many steps it can take to vet new platforms — including using AI or other tech platforms for advice, Edwards said.
“If you don’t have an information security department, I would go to [Microsoft] CoPilot or ChatGPT, and I would ask what types of questions I should be asking to make sure that this vendor is in compliance and secure,” he said.
Edwards joined Couche-Tard earlier this summer after several years spearheading the technology at GetGo Café + Markets, the c-store arm of supermarket chain Giant Eagle that Couche-Tard acquired in late 2024. While at GetGo, he created a checklist for vetting new tech and AI vendors, which helped expedite the decision making process.
“I can give you the sexiest, smartest AI tool in the world, but if you're failing on the operational level, there's nothing that the AI tool is going to do.”
Chris Edwards
Director of global retail platforms, Circle K
“I knew very quickly whether this was going to be something that would fly or not fly and was able to dismiss it before we got too far,” Edwards said.
He recommends smaller retailers implement a similar strategy.
“If you're not doing something like that, it's really easy to put together [a list] to know that somebody's kind of meeting those requirements and is secure,” Edwards added.
But even before considering what new tech or AI to bring on, any retailer must consider why they’re doing so, Edwards emphasized. Retailers usually want to implement a new system to solve a problem or challenge at hand — figuring why the issue arose in the first place is at the core of these decisions.
“I can give you the sexiest, smartest AI tool in the world, but if you're failing on the operational level, there's nothing that the AI tool is going to do.”
