Frodi Hammer: “AI will become the go-to technology”

The rise of ChatGPT has introduced artificial intelligence in the mainstream conversation. We speak to Frodi Hammer, CEO of A2i Systems, about how AI will impact the fuels and convenience industry.

Frodi Hammer is the Founder and CEO of A2i Systems, developers of a leading AI-driven fuel pricing management solution. Frodi is a former Ph.D. researcher in AI technologies at the University of Southern Denmark. In May, he spoke about how artificial intelligence is shaping the future of convenience retailing at the Conexxus Annual Conference.

Last month you spoke at Conexxus about AI and the impact it can have in the fuel and convenience industry. Due to the popularisation of ChatGPT, AI has taken centre stage in society. What are the implications of this technology for our industry?

AI can turn some challenges that retailers are facing today into opportunities. ChatGPT and other language learning models can reduce inequalities. It’s a tool for those that lack knowledge of a specific area – they can suddenly carry out tasks they couldn’t before.

Like we do with PriceCast, AI can leverage data with incredible problem solving to be able to deal with the volatility in today’s world. 2019 will never happen again. AI is already here and ChatGPT helps to show that. There are other algorithms being deployed out there and people just don't know it. You need AI to make all the data you already have actionable, in a way that helps you reach your business targets – that was one of the main ideas of my presentation. AI is like a digital assistant that can help you do things smarter and faster.

It was your second time at the Conexxus event. Did you notice more interest in the subject compared to 2022?

Definitely. The amount of traction that AI has gotten in the last 10 years is incredible. Now it’s something that everyone is using – with ChatGPT it's like having AI at your fingertips. That's a game-changer for people. We've all seen virtual reality in a movie but actually putting it on makes all the difference. Now people are thinking, “It's here. We need to do something." 

You've been working with AI for a long time so it's not new to you. There is a mainstream debate about the disruption of AI to jobs and society. What's your view on the impact that it can have?

If you ask Elon Musk, it's a bad thing and everyone should stop working for half a year. But he's developing large language models himself – that’s why he wanted six months of truce to catch up. As one of my teachers says, "A fool with a tool is still a fool." You have to apply and use the technology correctly. It will never be dangerous – we'll probably never see a General AI that has a similar thinking capability to us. We’ll see it being applied in many areas as it becomes the go-to technology. Vendors must be capable of giving those tools to suppliers. A lot of money is going into AI right now.

From a regulatory perspective, the U.S. is pushing for stricter regulations than Europe. That tells you that a lot of this playground AI we call ‘deep learning’ and ‘large language models’ is nothing new. What's new is throwing a load of data and computational power at it. That's why it's capable of doing what it does. We just made them bigger. They've been capable of doing small tasks for a long time. 

From a theoretical perspective, they are flawed because they're disconnected. You can't explain why an AI using deep learning won a game of Go. However, you could ask DALL-E why the elephant in the starry night is standing on the pool instead of lying in it.  You need to be able to do that from a regulation standpoint. Until now there has been a lot of resources, computational power and data being put into AI and something has come out of it, but you can't explain what. Explainability will be one of the big things driven by legislation.

In developed markets like Denmark and the UK, will all pricing solutions be based around AI in 15 years’ time? What kind of growth do you expect? 

One of the reasons why Amazon became so big is their pricing algorithm. Everyone will be striving towards something like that. It will be key. Just as you need some cloud computational power, AI will be a standard component. It’s already in a lot of systems. When it comes to pricing, it will be hard for you to differentiate yourself if you're not using an AI solution. We see a lot of traction. AI gives you the ability of correlating an incredible amount of data streams that would just be impossible with any other system. 

Conexxus do a lot of work creating standards for the industry. What were your big takeaways from the event? 

There was a major focus on innovation – how should a company organise itself and think in order to be innovative? Retailers were talking about trying to be innovative. And it's hard because it’s so resource intensive. You must structure your business around becoming innovative. That's were Conexxus plays a role with standards. If everyone followed them, it would be far easier to plug and play components. It would allow you to pilot and test much faster than today. Innovation doesn't necessarily come from retailers; it will always come from the market. If you want to be disruptive, you have to spend time and resources listening to your customers. The customer is still the king. 

What is the value of entities like Conexus at a time of such technological development? 

From a standards perspective, they have a strong connection to W3C – the body that drives all the standards we use. They're currently working on standardising a digital wallet. We all need a standard way of accessing and having capabilities on a wallet because Apple and Google are very restrictive. If you want to introduce something like age verification – TrueAge, for example – into your wallet, it's hard to push Apple unless you have a consortium behind you. From our side, if we wanted to personalise pricing, we need to be capable of accessing the transactions. That would be much easier with a more open digital wallet. From a membership and committee perspective, Conexxus does have the power to push some of the bigger players.

Finally, when we look at key issues in our industry like the energy, what impact can AI have on those processes? 

A significant impact. One of the amazing things about AI is the creativity. We see it in texts, poems and pictures. But it also means that you can come up with solutions that we have never been thought. Using Generative AI to help solve some of those issues will have a huge impact. But we still need to point out which is the problem to solve and then it will find a million ways to solve it. From a sustainability perspective, Generative AI will be able to come up with creative, new solutions.

Interview by Oscar Smith Diamante

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