VGN Virtual Global Summit Vision Report: Looking Ahead by Looking Back

VGN Virtual Global Summit 2025Transcript

Presenters:

• Hal Adams, Managing Director, OXXO USA
• Kristina Anderson, Chief Service Officer, Midwest Petroleum Company
• Frank Beard, Head of Marketing, Rovertown
• Brian Donaldson, Chief Executive Officer, The Maxol Group
• Brandon Frampton, Director of Fresh Food, Loop & Poppy
• Annie St. Romain Gauthier, CFO/Co-CEO, Y-Not Stop – St. Romain Oil
• Erin Graziosi, President, Robinson Oil Corp
• Zsuzsa Hordai, Head of Strategic Projects, SPAR International
• Raymond Huff, President, HJB Convenience Corp.
• Gabe Klein, Former Executive Director, U.S. Joint Office of Energy & Transportation
• Kris Klinger, VP Auxiliary Services, Boston University
• Deb Peck Kelleher, Deputy Director, Alliance for Clean Energy NY
• Gerd Leonhard, Founder and CEO,The Future’s Agency
• Donald Rhoads, President/CEO, The Convenience Group
• Nick Peters, VP – IT, Campbell Oil Company

Vision Group Network

• Myra Kressner, CEO Kressner Strategy Group
• Eva Strasburger, President StrasGlobal and CEO Compliance Safe
• Roy Strasburger, CEO StrasGlobal and President Compliance Safe

SUMMIT:

Welcome & Introductions

Roy Strasburger:

Welcome, everyone, to the first VGN Virtual Global Summit. I’m Roy Strasburger, one of the co-founders of the Vision Group Network. We’re excited to have you here for a fascinating program, and I have the honor of being today’s emcee, so you will be hearing more from me later.

Eva Strasburger:

Welcome, everyone. I’m Eva Strasburger, one of the VGN founders. I’ll be back later to give a brief summary of the VGN report-outs, but for now, I’m delighted to kick off this session. Thank you.

Myra Kressner:

Hello! I’m Myra Kressner, co-founder of Vision Group Network, and it is also my pleasure to welcome you to the inaugural virtual Summit. We’re thrilled to have participants joining us from around the world.

Because many of you are experiencing Vision Group Network for the first time, I’d like to take just a moment to share the story behind our mission – Sharing today to shape tomorrow – and why it brings us all together.

VGN began in October of 2020, right at the heart of the pandemic. At that time, we simply wanted to explore what might happen if we brought a diverse group of problem solvers together for two-hour virtual meetings, sessions that were focused on identifying trends, challenges, and the disruptions to collaborate and to imagine solutions. What started as an experiment quickly became something quite extraordinary. Today, Vision Group Network has grown into a network of six virtual forums, soon to be seven, and each one dedicated to exploring the most critical topics, trends, and opportunities shaping business today.

Our mission is to leverage our collective experience, insights, and perspectives to support your business, inspire new ideas, and to spark fresh thinking. In today’s retail and consumer-facing landscape, we all face a constant mix of challenges and opportunities. New competitors emerge, unexpected trends take hold, legislation shifts, and technologies disrupt established models. Within VGN, our retailer, consumer-focused, and Ally Supporter members explore all of it. We do it openly, candidly, and collaboratively. And we share these vital insights with the broader industry through our free vision reports, helping retailers and suppliers stay informed, anticipate change, and respond proactively to whatever comes next.

One of the greatest strengths of VGN is the relationships that are formed within each group, and across groups. Members frequently reference discussions happening in other forums, which sparked this idea from Eva, Roy, and myself: What if, once a year, we brought all of these conversations together? And what if we opened the gathering to everyone? That idea is now a reality: The VGN Global Virtual Summit.

Today, you’ll hear directly from members across all our groups, and get a glimpse of what it’s like to be in the room, where collaboration, curiosity, and honest dialogue drive everything that we do. We are certainly very excited to welcome the renowned futurist Gert Leonhard, who will share his thought-provoking perspectives with the VGN community for the very first time. It has been an incredible privilege to help build Vision Group Network, and an honor to be here with you today. Thank you for being part of this milestone event. It’s my pleasure to turn the agenda over to Roy.

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you, Myra. Before I introduce our keynote speaker, I want to tell you a couple of things that we’re going to be doing during the course of this program. First is that we’re going to be running a series of polls after each of the sections, because we want to find out what you’re thinking about what’s going on in the world today. So, if you answer all of the polls, we are going to have a drawing after the summit is over. We will send five people who answered all of the polls a copy of the book called “Supremacy.” It’s by Parmy Olson, and it’s the story of the race to monetize artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT. It was the No. 1 bestseller on the Financial Times books list last year, and we will be sending it to you if you answer all the polls and you’re one of our five lucky winners.

The second thing is that we’re going to be having a question-and-answer session at the end of the program. If you would like to ask any questions anytime during the course of this program, please go down to the Q&A box that you’ll see at the bottom of your screen. Type in your question, and then we will take those questions when we have the Q&A with Gerd at the end of the program today.

Speaking of Gerd, let me introduce you to him. Gerd Leonhard is a German futurist, speaker, and author, who specializes in the debate between humanity and technology.

Gerd is the CEO of The Futures Agency and founder of the Good Future Project. He was born in Bonn, Germany, and studied theology at the University of Bonn before traveling to the United States in 1982, where he studied music at the Berkeley College of Music, and later established a career as a professional musician, arranger, and composer. In addition to being a highly sought-after speaker for events around the world, Gerd is also a filmmaker and an author, and his latest book is called “Technology vs. Humanity,” a topic appropriate for our times.

So, with no further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce to you our keynote speaker, Gerd Leonhard.

Keynote Speaker, Gerd Leonhard

[Full presentation and slides are in presentation video]

Gerd Leonhard:

Greetings and hello, everybody. It’s my great pleasure to be with you today for the VGN Virtual Global Summit. I will speak to you about the future and how to get ready and understand what’s coming to develop your business and to think about what to do next. First, let’s start here. I think it’s important to realize that to understand the future, we have to hear, and to see, and to understand what is coming next.

The future is now arriving so fast, and it’s even hard to talk about the future, because the future used to be about tomorrow, and now the future is already here. And so the purpose of looking at the future is not prediction, this is very difficult, especially looking forward more than a month, or maybe a year, but it’s to be better prepared. It’s to understand what’s coming next, to make your best choices, to develop your intuition, your imagination, and to follow the right path to your future success, personally and, of course, in business. I have 10 bullets or so to share with you throughout the presentation, and this will be the things that we can discuss later and go into more detail about. So, let’s dive in.

Let’s start with the first point. I think we need to question our assumptions about the future, and because I do this a lot, I have a lot of customers who are very focused on today. And they may be thinking about next year, but not the next 5 years or 2035. And that’s really true for most businesses. I think we need to take a wider view to understand what the next windows are. Windows used to be 30, 40, 50 years until the next thing materializes. And now, with artificial intelligence and quantum computing and nanotechnology and all the things I’ll talk about later, the future appears on a very short window, so the window may be only 5 to 8 years, and then only 3 years. So, we need to question our assumptions of what is possible, what people want, and what is the right thing to do. That is a key thing when we think about, for example, what business are we in today, what business will we be in, let’s say, in 2030, or a little bit before that, and then 2035, the really long-term view, which is kind of science fiction at this point.

A great example from the car business: I used to work a lot with the German car companies. About 10 or 12 years ago, we had a big adventure, we talked about the future of the car, and we talked about electric cars, autonomous driving, car sharing, and so on, and we had a good laugh in the room, people didn’t believe it. The German car companies, to a large degree, had to continue to build better engines, mostly diesel engines, and to build better luxury. But it turns out, it’s not about that. It’s about building cars that run on software. It’s about cars that are no longer cars. It’s about transportation. It’s about self-driving. It’s about all the stuff that Tesla and other companies around the world, Japanese companies, Chinese companies, led by the Chinese company BYD, based on sales figures. If you’re looking at what’s happening in electric vehicles today, based on last year’s sales figures, it’s mostly Chinese [cars] and Tesla, of course. But we have to understand what is next after the current window. What is going to happen to convenience stores when the whole world around us changes, meaning there’s less driving, less driving myself, and more autonomous driving? What’s going to happen when the entire car culture changes? How will it change what we eat? We have to understand all of these things, develop a recognition, and a sort of free recognition about this. I think that’s the really important part, as this video here shows.

[Automated checkout VIDEO PLAYS]

AI can speak about itself, but many of its insights are based on so many assumptions, so we have to look a little bit deeper and find out what the pivot point is for these things to happen.

Let’s talk about the game changers and the revolutions, and what it means for the paradigm shifts of the world, the paradigms of consumption.

Science fiction is becoming science fact, so things that used to be impossible are now entirely possible. Things like language translation, autonomous driving, free phone calls on WhatsApp. The list goes on; there are a hundred things that the mobile phone has become the hub for.

We’re basically at the pivot point of many of those changes, and some pivot points are a little bit further out, like GLP-1 and the obesity drugs and things like that. But the future always arrives gradually and then suddenly. This is an important thing to learn. The concept comes from a Hemingway novel where the main character asks: How do you go bankrupt? And the counterpart says, well, gradually, then suddenly. That’s how the future comes.

The same goes for autonomous driving. We need a lot more components of that to work. Now it’s coming to a lot of major cities in the U.S., in Dubai, and some cities in China, as well. That goes for digital payments, as well, which took a long time. The future is here now for plant-based meat and cultured meat. There’s currently a big discussion around health monitoring. When the pivot point is there, boom! We’re here.

You have to look for those pivot points for convenience stores. What exactly are they, and where exactly can you see them? They may be different in Los Angeles than they are in Milwaukee. We each need to discover the pivot point and figure out how we get on it before it happens.

The next 10 years will bring more change than the previous 100 years, and that’s no overstatement. AI is just the first of all of these leaps in science and technology, many of them, of course, invented in Silicon Valley, in China, and to some degree also here in Europe. I’m talking about AI, robotics, supercomputing, nuclear fusion, the next level of energy – free, abundant energy – biotechnology, synthetic biology, biofuels, and so on, including genetic engineering, genome modification and geoengineering. I could add another 10 to the list so that your mind will boggle even more, but these are all happening at the same time. Let’s not forget that it’s not just about AI and more efficiency and more technology, it’s also about cultural changes and behavioral changes as Gen Y and Gen Z enter the game. This is a very big story.

Finally, we have the four revolutions coming together. I wouldn’t say at the same time, but pretty closely followed. We have a geopolitical revolution, where the United States is no longer the Pax Americana, taking care of the world, but instead going in a different direction. We have the digital revolution, which is primarily about intelligent machines now, and machines becoming useful for humans. We have the sustainability revolution. Regardless of the current political discussions, we’re going green at a mind-boggling pace, and if you’re not green and sustainable by 2030, people won’t like you. And this is very true, because also my generation is shifting out of the picture there as a decisionmaker, so that is clearly an important topic.

And finally, the purpose revolution, which is about a larger economic goal, not a simple goal, like profit and growth and power that we’ve had pretty much since World War II. We’re shifting to a new goal, a broader goal that is collectively about people, planet, purpose, peace, prosperity, also more meaning, more sensibility, more global consciousness. That is, I think, true for every country in the world, and manifesting itself in various ways. It’s really important to understand where that is going, what people want, and millennials are sort of adopting the purpose revolution.

Millennials are juggling lots of balls, like job and technology and political change and so on. They’re becoming a large part of the economy, taking over from people in my generation, from the baby boomers, and they’re followed very closely by Gen Z. They’re getting into power situations, like you see the new mayor of New York, and other places. This is a big shift, as young people come in and basically change the outlook of life.

Gen Z and Gen Y are really quite different [from older generations]. Younger consumers want more healthy environments, less snacks, less speed. Sustainable sourcing is a must-have. Alcohol is on the way out, and smoking is pretty much over. Smoking is all but banned in many states. You can do anything as long as you don’t smoke, especially in California. But younger consumers want to live healthier. And they want different things from convenience, and that is quite strongly an indication of the future.

Their worldviews are different. We’re no longer pursuing just profit, growth, and power. We’re going into people, planet, purpose, prosperity, and peace. This is a much larger story that we have to understand, and why it’s important. As generations are shifting, that will reflect on all their habits of buying and consumption and, of course, working.

Now we have people, as a default, checking their health on devices, like the Apple Watch and many other devices. This will become the new normal. Monitoring can save lives, and that has to do, of course, with food as well. People will realize the connection there. Apple is really cultivating this, and many other companies are following to go into digital healthcare preventative medicine, customized food and customized medication. Some people say that GLP-1 obesity drugs may save several million lives. So, this is a very, very big topic, changing the way that people look at the future and what they want. The culture is shifting from boomer-centric to millennial.

The second one is that transportation is going from fossil fuel-based internal combustion engines to clean technologies, including hydrogen and electric vehicles, primarily. The numbers on that vary, but this will be a clear shift by 2030.

We will still have lots of cars on the road that have combustion engines, but many will not be buying new cars with a gasoline-powered engine. There’ll be so many options. It will take a little bit longer, but this is imminent in terms of the behavior change. And then our work is changing, because now it’s possible to work online, and this is going to change cities. We’re working remotely, digitally, virtually. We’re digital nomads; people are working from home, and they’re no longer driving and commuting. It will also take some time for that to change in most major cities. But clearly, we’re heading to a green future. It will be a difficult mission to get there, but in the end, it’s really a core strategy in the circular economy: How do we build things? How do we give back? How do we create meaning in a world where people are looking for everything we do to make sense, not just to consume?

So there’s a transportation shift, coming; we’re not there yet. There’s a huge shift to electric vehicles. Right now, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says there will be 33 million EVs on the road by 2030, and that means we’ll need a comparable amount of charging stations. In my view, this is a great opportunity. Maybe not for the gas stations. That’s a painful shift. It’s like when record stores folded when music downloads became popular. The record stores are no longer there like they used to be.

Autonomous driving will bring a significant shift, I think, primarily in the areas of ride-sharing and autonomous taxis. A Goldman Sachs report from just last week says there will be a significant increase in commercial autonomous vehicles. There are just 1,500 today, and they project there will be 35,000 autonomous vehicles, like taxis, by 2030. And some people are saying between 20% or 30% of new cars will be autonomous and electric. That will require a big shift in the U.S. Global numbers are larger than that, but this is a cultural question and a policy question. But the shift is fundamental, and the shift will not stop. Combustion engine cars will diminish quickly in the near future.

The internet in general is changing, as well. This is another thing that we have to keep in mind as it impacts marketing, production, promotion, and everything else. People are now using ChatGPT to search, and this is an exponential shift. Eight-hundred million people are using ChatGPT. Google Search is declining, and this is why Google has its own AI Search now.

About 80 million people are paying for ChatGPT globally. I think that number is maybe roughly about 25 million or so in the U.S. That’s a big shift. We’re no longer using search engines; we’re using answering engines. Of course, this raises its own issues, like abdicating your own thinking, of getting mentally lazy, of atrophy. People talk about brain atrophy, as we’re using ChatGPT to ask anything. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but clearly, if you don’t have search engines, how do you find things? And who’s in charge of the results of that answer?

You’ve got ChatGPT, but OpenAI is pretty much the leader in this market. Many other companies, like Google Gemini and DeepSeek and so on, are also vying for that spot and really gearing up. But the new browser of OpenAI, called Atlas, is something you should look into. Here’s the short ride through Atlas.

[VIDEO PLAYS] “Today, we’re going to launch ChatGPT Atlas. This is an AI-powered web browser built around ChatGPT. We think that AI represents a rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be about. I don’t think we should think of it as a product. I think we should think of it as a distribution channel for OpenAI’s superintelligence. We’re going to have an AI that is our personal portal into everything. I’m not going to care what browser I use; I’m just going to be able to have a conversation with my AI, and it will pull up the data from wherever it is.”

Gerd Leonhard:

A conversation with my browser to do things for me. That’s called AI agenting. That is truly going to change the convenience store, because we’re going to be able to do things online and then go, or not go to the store to pick up the solution, or have it delivered with drones.

I do think that people are going to want to go to the store, because that’s where we meet, and that’s where we have social conversation interactions. So I think this whole thing about AI and mobile becoming the primary way of living, like some people said about the so-called metaverse, especially Meta, Facebook and Zuckerberg have been very strong on this topic.

Now, we have an executive from OpenAI saying that over time, we see ChatGPT evolving to become the operating system for your life, to which I would say, well, that sounds like a great plan for OpenAI. Probably not for us, because the operating system for our life is other people. It’s our society. It’s not technology. The OS for shopping, I understand that. For searching, yes. But somehow there have to be human components in here, and I think this is a little bit of techno-optimism, which we’re very much used to from Silicon Valley.

We’re moving into a world where we’ll no longer control the web by browsing or typing, we’ll just speak to it. That will create a fundamental convergence in the store also, as we’re looking at combining products and searching right on location with mobile phones, portable devices or glasses and other things. The natural user interface, the NUI, that’s where we’re headed.

At the same time, human nature is about our feelings. And there’s a difference between intelligence, which is about solving problems and getting stuff done, and consciousness agency, which is about experiencing and feeling things. That’s where human nature fits in. We’re not logical beings in the sense of robots and machines. We are different, and our intelligence is not just one thing; it’s not just brain power. We think with the while body, not with just the brain.

Many therapists will tell you that this is why the embodiment, the sensory experience in stores is going to be so important. Machines don’t think, they don’t feel, they don’t have hunches, they don’t understand, they don’t imagine, they don’t care. But, of course, they can pretend to feel and to care, and this is something we have to be very careful about. These are machines, they are not like us, they are tools, they’re not purpose. I think we need to have AI that is competent, not conscious.

Now we’re moving to experiences and to transformations, moving away from commodities and goods and basic services. The best example is Spotify. It has created a music experience, and it’s transforming the way that we consume music. It’s the experience economy all over again. And I think something similar is going to happen with convenience, moving into experiential purchases. And you can see on the simple chart, this is actually from about 25 years ago, that happiness is increasing, excitement is increasing, pleasantness is increasing with experiences.

I can’t say that often enough: I think that’s going to be a crucial point for all retail, but especially convenience stores. I’m talking about more unique environments, frictionless shopping in real life, and technology convergence. Our experiences will make it look like it’s all one thing, rather than separate processes. We’ll continue to access powerful tools to help employees to plan, to look ahead, to figure out what is happening, to get better analytics. The next step will be to get away from “gas station food,” to offer better quality food in different price points. This will be the tough part.

That raises a lot of discussion points: how consumer orientation is changing, how convenience stores may be competing in some ways with restaurants, or vice versa. And of course, all of these things are now happening because of technology, as healthcare and food are moving center stage in the digital revolution, right after media and other things. Now it’s really about AI and GLP-1 and digital therapeutics, or personalized medicine. That is still in early stages, but give it 5 years. The way things are moving, especially with AI driving all of those accomplishments, it will be here sooner than you think.

GLP-1, here’s a potential patient pool chart from Exponential View, one of the newsletters I follow. I think the ultimate study here is from Statista. GLP-1 is relevant to obesity, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, substance use disorders, all of those things, making a potentially huge impact on what people are going to do, how they live, and what they consume.

I have a new statistic here from The Economist, from just a few days ago, showing what’s happening with oral and injectable drugs. The adoption will grow, and ultimately people will buy fewer snacks and potentially harmful food, sweet foods, and high-calorie food. Instead, they’ll gravitate to smaller portions, protein drinks, hydration drinks, and overall better-for-you products. This is a major trend pretty much across the board in food stores, and especially in convenience stores. We also see it happening with online ordering.

Grocery spending changes six months after GLP adoption. That’s 2024 data, the latest data available. The question is: Will that last? And will people continue to experiment with these drugs, and will that become the new normal? And is it healthy for us in the long run?

Here’s a quick overview of GLP-1. This is basically the biggest lifestyle shakeup ever seen. The numbers are quite clear. And the result is a potential shift away from grab-and-go snacks and unhealthy things. But on the other hand, we have substantial issues on GLP-1 drugs and semaglutide drugs. There are considerable relapse issues when you stop taking it, maybe you gain more weight than ever before, you really haven’t changed your behavior. It’s an unclear long-term effect, and we don’t know if there are serious adversarial effects at this point. It’s way too early.

We’re also watching behavioral issues: When I take the drug, do I change my behavior, or do I take it for the rest of my life, like blood pressure drugs? And will that be actually good for us? The jury is still out on this. It’s a big topic to keep in mind.

Let’s move on to what’s happening with work and jobs. I think what Microsoft has done with digital labor is a big trend, as we’re moving into a world where routine work can be done by machines, tools like Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Einstein, and many others. We’re moving into a world where the routine is covered there, humans will have to do less routines. If your job is 30% routine work, it won’t matter much; you’ll find better things to do. That is unless you love the routine. But if your job is 90% routine, like, for example, driving could become that kind of job, call centers, financial analytics. These are things where we’re asking: What happens when your job is 90% routine? We need to consider job retraining and maybe creating a public fund to support that reinvention. It’s a whole different cup of tea.

But as we’re moving from humans doing routines to machines doing routines, there are lots of debates as to what that does to the employment space. I think we are going to lose some jobs there, for sure. On the other hand, many companies like Amazon are using AI as an excuse to whitewash firings that they had planned anyway [as cost-cutting measures].

But it is a good argument. I mean, we could say maybe there will be more jobs created, just like before, with the internet and cloud computing and mobile. It is a shift in society that remains a little bit unclear what the bottom line is. We could probably expect fewer jobs in 10 years, and even less in 20 years, but maybe we’ll work less, like has been propagated in France for a long time, 3 to 4 hours per day for the same money. That could be an entirely new development: fewer human employees. There are ads in Silicon Valley that encourage “Stop hiring humans, hire AI.” They’re from a company called Artisan. Meanwhile, other companies want to reinvent the whole workplace to be automated, and start companies, billion-dollar companies, with 10 employees. I think these things are really in the realm of science fiction, still.

We are going to have fewer human employees. However, can machines really replace humans? I’m not so sure about that. A cooking robot probably is difficult at this point to consider as an investment. Yes, we can invent technology that takes care of human routines, and this is ultimately the opportunity of artificial intelligence.

I think, really, as this chart shows, we can work much more efficiently. This chart actually needs to be updated. The new version’s coming out very soon. The production multiplier of AI is not 4x of the office support and admin or paralegal efficiency. It’s probably more like 2.5x and 3x, but it’s still substantial. I think this is really about augmentation, making us work better, and maybe some automation, but it’s not about replacement. I think this is the lesson for us to think: Okay, we’re probably not just going to have places with only 2 employees when we had 10 before.

Clearly we’re going to see smart kitchens. I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of automation. We’ll see machines creating simple things, and here’s a mock-up. This is a production-ready Smart Kitchen from the Circus Group. The price point of this will be extremely steep, there will be lots of maintenance issues, and the question is, how much can it really do? And how quickly will that come about? You can check it out here on YouTube.

Then there’s the question of what do we want from these machines? I think, ultimately, we want cognification, we want things to be better in terms of how we process things, to be faster, more efficient, more understanding, and take on the heavy lifting, like reading a 1,000-page Bitcoin document. We can have that done by machines now, a matter of helping us. Then there’s food preparation and human augmentation, which includes physical things, like robotics helping us to do jobs faster. These are very big topics I’m sure you’re looking at, but it’s mostly really about augmentation.

Then, I think, our intelligence goes beyond machines, and we have to keep reminding ourselves of that. This is why we have to stay in the loop. Our intelligence is organic. It’s about kinesthetics and intellectual [power], which is kind of like a machine in terms of processing power. But it’s also about emotional, social, cultural, and political intelligence. It’s all the things that are unclear how they work, but we just know that we have them.

And the ideal world, I think, in the future would see machine intelligence converging with humans in such a way where it’s supporting us, rather than diminishing us. So, when we think about artificial intelligence, we have to think about all the different parts of it, the different approaches to it. Generally speaking, AI is a power tool that’s like a nail gun.

The CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, wrote a great book about this. He says, if you’re not amazed by AI, you don’t really understand it. But also, if you’re not afraid of AI, you don’t really understand it. So, this is a very important point. We should not be doomers (overly pessimistic), or boomers (overly optimistic). We should be realistic. We should use the optimism of the heart and the mind, but maybe the pessimism of the intellect as well, to ask questions, and to see how useful it really is.

So, AI defined is machines that turn information and data into knowledge. This is the most basic definition from Dennis Hassabis from DeepMind. AI creates knowledge, and now it creates intelligence.

More important to me is intelligent assistance. What are the things machines can do to no longer be stupid: cognification, automation, virtualization, and augmentation. I call it CAVA. What I think we should stay away from is artificial general intelligence. That is, intelligence that can subsume us, that can basically do a better job with pretty much anything than humans can. That is essentially a machine with 100,000 PhDs. General intelligence, superintelligence, which is what OpenAI is pursuing. I think we should draw a red line there and ask, how good would that be for business, and for every business, really, and for humans? We should not just pursue the competence of AI. We should think about a larger story.

It is all about what I call CAVA. It’s about tools not digital humans. And CAVA is the combination of the things that are possible today that culminate in automation, the possibility of automating processes. But more importantly, quantification means that we’re just better mentally understanding, like in analytics. And augmentation helps us to understand languages better, which is a big deal, I think, in many convenience stores, is to translate on the fly. Virtualization, digital twins, and so on. This is really what tools are all about, right? Inventory management, staffing, predictive maintenance. This is the nuts and bolts of technology, rather than building digital humans that can be like us.

So, I think we need to focus on the magic of technology. We should see if we can turn down the manic factor, like Instagram, and get obsessed with technology, and definitely not have the toxic part increase. Avoid toxic products, like Hirevue, when you’re hiring for new jobs, to use AI to look at my face. That’s a toxic environment. Many things on social media have become toxic. They are not helping us to understand reality.

So, we need to refuse cognitive outsourcing, this idea that we can use a machine to answer everything, and then there’s no work left for us. That’s an abdication, an outsourcing of things to something else, so that I will no longer be bothered. I no longer need to make an effort. There is no progress without effort, there is no good products without effort, and good enough sometimes is good enough, but usually good enough isn’t good. And so, we need to think about this in a more human way, expecting the things that we want. Also, democracy will suffer if we outsource our thinking. Because if we’re going to look at automating all our decision-making, democracy will suffer; we won’t trust people anymore.

So, let me summarize and give you some action items. First, no matter how real technology like AI and chatbots and all that stuff become, and how real they may look, pretending to have feelings, pretending to be human, pretending to know me. In the end, we have to stay critical. We have to stay human. We have to stay curious. We have to keep thinking and always keep the human in the loop. This is the most important virtualization. Until we know for sure that a machine can do something like we do, we have to stay in the loop. And that goes for many, many products and services. Providing a good experience is hard for a machine. This is what humans do well, because it has to do with consciousness, emotions, feelings, understanding.

Second, let’s train our future mindset to get more ears. To have an understanding of what’s coming, first we have to perceive and observe, then we have to understand what it means and develop our intuition, imagination, and plans. And then we create a product or a service.

This is really important that we don’t jump to conclusions and say let’s do something quickly before we really understand it. Let’s rethink convenience completely with more technology, better products, better-for-us experiences along the axis I outlined earlier. And here are the bullets again, because I think it’s really time to take a look at all of those individual components, and put a checkbox and say, “Okay, this is what we’re pursuing. This is what we believe, and this is where the pivot point is.” That discussion is most important. When is it going to get real? And usually, it’s quicker than we think.

We have to prepare for tomorrow, today. And then we have to prepare for after tomorrow, the day after today. We have to think in windows and be better prepared for the future.

Thanks very much for your time and for your kind attention. I hope you liked my presentation and my thoughts, and now we’ll go back to the main event, and I will see you later for a discussion. Thank you.

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you, Gerd. That was fascinating information and certainly gave us a lot to think about. A couple things that I took away from Gerd’s presentation is that we are not trying to predict the future, what we are trying to do is plan for the future. I think that’s really important because, as we all know, the future can change from where we’re going, because as Gerd says, it’s not a straight line. It always moves in different directions.

And then I also thought his CAVA acronym was very interesting. Cognification, Augmentation, Virtualization, and Automation help us understand artificial intelligence and see how we can use it to our advantage.

Thank you very much, Gerd. As a reminder, toward the end of the program today, we are going to have a Q&A with Gerd. We already have a few questions in the Q&A box, which you can find at the bottom of your screen. Be sure to type in your questions, and we’ll try to get to those a little bit later.

Poll No. 1: Artificial Intelligence

Roy Strasburger:

We’re now going to have our first poll, and as a reminder, everyone who answers all of the questions, all of the polls that we have today, we’re going to put into a drawing. And, we’re going to select from that drawing 5 people to receive a copy of this book, “Supremacy,” which is about the monetization and the development of AI. It’s a worthy prize for you today.

Our first poll question: Do you support the development of artificial general intelligence, known as AGI?

Just as a reminder, artificial general intelligence is an autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities in the majority of economically valuable tasks.

We will compile those votes and give you the results later.

Global Convenience Vision Group

Roy Strasburger:

As we are developing our virtual networks, or our forums with the Vision Group Network, we’re very excited that we have established the Global Convenience Vision Group. This group has members on 6 different continents that are involved with us. We’re very excited about that, and I know that a few of our GCVG members are online with us, even though it’s 2 o’clock in the morning for some of them. We’re very appreciative of that dedication to our mission.

I would like to introduce the facilitator of the Global Convenience Vision Group, Christian Warning, who is going to give you an overview of the group and then tell you a little bit about what they have done over the last year. Christian, over to you.

Christian Warning:

Good day, everyone. I’m Christian Warning, founder and managing partners of The Retail Marketeers, and I have the pleasure of working with VGN to create the Global Convenience Vision Group. I proudly facilitate all the GCVG meetings.

We launched GCVG early in the year with one overriding mission: bringing together convenience and mobility retail leaders from around the world to share what works, what doesn’t, and where our industry is heading.

Our members represent the full spectrum of our industry. We have c-suite executives from major international chains sitting alongside owners of small, independent operations.

What unites us isn’t the company size or market position, it’s the shared experience of serving customers who need solutions fast, whether they’re grabbing coffee or lunch, or filling up their tank, or charging their car. And because our members are located in all corners of the world, when we meet, for some, it’s midday, others it’s dinnertime, and for others, it’s the middle of the night. Kudos to all of them for being so committed.

Since our first meeting in March, we have explored everything from AI and robotics to changing consumer health trends. These aren’t academic discussions, they are real conversations between people making real decisions that affect customers every day. The beauty of GCVG is that a challenge facing a retailer in Germany might already have been solved by someone in Australia or South Africa.

Let me turn it over to our members, who will walk you through what we’ve learned together over these past months.

Zsusa Hordai:

Thanks, Christian. I’m Zsuzsa Hordai, head of strategic projects for SPAR International. Well, let me start with the big picture here. Over the past year, we’ve tackled three major themes that are reshaping our entire industry.

First, the technology revolution, how AI and robotics are moving from sci-fi fantasy to everyday reality into our stores. Second, there is a massive shift that we are seeing in what customers actually want to buy. This is driven by a variety of trends from weight-loss medications to younger generations drinking less alcohol. And third, how we balance efficiency with the human connection. That still remains more important than any single algorithm out there.

By our August meeting, we moved from “should we use AI” to “how do we use AI responsibly”? And Joerg Heilingbrunner, CEO of Scheidt & Bachmann Energy Retail Solutions, showed us that AI isn’t just flashy robots, it’s actually an everyday problem solver for theft prevention, fraud detection and operational efficiencies.

In this conversation, I also raised a couple of issues around the ethical concerns of AI and what we all need to consider, especially around energy consumption and sustainability running these high-tech algorithms.

Meanwhile, from FGC Fuels Marketing, Claudio Reboredo raised concerns about smaller operators and how they can face cost barriers and challenges to make financial sense in investing in these new technologies.

In our June meeting, Dr. Tilo Huhn from the Zurich University presented research showing that approximately 6 million Americans are already using this weight loss medication called GLP-1, and potentially, this number could reach up to 40 million by 2030. And if you think about it, this isn’t just a health trend, it’s a fundamental shift in what people want to eat and how they’ll consume it.

Roger Vogt from Valora Retail also presented at our June meeting and introduced the foodvenience strategy, a combination of convenience retail with foodservice. Their success in Switzerland, where over 60% of consumers now prefer self-checkout, shows us what customer behavior might look like everywhere, in a few years, perhaps. It’s not just about technology; it’s about offering healthier food options that people actually want to buy.

Theo Foukkare from the Australian Association of Convenience Stores highlighted another trend we hadn’t fully grasped yet: Younger consumers are drinking less alcohol than previous generations, and this creates both a challenge for traditional beverage markets and categories, and opportunities, of course, for low and no alcohol alternatives, as well.

2026 looks like a really interesting year ahead. Trading up compelling online and offline promotions would be my second point to add here, boosting basket size and category performance through integrated promotion engines that bridge the physical and digital retail worlds. Use dynamic pricing, app-based upselling, omnichannel campaigns to drive premium choices and incremental sales, especially in the high-margin food and beverage categories. And number 3 would be to really get them back, personalize loyalty and subscription ecosystems to turn occasional customers into loyal advocates through data-driven, personalized offers and membership-style subscription programs. Report frequency, bundle convenience missions, and create emotional stickiness by offering tailored benefits that merge mobility, food, and lifestyle needs across every single visit. And perhaps, most importantly, how do we train and develop a workforce for jobs that don’t exist yet.

The convenience industry continues to evolve. The insights from the Global Convenience Vision Group have convinced me that the companies surviving 5 years from now will be those who embrace change now, while also staying true to what convenience retail has always been about: Making life easier for people in a hurry. Thank you.

Brian Donaldson:

Thank you, Zsuzsa. Our March meeting on artificial intelligence and robotics was a real eye-opener. We had Nikolas Bullwinkel, founder and CEO of Circus SE, show us what’s actually possible with robotic food preparation. The key insight wasn’t about the technology itself, but how far we are behind compared to other retail sectors. While grocery stores and quick-service restaurants have been experimenting with automation for years, we’re still debating whether self-checkout actually works.

Sandra Schütte, head of mobility, Westfalen AG, in Germany made a brilliant point about automation, needing to have theater, where customers want to see how the food is prepared, and not just have it arrive in a black box.

I spoke briefly about the importance of marketing programs, but these programs can be copied. The quality of your people is truly what differentiates your brand.

Joe Boyle, our good friend and the CEO of FreshStop in South Africa, reminded us that regional differences matter enormously. What works in one market might completely miss the mark in another.

Throughout all of our discussions, one key theme kept emerging: Technology is a tool. It’s not a replacement for human judgment or interactions. The most successful implementations we discussed combined efficiency gains with enhanced customer experience, not fewer customer interactions.

Claudio from Argentina, I believe, captured the attention of many of us that we feel. He said that we, in convenience retail, have created an incredible offer built around human engagement and interaction, and would see robots in the kitchen, a very distant part in the future. Meanwhile, Mert Dunder, head of operational technology at Petrol Ofisi Group, emphasized that innovation isn’t just about purchasing technology, it’s about integrating it into your company and customer-centered structure.

Three key insights have emerged from our year of discussions. Firstly, the convenience industry can’t afford to be followers anymore. We need to lead in adoption of technologies that solve real problems, not just chase shiny objects. Secondly, health-conscious consumers aren’t a niche market anymore. They’re becoming the mainstream, and our product mix needs to reflect that reality. Thirdly, the most successful retailers will be those who use technology to enhance human capabilities, not replace them. Get more efficient.

Based on everything we’ve discussed, we’re most curious about 3 key areas for 2026. Get our customers into multi-energy destinations with reliable foodservice and smart retail tech. Attract customers by transforming sites into multi-energy mobility and lifestyle hubs. Combine EV charging, alternative fuels, and traditional energy with a reliable, craveable foodservice offer that drives frequency. Leverage retail technology from artificial intelligence-driven maintenance to digital signage and smart operations, to enhance uptime, customer experience, and of course, data capture. And perhaps most importantly, how do we train and develop our workforce for those jobs that currently don’t exist?

The convenience industry continues to evolve at pace. The insights from the Global Convenience Vision Group have convinced us that the companies that will be successful in 5 years’ time from today will be those that embrace technology today but also staying true to what convenience retail has always been about: Making life easier for people in a hurry. Thank you.

Roy Strasburger:

Excellent. My thanks to Christian, Zsuzsa, and Brian for sharing their thoughts and their experiences with the Global Convenience Vision Group. And just to give you a reference point, Christian is in Germany, Zsuzsa is in the Netherlands, and Brian is in Ireland.

I think, really, what they were coming across was that, although we may not be able to predict the future, we might be able to get a peek at it by looking at other countries and other markets to see what they are doing, and then trying to develop those ideas into our own markets.

Poll No. 2: Staff Count

Roy Strasburger:

It’s poll time again. The question is: Will AI and or robotics reduce your staff count by 2030? For everyone who answers all of the poll questions, we will conduct a drawing and send 5 people a copy of this book, “Supremacy,” which was the No. 1 bestseller on the “Financial Times” business book list.

Thank you for participating in the poll. Before we move on to our next group, which is the Convenience Foodservice Vision Group, I’d like to do a quick shout-out to our sponsors, and those are AisleAI, Compliance Safe, GK Software, Invenco, McLane, PriceEasy AI, Ultimate Sales, Upshop, Verifone, and our booster sponsor for this event is CAF Outdoor Cleaning. The Vision Reports that we put out are made possible by the support of our Ally Supporters, and we really appreciate that. And we’re going to hear now from three of those who are the Ally Supporters for the Convenience Foodservice Vision Group. They are McLane Co., Upshop, and Ultimate Sales, and that will be followed by our CFVG facilitator, Richard Poye, who will be introducing the CFVG report-out. So, please pay attention to our sponsors’ ads. Thank you.

[Video ads play.]

Convenience Foodservice Vision Group

Richard Poye:

Good day, everyone. I’m Richard Poye, founder of Food Trends Think Tank and facilitator for Convenience Foodservice Vision Group, or CFVG for short. I’m really excited to introduce you to our group today. I really feel that we have begun the transformative process, how we collectively think and act around convenience foodservice.

As all of you know, competition across the retail food channels has never been tougher. And along with that, foodservice is playing a vital role in how we address those challenges.

For convenience retailers, this, I believe, creates a really fantastic opportunity to grow, stay relevant, and also to delight more customers. This is why we launched the Convenience Foodservice Vision Group in January 2025. It began with a simple, yet powerful mission: To bring together the brightest minds in our industry to discuss foodservice trends and where we can be going, and to really raise the quality and elevate the perception of convenience foodservice.

Our diverse group makes Convenience Foodservice Vision Group special. We’re a collection of c-suite executives, innovative foodservice professionals, operational leaders that represent large national and regional thriving chains, along with adjacent sectors to come together and think about foodservice. We also come from across the United States, so we’re getting different perspectives from that, as well.

What makes this group special, as well, is we have great partners from our Ally Supporter members that bring thought leadership. I want to thank Jon Cox from McLane, Mike Weber from Upshop, and starting in early 2026, Wes Stone from Ultimate Sales. Your collaboration is making a tremendous difference.

As a group, we’ve evaluated a range of opportunities. How sensory science can impact guest experiences, and how we can improve that. We’ve looked at how large language models can be used to increase production efficiency, reduce waste, and positively impact the bottom line. And we’ve looked at how we can access large sets of data from multiple foodservice sectors to shape how we innovate and bring our menu development to our stores.

Each of these group discussions have sparked new insights and actionable ideas for the industry. We see our mission as aiming to impact the bottom line and improve guest satisfaction.

Now, I’m really happy to hand off the mic to two of our members. First, Brandon Frampton from Loop Neighborhood Market, and then Kris Klinger from Boston University. They’re going to give you their perspective on what we’ve discussed, and the things that they’ve learned. Again, thank you, and welcome to the future of convenience foodservice.

Brandon Frampton:

Thanks, Richard. As an experienced retailer, I am familiar with the convenience business. However, joining CFVG has expanded my perspective on our very unique industry. First, a little bit about me.

I’m Brandon Frampton, and I lead the foodservice department at Loop Neighborhood Markets. We have about 150 locations that are traditional c-stores. Also, we have full kitchens, dispensed beverage, and all things convenience. Now, let me give you a quick preview of what we’ve been digging into.

We’ve explored the sensory science behind why customers choose one c-store over another. We dug into how we can use cutting-edge technology to predict what people want for the next meal. And recently, we discussed how menu innovation strikes the balance between those familiar comfort foods and the exciting trends, and then we explored how major cultural shifts impact the generational preferences that are shaping our entire business model.

CFVG began in January [2025] with the idea that sounded simple, but quickly proved to be something much deeper, the science of our senses. Rachel Toner from Taste Strategy took us on a journey to explore how smell and touch shape every moment the customer spends in our stores. She helped us see that it’s not just about what we sell, but how people actually feel when they walk through our doors. The warmth of a cup of coffee in their hands, the freshness of the air, even the subtle scent of the space itself. And maybe most surprisingly of all, we realized that some of these things we thought made our stores feel fresh and clean, like certain cleaning products, might actually be pushing our guests away. It was a powerful reminder that every detail matters. And that the smallest sensory cues can shape how people connect with our brands.

Barbara Kessler, formerly with the Wills Group and now with CrossAmerica Partners, put it perfectly when she says, nobody wants to walk into the store and smell chicken. And more importantly, nobody wants to leave smelling like chicken. Candidly, how many of us were really paying attention to these types of details before that meeting?

You know, the real eye-opener was learning that creating a memorable sense experience doesn’t require a Fortune 500 budget. Jon Cox from McLane reminded us why we’re all here. Foodservice is the future of convenience, and we owe it to ourselves to serve quality food.

By May 2025, we are tackling menu development with insights from Claire Conaghan with Datassential. And it isn’t about following every food trend that pops up on social media. It was about understanding the sweet spot between familiar and exciting.

The conversation took a practical turn when Derek Thurston of Cliff’s Local Market shared their approach to addressing dirty sodas. Instead of letting specialty shops charge $6 or $7, they positioned it as, come and create your own dirty soda at Cliff’s. That’s the kind of thinking that really turns trends into profits.

You know, what I found fascinating was the focus on the generational differences. Kris Klinger from Boston University broke down what Gen Z wants. They want authentic, bold flavors, and don’t forget they love spice. And they absolutely love uniqueness. However, it must be portable, because that’s how they roll.

Last came our August 2025 meeting regarding AI, and honestly, this is where things got really interesting. Mike Weber from Upshop didn’t pull any punches. He told us straight up that AI is rewriting the rules of everything, and it will have a massive impact on our business. However, what surprised me the most is that we don’t have to have the data to be perfect to get started. Another presenter, Steve Brask from Upshop, explained, if you have reasonable historical data, even if it’s incomplete, AI can fill in many of those gaps. It takes a lot of pressure off some of the smaller operators, who felt they needed years and years of perfect record keeping.

I found this year’s CFVG to be awesome. Thanks to all the presenters and participants that were engaged to make this program so bountiful. Now, turning it over to Kris Klinger.

Kris Klinger:

Thanks, Brandon, that was outstanding. The practical applications are abundant, and what’s possible blew my mind.

Hey everyone, I’m Kris Klinger. I’m the vice president of auxiliary services at Boston University. Boston University Auxiliary Services oversees the majority of the business operations at Boston University. Our areas of oversight include Agganis Arena, undergraduate and graduate housing, transportation and parking services, fitness, recreation, and club sports, events and conferences, residential and retail dining, catering services, convenience stores, and the campus bookstore.

Bonnie Zaring from RaceTrac nailed the real challenge we all face. Like, how do we learn from sales data when everything gets rung up the same way? Fortunately for us, AI can determine what was in the cup or in the wrap, even when the POS system can’t distinguish the difference.

One thing that came up also repeatedly was managing our teams through all of this innovation. Stephanie Galentine from Lassus Brothers Oil was refreshingly honest about the resistance from long-term employees. When you tell someone who’s been doing the same thing for 15 years that it’s wrong, it can be tricky, because you’ve got to figure out how to best change the behavior without making them feel bad. And as we all know, there are many more changes to come, so change management is going to be important.

Brandon Frampton from Loop Neighborhood Markets, who we just heard from, also summed it up very well. This technology is going to change our industry more than anything ever has.

And if you boil it down, my biggest takeaways from these meetings so far are: First, we’re an experience business, not just a convenience business. Every action, big and small, every smell, sight, sound, matters. They matter much more than we realize.

Second, innovation doesn’t always mean throwing out familiar. Many of our best new products and services will build on what customers already know and love.

Third, technology isn’t replacing human judgement. It’s enhancing our decision-making and making our operations more efficient. We need to treat technology as a partner, and create the checks and balances necessary. Ultimately, the companies that will thrive are those that anticipate trends and act quickly, rather than merely react to what others are already doing.

For 2026, I’m excited to explore how we can leverage these insights to cultivate stronger customer loyalty. I want to understand more about omnichannel strategies, such as how to compete when customers can have everything delivered. And I’m curious about sustainability, not just because it’s trendy, but because I believe that it’ll be the table stakes for the next generation.

The convenience industry has always been about evolving, and these CFVG meetings have shown me that we are on the cutting edge of something bigger and better. We’re not just selling products and services anymore. We’re creating experiences, building relationships, and honestly, having a lot of fun doing it. Thanks for letting me share what we’ve learned so far, and thank you again, Brandon, for your mind-blowing presentation.

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you, Richard, Brandon, and Kris, for the great insights on the CFVG program. And also, a big thank you to our CFVG Ally Supporters: McLane, Upshop, and Ultimate Sales. We can’t do it without you.

The takeaway from the CFVG group was that, I think Kris summed it up very well at the end there, we are an experience business. It’s not just about the products; it’s about what customers experience when they come into our store, and we have to be ready to provide that experience when they walk in.

Poll No. 3: GLP-1

Roy Strasburger:

It is poll time again, and our third poll question is: Do you know anyone using a GLP-1 drug?

Something that’s kind of interesting that came out today is that Circana released a report saying that GLP-1 users tended to shop five times more often than non-users, because they’re looking for places to buy smaller portions. While I truly believe that GLP-1 drugs are going to be a major change in the way retail is affected, it’s not all doom and gloom. The convenience industry can be a great spot for people to pick up items that they’re looking for, like high-protein nutrition items, hydration and electrolytes, vitamins and supplements, hair care products, nausea relief and digestive support products. So, there are some areas, silver linings, that we can take advantage of.

Electric Vehicles Vision Group

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you for answering the poll, and now we’re going to move on to our next group, which is the Electric Vehicles Vision Group. This group is a little bit different from our other Vision Groups, which are mainly about convenience and the convenience channel. The EV Vision Group covers everyone across the whole ecosystem of electric vehicles, including retailers, car manufacturers, grid providers, electricity companies. We have an airport, we have a port in San Diego to talk about their electric vehicles, because electric vehicles don’t only include cars and bikes, they include boats and transportation for moving freight.

I will turn it over to Nathan Niese, who is our facilitator for the evVG. Nathan, take it away.

Nathan Niese:

I’m Nathan Niese, the global lead for electric vehicles at the Boston Consulting Group. It’s my pleasure to be a co-facilitator with Mike Austin for the Electric Vehicles Vision Group, or evVG as we like to call it. Now, evVG talks about everything related to electric vehicles. And this group’s a little different, as we’re comprised of EV experts from many different sectors, not just convenience retail, like the other Vision Groups.

evVG launched its first meeting in November of 2024 with a wide array of members from different areas. We’re talking about everyone who matters, from those making cars at Ford to those making batteries at CATL, to the people building charging networks at Shell Recharge and Love’s Travel Stops, to convenience retailers wondering how EVs will change their business, and to city planners figuring out where and how to place all this infrastructure.

We have explored topics ranging from electric grid capacity, to charging demand, to federal programs, to battery technology, and to what customers actually want.

The beauty is that when you get utility executives with automaker vice presidents, and convenience store operators, and policy makers, all talking together, you get the full picture, not just one slice of it.

Now let me turn it over to two of our members. We’ll have Deb Peck Kelleher and Gabe Klein walk you through more of the details of what evVG has focused on during the last year.

Deb Peck Kelleher:

Thanks, Nathan. I’m Deb Peck Kelleher, the deputy director at the Alliance for Clean Energy New York. We are a member-driven association that is the voice for clean energy in New York State. In addition to wind, solar, hydro, and offshore wind developers, ACE New York also has environmental organizations, labor, transmission, energy efficiency, and transportation electrification members.

Let me give you a brief overview of the issues that the EV Vision Group has been discussing.

Since our first meeting in November of 2024, we’ve covered four major areas that keep reoccurring in all of the meetings: policy changes, infrastructure, consumer behavior, and the economics of all of these pieces.

Starting with the November 2024 meeting, right after the election, we dove headfirst into how policy changes ripple through everything we do. The uncertainty was palpable. But Chris Normandeau from FirstService Energy asked us not to lose sleep over policy changes because the industry is moving forward one way or another.

At our February 2025 discussion, Karl Doenges from the Transportation Energy Institute walked us through the changing landscape of the new federal administration. His key insight was that while rhetoric and federal changes might slow the pace of EV growth, it won’t stop it. The momentum is already there.

At our most recent August meeting, we had probably the most sobering discussion yet. Nathan Niese from Boston Consulting Group explained how the 2025 budget reconciliation essentially takes us back to the pre-Inflation Reduction Act policy dynamics. His warning was stark. You’re looking at maybe a 2- or 3-year planning horizon because policy keeps shifting every congressional session.

In our April 2025 meeting, Garrett Fitzgerald from the Smart Electric Power Alliance explained how EV charging fundamentally differs from gas stations. He said charging integrates into your life rather than the other way around, which completely flips our traditional retail model.

I’m now handing it over to Gabe Klein, who will take us through more of EV Vision Group’s discussions. Thank you.

Gabe Klein:

Thanks, Deb. Hi, I’m Gabe Klein, the former executive director of the U.S. Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, and co-founder of CityFi, as well as, now, Adapt Impact, working on new models for public-private partnerships, working with cities, and much more. And it’s my pleasure to be a member of evVG.

Throughout our discussions, we kept coming back to the education gap. Darren Palmer from Ford Motor Co. pointed out that consumers seem to focus on extreme cases, or as we call them, edge cases. The possibility of running out of charge during that one long trip they may take per year, instead of realizing that for 500-mile trips, you’re stopping for 20 minutes anyway to grab coffee and use the restroom, so why not charge?

But here’s the thing: Srijata Chattopadhyay from Shell Recharge kept emphasizing that despite policy headwinds and slower adoption rates, there’s still a lot of optimism. EV owners are generally very satisfied. In fact, in my experience, over 94% say they will buy another EV. We just need to get more people over that initial hurdle. However, the money side keeps evolving.

Jessica Stoll Lowery from Climate Mayors explained how policy changes are hampering fleet timelines. Companies still want to have commercial EVs, but budgeting cycles are getting stretched.

Tom Healey from the Nouria Energy Company noted that incentive money directly impacts what type of charging equipment operators choose to install. And I would add, how soon they install it.

Jay Smith from Charge Ahead Partnership pointed out something crucial for retailers. Retailers are used to competition, but they need a level playing field. They can’t invest in areas where utility companies might have unfair advantages. I highlighted that, in my opinion, the federal government had probably put too much emphasis on fast charging and didn’t emphasize enough the mid-speed public charging that cities actually need and getting that in quickly.

Meanwhile, some DC Fast Chargers were failing 35% of the time, which was not exactly confidence-inspiring for customers or investors. The ChargeX Consortium, which the Joint Office spun up with three national labs, has dramatically improved those numbers for existing chargers, but, I noted, also impacted the design of new ones, which was equally important.

Also, NEVI is back up and running. And CFI grants are likely right behind them, and we’re seeing a few move already.

So, four big takeaways from all these conversations. First, this transition is happening regardless of policy changes, but it does affect the timeline, and that will keep shifting.

Second, consumer education is absolutely critical. We can’t just build infrastructure and hope people figure it out. They need to know where it is.

Third, the economics work best when everyone in the ecosystem understands their role, and then plays fairly.

Finally, work needs to continue to build out the electrical grid so the charge points can be installed wherever they’re needed with a sufficient supply of power. And I will note that the NEVI program often built out those really tough chargers where there wasn’t power. That’s another reason a lot of them would take a while.

The bottom line is this: The EV transition isn’t just about vehicles or charging stations. It’s about reimagining how energy, transportation, and retail all connect in people’s everyday lives, and I would say also schools and doctors, and all the things that people do every day. That’s exactly why these evVG conversations matter, because none of us can figure this out alone.

I always like to joke – well, it’s not really a joke – that it takes a village to build a charging station. Thank you.

Roy Strasburger:

Excellent. Thank you, Nathan, Deb, and Gabe, for giving us the report-out on the evVG. I think the main takeaway from our conversations are that while EVs are becoming more important, the internal combustion engines are going to be around for quite a while, so we’ve got another 20 or 30 years of hydrocarbons that we have to be able to deal with, and that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

Poll No. 4: EVs

Roy Strasburger:

It is now poll time again. Do you own an EV?

As we said, ICE vehicles are going to still be a big part of the market. There will be room for convenience stores and petroleum, but ultimately that we are going to have to switch over into more of an electrified grid for servicing EVs.

And a reminder that we will have a question-and-answer session at the very end of the Summit, so if you have any questions for Gerd that you’d like to put in the Q&A box, that is located at the bottom of your screen.

Conexxus Vision Group

Next, we’re going to hear from our Conexxus Vision Group. Now, the Conexxus Vision Group was a one-year project that we had with Connexus. We had four meetings with them, and we’re going to have a report-out on what we did with that group. Before that, we’re going to hear from the CxVG Ally Supporter Compliance Safe, and then we’ll turn it over to James Maxey, who was the facilitator of the Conexxus Vision Group.

[Compliance Safe ad plays]

James Maxey:

Good morning, everyone. I’m excited to introduce the Conexxus Vision Group, or CxVG.

CxVG has completed its one-year term, and during that time, we made some wonderful connections and produced some fantastic collaborative ideas. I would like to start by thanking Verifone for being a CxVG Ally Supporter. Special thanks to Paul Robertson, who’s from Verifone, for actively participating in the meetings, as well as our other Ally Supporter, Roy and Eva at Compliance Safe.

Since our formation in late 2024, we brought together a group of owners running single stores, presidents of 100 store chains, technologists and technology solution providers who are shaping our industry’s future. What makes this group so special is that the team is sitting around the same virtual table, sharing real-world challenges and identifying real-world solutions.

Our mission was simple: Turn theoretical technology discussions into practical, real-world applications. We met quarterly, three virtual meetings and one in person, to dive into the technology issues keeping convenience store technologists and leaders up at night. Thank you.

Kristina Anderson

Thanks, James. I’m Kristina Anderson, chief service officer with Midwest Petroleum Company. Over the past year, our CxVG discussions have covered everything from artificial intelligence to third-party delivery services. But before I dive into the details, let me give you the big picture of what we’ve been talking about.

We’ve essentially been asking ourselves: How do we bridge the gap between cutting-edge technology and the everyday realities of running convenience stores? Whether you’re managing one location or a hundred locations, the challenges are surprisingly similar: You need technology that actually works, tech that doesn’t break the bank, and tech that makes your operation more efficient and not more complicated.

Our very first meeting in November 2024 set the tone perfectly. We weren’t talking about fancy gadgets. We were talking about the basics that every retailer needs to master. The conversation quickly turned to data management. Babir Sultan from Favtrip was on the mark when he talked about making data reliable for employees, encouraging them to work smarter, not harder, through better data understanding.

And this theme carried into our April 2025 meeting on data-driven decision-making, where we saw a live demonstration from James and Babir on how operators can use accessible visualization tools.

The eye-opener came from myself when we shared how these days on hand inventory reports revealed that we had several weeks of inventory sitting in certain categories, numbers that were so shocking to us that we didn’t even initially believe them.

One thing that has become crystal clear across multiple meetings is that technology is only as good as the people using it.

In that first November meeting, Don Rhoads from The Convenience Group put it perfectly. We need to digitize training in a way that captures new hires for at least 3 months, making work engaging and fun so people actually want to keep showing up in the morning.

Speaking of Don, I’ll turn it over to him for additional thoughts. Don?

Don Rhoads:

Thank you, Kristina.

I’m Don Rhoads, president of The Convenience Group, located here in Vancouver, Washington State. And I want to discuss our January 2025 meeting first, on third-party delivery services.

It really opened everyone’s eyes to how customary behavior is shifting, especially among younger generations. Kristina made a crucial observation: These generations are trained to search online first, and we have to have a presence in this online space. But the reality check came from several operators.

Rob Razowsky from Rmarts shared how their DoorDash experiments barely reached $20 per order. While Lonnie McQuirter from 36 Lynn Refuel Station broke down the brutal math that you’re already giving 20% of your top line to DoorDash, then adding more percentage points to other services.

The digital engagement story continued in our June 2025 meeting on digital coupons, where we discovered something fascinating about customer communication. Babir Sultan shared how older customers with flip phones still remember the SMS promotions long after their apps have died, and highlighting some enduring power of the simple text messaging over complicated app-based solutions.

Here’s what I’ve learned over these discussions. The best technology solutions are often the simplest ones. Colin Dornish from CSD Solutions explained how PROSPR digital coupon initiative isn’t just another tech gimmick; it’s opening up entirely new funding streams from CPG companies that were never available to convenience stores before.

Rob Razowsky summed up what many small operators feel: As a retailer without an IT department and limited resources, this stuff needs to be scalable and easy to implement. And that’s what keeps us going, keeps us relevant, and lets us compete. Here’s some key takeaways that are shaping my thinking.

First, data democratization is real. Small operators can now access and use the same analytical tools that big chains have relied on for years. Second, customer communication is shifting back to the basics. While everyone’s chasing the latest app features, simple SMS messaging, straightforward digital tools often deliver better results than the complex forms that are in place today.

And third, the AI revolution in convenience stores won’t come from flashy bells and whistles, but more powerful operational improvements like better ordering systems, inventory management tools, and more effective staff scheduling.

And fourth, integration is everything; the days of standalone solutions are over. Whether it’s payment systems, loyalty programs, or digital platforms, everything needs to work together seamlessly.

So, while the Conexxus Vision Group has finished its planned run, I look forward to watching, hearing, reading, and working with the Convenience Technology Vision Group to continue to learn and explore topics like we did with our group. Thank you.

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you, Don, and thank you to James and Kristina for that report on the Conexxus Vision Group.

Poll No. 5: Digital ID

It’s time for our next poll: What percentage of people will be using digital ID by 2030? We know that’s being rolled out in some markets and some states, and so will that become a trend of the future?

I would now like to thank again all of our Ally Supporters: AisleAI, Safe, GK Software, Invenco, McLane, PriceEasy AI, Ultimate Sales, Upshop, Verifone, and our booster sponsor, CAF Outdoor Cleaning. And now, we’re going to hear a few words from CTVG Ally Supporters Invenco and GK Software, and then we’ll be hearing from Ed Collupy, the facilitator for the Convenience Technology Vision Group.

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Convenience Technology Vision Group

Ed Collupy:

Hello, everyone. I hope you’re doing well. I’m Ed Collupy, and I have the privilege of serving as facilitator for the Convenience Technology Vision Group since its inception in 2023. It’s great to be with you all today. Let me tell you a bit about this remarkable group.

CTVG brings together invited technology and operation leaders from across the convenience and mobility industry for our meetings. We’ve grown to become the largest, and I would say one of the most talkative of the Vision Groups. We’re always welcoming new voices, including several members who have joined us from the Conexxus Vision Group.

Our mission is straightforward but powerful: We harness the collective intelligence of retail technology leaders to advance our industry. Each quarter, we dive deep into the issues that matter most: artificial intelligence, point-of-sale systems, electric vehicle infrastructure, cyber security, foodservice technology, and more. I especially want to thank our long-time ally supporters, GK Software and Invenco, powered by Vontier, and our newest Ally Supporter, Compliance Safe, for their continued partnership and support. Their commitment, and that of other supporters, strengthen the work we do here.

What makes this group unique is that technology solutions thrive when shared and discussed collaboratively. We believe they work best when we learn from one another’s successes and challenges.

The real value comes from their candid voices, thoughtful questions, and shared insights. Today, you’ll hear from two of our retail members about the incredible breadth of topics we’ve tackled together and the valuable perspectives that have emerged.

I’m happy to be joined by two of our great CTVG members, who are going to review some of what we’ve discussed in our meetings: Erin Graziosi, president at Robinson Oil and operators of the Rotten Robbie stores in California, and Nick Peters, VP IT, Campbell Oil, operators of Minuteman Food Marts in the Carolinas. Erin?

Erin Graziosi:

Thank you, Ed. As a charter member of CTVG, I’ve been privileged to participate in discussions since our start in 2023. We’ve tackled the technology challenges facing convenience retailers today. We’ve explored AI, dissected POS system struggles, examined cybersecurity threats, and looked at future foodservice technology integration.

We’ve also covered digital transformation, mobile apps, loyalty programs, retail media networks, and emerging payment technologies. Let me share some of the key themes and takeaways that have shaped our industry conversations.

AI has been a reoccurring topic since the very first CTVG, and we’ve had some fascinating presentations.

In our September 2024 meeting, we heard from Randy Allen, a senior lecturer at Cornell S.C. Johnson College of Business, who presented research showing that the convenience industry is significantly lagging behind other retail sectors in AI adoption. While grocery and general merchandise retailers use AI for customer engagement and marketing, we’re primarily using it for back-end operations and HR functions. Ed Collupy captured it perfectly when he said companies that don’t use AI will soon be obsolete.

But as Greg Buzek from IHL Group reminded us in our January 2024 meeting, you can’t use AI on bad data. If you try to do an end around on bad data, you’re just going to create a worse forecast.

What’s particularly interesting is how our smaller retailers are approaching this. The Cornell study found that smaller retailers face significant challenges as they are often constrained by limited resources and rely heavily on third-party vendors for AI solutions. Many smaller IT teams are primarily focused on day-to-day operational issues, making large-scale AI implementations difficult without external help.

The attention among CTVG members to the problems facing retailers, from small to large, is a hallmark of the group and is reflected in the many practical applications discussed across all of our meetings. The consensus is clear. Start small, focus on data quality, and build from there.

A universally applicable tool in our industry is POS systems, and in our first meeting discussing POS in September of 2023, it was apparent that integration challenges and functionality was a critical industry frustration. We held a special breakout session in October of 2023 with five POS solution providers to address the challenges head-on.

Nick Peters from Campbell Oil Company, who you will hear from shortly, really hit the nail on the head when he talked about breaking apart payment systems from the point-of-sale setup. He thinks that a module approach would be spot on. But here’s the thing, the forecourt technology is just so old and quirky, it’s a real headache to deal with.

Skip Potter from RL Vallee shared his frustration with major oil companies. He said it’s one of their company’s biggest headaches because they know the POS software fixes are sitting there, ready to go, but they can’t get their hands on them because the major oil company won’t give the go-ahead.

The main takeaway here is the urgent need for POS system flexibility and faster innovation cycles. Retailers want the ability to choose the best-of-breed solutions without being held hostage by a lengthy approval process.

Our June 2023 meeting focused heavily on EV infrastructure, and we revisited it following the September meeting’s lightning round with a presentation on EV charging infrastructure. The takeaway? Most retailers are taking a strategic wait-and-see approach.

Jason Collins from Englefield Oil Company noted the challenge of competing with anyone that has real estate for NEVI grants.

Donnie Rhoads from The Convenience Group and Rance Wells from Toot’n Totum both indicated they are waiting for technologies to advance further, specifically looking for developments in quicker charging units and solid-state batteries before making major investments. The industry recognizes EV charging as inevitable but wants the technology to mature before committing significant resources.

We also tackled the very important foodservice category. Our March 2025 meeting was truly eye-opening, with presentations from Cameron Watt, president and CEO of InTouch Insight, and Robert Grimes, founder and CEO of the International Food and Beverage Technology Association.

Watt shared a stunning statistic: 72% of consumers now see c-stores as legitimate restaurant alternatives, up from just 45% in 2022. That’s almost a complete transformation in consumer perception in just 3 years.

But integration remains the biggest challenge. Sanjit Bajimaya from Loop Neighborhood admitted that he feels everyone’s pain. He said that with their legacy pumps, trying to deploy an order-ahead foodservice solution from the forecourt is far from seamless.

Robert Grimes also noted that frictionless and personalization have become the key buzzwords for 2025, emphasizing that technology should enable experiences rather than complicate them. Nick, please take it from here.

Nick Peters:

Hello, everyone, and thank you, Erin. I, too, am a charter member, and have benefited greatly from the CTVG conversations I’ve had with industry leaders.

During our December 2024 conversation, the meeting outlined cybersecurity trends. My key takeaway is that cybersecurity isn’t just about technology, it’s about policies, and really talking about training, and creating a culture of security awareness. Human risk management emerged as a top concern across these discussions.

Our September 2024 meeting was regarding the Sunrise 2027 project, and it featured Gena Morgan and Liz Sertl from GS1, explaining the transition from UPCs to 2D barcode technologies.

Shifting from a half century of UPC flat barcodes and transitioning to this new capability really represents a huge opportunity for enhanced customer experience and efficiency, because 2D barcodes can offer customer experience enhancements like, as an example, product improvement or product information, and much, much more. But it does require careful planning, and most importantly, vendor coordination.

We have until the end of 2027 when the retail industry must set the date to make the transition for acceptance of these new 2D barcode technologies with our point-of-sale systems.

One of the most timely and evolving topics we covered in a lot of meetings was digital engagement with our customers.

Our June 2024 discussion on retail media networks reveals that one-to-one marketing represents the future, but small retailers will face significant resource challenges. In June 2025, we talked through the future of digital identity and mobile credentials. This technology promises secure customer experiences, but Abhi Patel from Nouria Energy pointed out retailers are grappling with practical questions about customer adoption, technology investment, and staff training requirements.

And most recently, our September 2025 meeting examined how loyalty programs and mobile apps and social media are actually converging. The key insight? These channels serve different purposes and require different strategies.

Most of us agree that the app should focus on delivering value and loyalty benefits, while social media is better suited for storytelling and brand personality. The challenge of most retailers is integrating these disconnected systems to create a unified view of each customer across the store experience.

In almost every conversation, we’ve also seen how technology can either help or hinder employee experience. The gig economy and employee expectations are reshaping how we want to work, and our technology needs must adapt.

We explored everything from AI-powered schedules to the gamification of training, with members sharing how they’ve used employee-focused apps to build mobile solutions and improve retention and engagement.

Three things that I take away most from these meetings are: First, integration is everything. Whether it’s POS or actual food-system technologies, or even AI solutions, the ability to seamlessly integrate these technologies will separate the winners from losers. Second, employee experience drives customer experience. Technology that makes our members’ jobs easier and more fulfilling will ultimately create and curate more and better well-rounded experiences. Third, data is our competitive advantage. But it’s got to be clean, and it’s got to be actionable. And most importantly, it’s got to be protected. The companies that master data management will lead the industry.

Looking ahead, I’m eager to dive deeper into practical AI applications that smaller retailers can actually implement, and they can afford. We need to explore advanced inventory management technologies, like RFID, and effectively all the IoT sensors throughout the store that Ed mentioned earlier in the discussions. And frankly, I want to learn more about how to make all these technologies work seamlessly without breaking the bank.

The convenience industry is at an inflection point. The conversations happening at CTVG are helping us navigate all these transformations together. Because at the end of the day, we’re looking, and we’re not just talking about technology, we’re talking about the future of the industry, and we’re doing it as a community of our peers learning from each other. Thank you.

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you, Nick, and thank you also to Ed and Erin for your contributions. And as we heard, systems integration is the key. We’ve got to bring it all together into one system.

Poll No. 6: Digital Marketing

Roy Strasburger:

Now, for our next poll: Would personalized digital marketing in a store make you buy something, or make you feel uncomfortable?

For everybody that votes in every poll, we’ll put their name into a drawing and select 5 people to receive this book: “Supremacy” by Parmy Olson.

Convenience Leaders Vision Group

Roy Strasburger:

The next group that we’re going to hear from is the Convenience Leaders Vision Group, which is facilitated by VGN Co-Founder Myra Kressner. But before we hear from her, we’d like to listen to this message from our Ally Supporters for CLVG: Verifone, which is also a CxVG supporter, and Aisle AI.

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Myra Kressner:

Hello, it’s Myra Kressner back again. Besides being CEO of Kressner Strategy Group and co-founder of VGN, I also facilitate the Convenience Leaders Vision Group together with Roy Strasburger. I’m very pleased to introduce Convenience Leaders Vision Group, CLVG, to you today.

Since 2022, we have gathered some of the best minds in the industry and let the ideas flow. It’s significant that this group of CEOs, presidents, and c-suite leaders at our virtual table represent incredible diversity. Third-generation family business owners are sitting alongside corporate executives with hundreds or even thousands of stores. Small independents and industry giants are learning together and from each other. And they have one thing in common: They volunteered their time because they believe in sharing knowledge to make the entire convenience and mobility industry stronger.

CLVG doesn’t gather to create groupthink. Instead, they problem-solve, challenge assumptions, and look boldly toward the future. The conversations are authentic, candid, and incredibly valuable.

We also have to thank CLVG’s Ally Supporter Verifone and member, James Hervey, for participating and contributing to the quality discussions. And today, we welcome Aisle AI as a new CLVG 2026 Ally Supporter.

Now I’d like to turn things over to two of our highly valued CLVG members and people whom I also consider a friend who will share key insights from our quarterly meetings: Hal Adams, managing director with OXXO USA, and Annie Gauthier, CFO and CEO with Y-Not Stop and also NACS 2025 and 2026 chairperson.

Hal Adams:

Thank you, Myra, and hello. My name is Hal Adams, and I’m a veteran of the convenience and fuel retailing industry for the past 40 years, currently serving as the managing director for OXXO USA. One of the things that I love about our industry is the spirit of collaboration. And I suppose that’s why I’m an inaugural member of the Convenience Leader Vision Group, because it’s all about sharing ideas with industry veterans and leaders of companies large and small, with the spirit of learning from each other and lifting up the industry.

Annie and I would like to share a few of the themes that have emerged from the CLVG meetings.

I suppose we’ve discussed AI more than any other topic, and for good reason. During our June 2023 meeting, McKinsey & Company introduced us to AI’s potential in the convenience retail market.

October 2023, A2i Systems led a discussion about specific applications, like predictive fuel pricing and dynamic in-store pricing, with Kevin Smartt from TXB and Greg Parker from Parker’s Kitchen sharing real-world, innovative implementations that they are using every day in their stores.

Our January 2025 meeting with guest presenter Greg Busek from IHL Group was a real wake-up call for us all. He revealed that the convenience store industry is lagging behind other retail segments by dedicating only 10% of our IT budgets to AI. Busek put it perfectly: The retailers who embrace AI will be the winners, while those who resist change will be left in the dust.

But the success stories were compelling. Parker’s Smart Kitchen System uses AI to predict food sales with 94% to 95% accuracy. They can forecast how many chicken nuggets that they will sell in the next 15 minutes. Amazing!

We also focused on AI during our August 2025 call. Tracey Hughes at Wallis Companies, shared that their multilingual customer support bot for wholesale fuel customers have made a world of difference in their operations.

In January 2024 meeting, we tackled one of the industry’s largest concerns: becoming an employer of choice. After studying the Coca-Cola Research Council’s data from a survey of over 45,000 convenience store employees, the message was clear: Our people will make or break us.

Scott Hartman from Rutter’s emphasized the overwhelmingly positive impact his store managers can make in creating a positive employee environment. While I was able to share some of the great things that OXXO USA is doing to form an employee value proposition, which is just as important as focusing on our consumers.

The theme continued in our August 2025 meeting, when we studied academic partnerships and explored how universities could help develop talent pipelines and create innovation through capstone projects and hackathons.

That’s a lot of learnings. Now, I’ll turn it over to Annie, and she’ll share some of her thoughts from CLVG. Over to you, Annie.

Annie Gauthier:

Thanks, Hal. Hi, I’m Annie Gauthier. I serve as the CFO and co-CEO of St. Romain Oil Company down in Mansura, Louisiana. I also serve as the 2025-26 NACS Chairman of the Board. I’ve been involved with the Convenience Leaders Vision Group for the past 3 or 4 years now, and I’m going to touch on the key consumer trends and the energy and mobility disruptions that our industry faces.

Our April 2025 discussion on GLP-1 drugs was absolutely fascinating. Sherry Frey from Nielsen IQ presented data showing that 12% of Americans were on GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic by the end of 2024. These aren’t just weight-loss drugs; they’re fundamentally rewiring how people think about food and changing their eating priorities. Eva Strasburger called it possibly the biggest lifestyle disruptor in our lifetime.

Particularly notable was Hal Adams’ observation that when one person in a household changes their eating habits, two or three other family members often follow, eating more protein, fewer sweets, and focusing more on hydration. Think about what this means for our industry, one that’s built on impulse purchases and snack foods.

We first started discussing this trend back in October 2024, during our disruption meeting, where Eva first raised concerns about appetite-suppressing drugs disrupting traditional convenience store categories. At the time, it wasn’t even on the radar screen for most of us.

Our August 2024 meeting featured Mark Wohltmann from NACS Global presenting the Global Convenience Radar Screen, talking about what retailers are doing internationally. His key insight resonated with everyone. On every issue and opportunity, there’s always someone else in the world who is more advanced than you are. As Henry Armour likes to quote William Gibson: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”

On this call, we were able to learn from international guests, including executives from Parkland in Canada, Maxol in Ireland, and OXXO in Mexico, about different approaches to consumer experience and operational excellence.

Our October 2024 “Expecting the Unexpected” meeting was sobering. We covered natural disasters, cybersecurity threats, supply chain disruption, and future pandemics and how to prepare for them. Real uplifting meeting.

Troy Dickson from Parkland shared how they build from the ground up with comprehensive emergency action plans. Greg Parker admitted that Hurricane Helene caught them more unprepared than expected, despite their planning efforts.

And finally, we covered energy transition and sustainability. Our March 2023 meeting dove deep into EV charging models, examining site selection, customer behavior, and profitability models.

These early conversations helped to shape how members approach this transition. And our August 2025 discussion revealed mixed results, with Joe Hamza from Nouria noting that EV charging transactions are decreasing as more people charge at home.

We talked about sustainability in 2024 with a presentation by HFA Architecture showing us that environmental responsibility and profitability can align through cost-effective energy efficiency strategies. Scott Hartman from Rutter’s brought refreshing pragmatism, emphasizing realistic approaches to building construction that work for our bottom lines.

The meetings in this group have emphasized to us all that the pace of change is accelerating faster than ever. Whether it’s AI capabilities, consumer health trends, or global disruptions, companies that anticipate and adapt quickly will thrive, while those that wait will likely struggle.

Most importantly, these conversations prove that when our industry leaders share insights across company sizes and geographies, we all get stronger together. All of us at CLVG have been excited to explore how these themes continue to evolve, like using AI applications, our strategies for serving health-conscious consumers, and building resilient operations that can weather any storm.

The convenience industry is at an inflection point. We’re not just selling Cokes and smokes anymore. We’re essential community anchors, navigating unprecedented change. The future belongs to leaders willing to listen, learn, and adapt together. Thank you.

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you, Annie, and thank you to Myra and Hal, as well as our Ally Supporters Verifone and Aisle AI.

Poll 7: Pandemic

Roy Strasburger:

It’s now time for our seventh, poll. And this poll question is: If there is another pandemic before 2030, are you prepared? Not something that we want to think about, but something that we do need to anticipate. Thank you for answering that.

The Vision Group

Roy Strasburger:

We’re now moving on to our last Vision Group, The Vision Group, which is the one that has been together the longest and has a lot of information to share today. I will turn it back over to my Co-Founder Myra Kressner, who is the facilitator of this group.

Myra Kressner:

I’m Myra Kressner. If you did not pick that up from our introductions at the beginning of the summit, or our CLVG meeting that preceded this report, I am CEO of Kressner Strategy Group and also Vision Group Network co-founder.

Welcome to this report from The Vision Group, VGN’s original virtual forum, which we refer to as TVG. TVG launched in October of 2020 during the height of the pandemic, when everything was crazy and uncertain and there was nothing going on, no networking happening, everything just ground to a halt.

What started as an exploratory venture became something quite extraordinary. We brought together a diverse collective of problem solvers who initially met during the pandemic for two hours every other month and now meet several times a year to identify challenges, trends and disruptions, and brainstorming innovative solutions together.

TVG membership spans a broad swath of the retail and foodservice ecosystem, including convenience, grocery, and foodservice leaders, academic and technology innovators, futurists, and industry veterans who bring cutting-edge perspectives to each extraordinary conversation.

Since TVG’s formation five years ago, we’ve explored everything from global retail trends like 15-minute cities, to cybersecurity threats and Jetson-style predictions actually coming true. We’ve debated omnichannel retailing, phygital experiences, and how to create compelling customer destinations in an increasingly digital world.

Now, unlike our other Vision Groups, TVG doesn’t typically generate formal Vision Reports, although our discussions often shape and guide the themes for other Vision Group Network forums. TVG is the incubator laboratory where ideas are debated and launched, and further industry conversations take place.

Now, let me turn this over to two TVG members, also my good friends, Ray Huff and Frank Beard, who will share some of the group’s insights from the past five years.

Raymond Huff:

Thank you, Myra. I’m Raymond Huff, president of HJB Convenience. I’ve been part of The Vision Group since its inception. I can honestly say these compelling conversations have had an impact on how I think about my company and the future of retailing.

Over the past five years, TVG has tackled five major themes that are reshaping retail, technology and innovation, consumer behavior and demographics, economic and market forces, operational excellence, and future retail formats. Each discussion has revealed insights that are now playing out in real time across retail.

COVID shopping patterns revealed permanent shifts, starting from our very first meeting in October 2020. We saw convenience stores evolve from fuel-focused to destination retailers. Michael Sansolo with Sansolo Solutions recently shared data to confirm this. Convenience store acceptance as a legitimate restaurant alternative jumped from 45% in 2022 to 72% today. Nearly three-quarters of consumers now see c-stores as a viable food destination.

However, things turned sour for our frontline workers in 2021, as mask mandates polarized customers. In August of that year, Jesse Hirsh of Metaview’s Media Management guided us through the mental health crisis facing retailers during the pandemic, exploring how mask mandates and aggressive customers were driving turnover. The conversation revealed that labor shortages weren’t just about wages. It was about workers re-evaluating what they wanted from employment.

In that same meeting, Frank Beard, now with Rovertown, highlighted how Enterprise Rent-A-Car successfully rebranded entry-level positions as management training opportunities, asking whether convenience stores could similarly call cashiers “management trainees” to signal career growth potential.

Labor market challenges dominated our June 2021 discussions when Mark Samuels from Dash In, now a member of CLVG, predicted that the $15 minimum wage would happen through market forces, not government mandate. He was right. Mark explained how government subsidies were keeping workers home, creating what he called a soft labor force. By April 2022, Mark reported that Dash In had achieved 83% employee satisfaction and reduced turnover from 178% to 126%, proving that investing in workforce pays dividends.

In October 2022, Eva Strasburger spoke about the concept of phygital retail, where digital tools enhance physical store experiences. Our omni-channel and phygital retail discussion showed us that success isn’t choosing between digital and physical, it’s seamless integration. We learned from Sephora’s model where customers research in-store, compare online, then return to purchase, all supported by unified technology.

Our February 2023 meeting brought insights from Kris Klinger with Boston University talking about Saxbys student-run model on campus, which fully staffed 60-plus positions in under 60 days by creating environments where students wanted to work for students. Saxbys founder, Nick Bayer, joined us in April 2023 to explain their student CEO program proving that treating young workers as future leaders rather than temporary labor solves the Gen Z engagement challenges.

Eva Strasburger also shared a Gallup poll showing 79% employee disengagement in companies, with the majority being workers under 30. The solution: Focus on inspiration and purpose, rather than just processes. TVG member Tim Tang from Hughes Network Systems cautioned us about treating Gen Z as a homogeneous group, emphasizing the need to understand diverse segments within the demographic, from wealthy to struggling students, from idealists to those just seeking stability.

In January 2024, the Coca-Cola Research Council, represented by Michael Sansolo, who is CCRC’s director of research, emphasized creating clear career pathways through community college partnerships showing entry-level employees how convenience retail can lead to sustainable careers.

Our technology discussions began with healthy skepticism and evolved into strategic planning. Artificial intelligence appeared as our most critical topic in June 2022. We discovered that convenience retail is lagging behind other sectors in AI adoption. The key insight: Don’t wait for perfect data infrastructure. Tim Tang stressed in that meeting that AI can optimize daily decisions and forecasting, even with imperfect data, focusing on large-scale pattern recognition for operational efficiency.

In 2022, James Farwell, information warfare national security cybersecurity expert, elevated cybersecurity from an IT concern to a corporate governance issue, revealing that email scams account for over half of the data breaches. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine dominating headlines, Farwell also addressed potential cyberattacks on 16 critical U.S. infrastructure sectors, urging members to consider how their operations might be impacted by disruptions to energy, transportation, or food systems.

In that year, Tim Tang warned about biometric lawsuits hitting McDonald’s and ADP for $50 million in settlements. We explored everything from payment card vulnerabilities to social media manipulation, learning that data security isn’t just IT, it’s customer trust protection. Thank you. Frank, over to you.

Frank Beard:

Hi, I’m Frank Beard, head of marketing at Rovertown. I just want to take a few minutes to unpack a few of the themes and topics that we’ve been discussing in past meetings of The Vision Group.

One topic that continues to come up, especially amidst the global economic uncertainty discussions throughout 2021 and 2022, and more recently, discussion about tariff impacts and cryptocurrency growth, is this idea that fuel and convenience retailing represents stability in an economy where the narratives are maybe too often influenced by hype and speculation.

For example, Brandon Lawrence with Fuel Insight emphasized in our March 2025 meeting how important the physical economy matters, especially when you have digital trends that sometimes seem, or at least feel, disconnected from the actual needs and behaviors of consumers.

Another topic, though, that’s really come up a lot, as early as September 2024, but also in more recent discussions that we had in March, it was mentioned that GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, really do reveal this potential revolution in food consumption. Eva Strasburger had noted that her research suggests that as many as 30 million Americans might be using these medications by 2030, which would fundamentally alter portion sizes and eating patterns for a very meaningful percentage of our population.

Roy Strasburger had also suggested that retailers might want to start considering how they would respond to this, like, do you incorporate shareables into your menus? Do you offer smaller portions at higher prices? It’s a topic that I don’t think’s probably going to go away anytime soon.

Speaking of food, though, foodservice innovation is a frequent focus in our conversation, such as December 2022, when Rob Grimes from the International Food and Beverage Association had reported on his company’s FS/Tech 2050 meeting, where they explored how robotics and even predictive analytics could reshape foodservice.

The Aldi effect also became a case study in operational discipline in our March meeting. Roy Strasburger observed how Aldi’s efficiency measures, like UPC codes on four sides of packages, show how small operational improvements can actually create massive competitive advantages.

Michael Sansolo also explained how by limiting choice to, let’s say, maybe one balsamic vinegar instead of 35 varieties, is one way that Aldi’s been able to eliminate a lot of decision fatigue, while at the same time keeping their customers very happy.

And I think we all can feel the need to get rid of decision fatigue in grocery stores. So, it’s interesting. But on that note, supply chain resilience discussions during our June 2021 meeting had also revealed the importance of just staying flexible and looking for local sourcing options during the pandemic.

Mark Samuels shared a really interesting example of how Dash In had received dozens of letters from their manufacturers, who just weren’t able to deliver staple items like Slim Jims. It’s a really good reminder that efficiency alone is not always enough, and that adaptability is what really matters when it comes to navigating those kinds of disruptions.

Fast-forwarding to some big ideas. In December 2021, Joe Bona from Bona Design Lab showcased global innovation from SPAR’s 170-square-foot portable mini-markets on barges, all the way to various implementations of autonomous checkout in the UAE. But the key idea he really emphasized, though, is that technology should ultimately enhance, not replace, the human elements that make a difference in retail, which is a theme that really continues to come up in frequent conversations, or in recent conversations around automation and also retail tech.

In a related discussion on 15-minute cities, urban transportation came up in August 2022 when we really had a deep dive on European models for how to integrate retail and transportation. If you’re not familiar, the idea of a 15-minute city is that they aim to create walkable urban hubs where all essential amenities are within a short distance of home, rather than just requiring people to get in the car every time they need something.

It’s a concept that won’t go away anytime soon, especially as more Americans question the value of long commutes, zoning laws that separate businesses from neighborhoods, and so on and so forth. And, quite frankly, as people travel and see walkable communities in other countries.

Moving forward, though, Bruce Reinstein from Kinetic 12 led us through the evolving foodservice landscape in May 2024, when he showed how convenience stores can further elevate their culinary game to really compete with QSR standards. He explored how equipment innovations, menu engineering, and operational simplification could transform c-stores into more legitimate foodservice destinations that can provide a compelling alternative to fast food and fast casuals. The discussion reinforced that customers really are interested in food that goes way beyond the roller grill and satisfies actual legitimate day part needs.

The future of transportation, though, does continue to be a frequent topic in our meetings, and in April 2021, John Eichberger from the Transportation Energy Institute really reinforced the idea that EVs are maybe not the revolution they’ve often been said to be, especially when we’re staring at decades of liquid fuel cells ahead. Retailers, however, are in a unique position, because while some, on one hand, may see opportunities in chasing first mover advantages, on the other hand, many are now speaking publicly about the low adoption and what they’ve seen as lack of ROI on chargers.

In another EV charging conversation in August 2022, Eva Strasburger had also pointed out something really interesting, where she was discussing how the EV driver tends to stay in their cars more often while they’re charging, which creates a different dynamic and creates a new set of challenges for tracking them into stores.

More recently, though, in September 2025, Michael Offerman, the senior director of strategy at Cactus, had taken us through a deep dive on how a few really innovative organizations are just constantly pushing the envelope when it comes to specific areas, such as the Mayo Clinic and their use of robotics, or Hilton, and the way that they’re trying to build out a loyalty program that really sticks with consumers. We also had a really interesting debate about, could smartphones one day be obsolete, as maybe smart glasses or some sort of other wearable tech hardware starts to take its place? I don’t know.

In that same September meeting, we also heard opinions about how Gen Z’s decreased car ownership and their strong adoption of rideshare tech like Uber and Lyft could also potentially have an influence on traffic patterns.

We discussed how retail tech will also increasingly focus on invisible operational enhancements that empower employees, as opposed to maybe flashy customer-facing innovations, especially as you can argue that the diminishing returns past a certain point tend to make incremental improvements and stuff like faster checkout times potentially economically unjustifiable.

But I think if you take a step back and look at these discussions, there’s really a common thread running through everything, and it’s that progress rarely moves in straight lines. Technology, consumer behavior, the economic forces behind them, they intersect in very unpredictable ways, and what looks like a disruption today can often evolve into something way more nuanced tomorrow, or maybe even in hindsight, prove to be a distraction that never quite shook out.

I think our role is just to stay adaptable, stay curious, and most importantly, maybe stay connected. The Vision Group really provides a space to do that. It’s to exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, and maybe leave each session with more perspective than you had going in.

Personally, I found it enjoyable and valuable. I’ve been involved since the early days, and it keeps me plugged into conversations with peers throughout the year and gives me a chance to talk about those big ideas, and maybe go beyond whatever’s on my desk that week.

But I think one of the things that makes our industry special is we do have these conversations, people are willing to share their insights and perspectives, even when they might technically be competitors or disagree. But bringing diverse viewpoints together, giving each other permission to disagree, making it clear that respectful debate’s welcome, that’s valuable in and of itself, especially in today’s world. So, as the conversations continue, so do the insights, and in our own small way, I think they help each of us tackle our industry’s biggest challenges together. Thank you.

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you, Frank, and thank you, Ray, and thank you, again, Myra. We appreciate your input and some great ideas. TVG has a lot of thoughts from spending a lot of time together, so we appreciate them sharing that with us.

Poll No. 8: Automated Stores

Roy Strasburger:

For our next poll question: Do you prefer to shop in a walk-out automated c-store, or a traditionally staffed c-store? What is your preference on retail engagement?

So we’ve now heard from all of our Vision Groups. Please be sure to ask any questions you may have. We’ll get into a Q&A with Gerd right after the next session.

In Summary …

Roy Strasburger:

The next session is a summary of what we’ve seen of the seven Vision Groups that you’ve heard from today. And the presenter for this one will be Eva Strasburger.

Eva Strasburger:

What a remarkable journey we’ve just seen. Seven Vision Groups, dozens and dozens of industry leaders, and countless hours of conversation, all focused on one question: What does the future of convenience and mobility retail look like?

After listening to these presentations, we’re struck by how the conversations happening in Germany, gas stations in Oklahoma, and tech labs in Silicon Valley are all remarkably similar. We’re all grappling with the same fundamental shifts. And the insights emerging from the Vision Group Network paint a clear picture of where we’re headed.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: artificial intelligence. Every single Vision Group discussed AI, from The Vision Group’s early skepticism, yes, we were skeptics, evolving into strategic necessity, to the tech group’s warning that companies that don’t use AI will soon be obsolete.

The Convenience Leaders Group discovered we’re dedicating only 10% of our IT budgets to AI, while the foodservice group showed us that AI can improve daily decisions, even with imperfect data. That’s good to know.

But here’s what’s fascinating: The global group’s discussions revealed that successful AI implementation isn’t about replacing humans; it’s about enhancing human capabilities. And a very compelling insight came from Convenience Leaders Group, where we learned that Parker’s Kitchen’s AI-powered smart kitchen predicts food sales with 94%-95% accuracy, forecasting chicken tender demand 15 minutes out. That’s really amazing.

The message is clear: The AI revolution isn’t coming; it’s right here. And it’s not about flashy robots. It’s about boring but powerful operational improvements that solve real problems.

Perhaps the most striking theme across all our groups was the dramatic shift in consumer behavior. The foodservice group reported that convenience store acceptance as a legitimate restaurant alternative jumped from 45% in 2022 to 72% today. That’s not a gradual change. That’s a complete reimagining of what we represent to customers.

But a plot twist came from multiple groups discussing GLP-1 medications, like Ozempic. The Convenience Leaders Vision Group noticed that 12% of Americans were on these drugs by late 2024, with projections reaching 30 to 50 million users by 2030. The Vision Group called it possibly the biggest lifestyle disruptor in our lifetime.

When just one person in our household changes their eating habits, two or three family members often follow. Think about what this means for an industry built on impulse purchases and snack foods. We’re not just selling differently. We’re selling to fundamentally different appetites. The groups consistently emphasized that we’re transitioning from the convenience business to the experience business.

The foodservice group discovered that every smell, sound, and sight matters more than we realize. Nobody wants to walk into a store and smell chicken, and more importantly, nobody wants to leave it smelling like chicken.

Meanwhile, the electric vehicles group taught us that EV charging integrates into your life rather than the other way around, completely flipping our traditional retail model. The Conexxus group reinforced that the best technology solutions are often the simplest ones, with SMS messaging sometimes delivering better results than complex app platforms. That’s great to know, and great for our budget.

Every group stressed that integration is everything, whether it’s POS systems from the tech group discussions, foodservice technology from the foodservice group, or the seamless digital-phygital experiences explored by The Vision Group. The ability to connect different technologies will separate winners from losers.

The Conexxus group put it perfectly. The days of standalone solutions are over. Whether it’s payment systems, loyalty programs, or delivery platforms, everything needs to work together seamlessly.

Meanwhile, the global group reminded us that while challenges are global, solutions must be local. What works in Switzerland might miss the mark in South Africa. Yet the fundamental shifts, like health-conscious consumers, technology adoption, and changing demographics are universal themes requiring locally adapted responses.

So, what should you remember from today?

First, the pace of change is accelerating faster than ever. Companies that predict and adapt quickly will thrive. Those that wait will struggle.

Second, we’re not just selling products anymore. We’re creating experiences, building relationships, and solving problems customers didn’t know they had.

Third, technology is not replacing human judgement. It’s making our decisions smarter, and our operations more efficient. The winners will use technology to enhance human capabilities, not to replace them.

Fourth, health and wellness trends will fundamentally reshape food consumption. Plan for smaller portions, premium experiences, and customers with completely different appetites.

Finally, integration and collaboration matter more than individual brilliance. Though individual brilliance is not bad, the retailers thriving 5 years from now, will be those who connect systems, people, and experiences seamlessly.

As we look towards 2026, We’re most curious about three things: How do we scale AI solutions to work for operators of all sizes? What happens when autonomous delivery becomes mainstream and fundamentally changes customer expectations? And perhaps most importantly, how do we keep that human connection in an increasingly automated world?

The future isn’t something that happens to us. It’s something we actively shape through today’s conversations and tomorrow’s bold decisions. The Vision Group Network has shown us that when diverse perspectives come together to tackle our industry’s biggest challenges, extraordinary insights appear.

So, the conversations continue, and the best is yet to come. Thank you.

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you, Eva, and thanks for the great summary of the presentations. As Eva says, the future isn’t something that happens to us, we shape it through our decisions. And that’s something that, at the Vision Group Network, we’re trying to help people understand their decisions and the ramifications of their decisions as we go along.

Poll No. 9: AI Chatbots

Roy Strasburger:

Our next-to-last poll question is: How often do you use AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Claude?

Poll Results

Roy Strasburger:

In just a moment, we are going to welcome back our keynote speaker. Gerd Leonhard will be joining us live. If anybody has any questions, please put it in the question-and-answer section. But right now, we’re going to do a run-through of the polling, and see what everybody’s thoughts were.

The first, polling question based on Gerd’s keynote: Do you support the development of artificial general intelligence? Basically, we saw a 50-50 split. We have half the people who are excited about it, half the people are concerned. I think that actually is not a bad reflection of what’s going on in the real world.

Question No. 2: Will AI and/or robotics reduce your staff count by 2030? The answer is yes; 55% said yes, 45% said no. From that, maybe we can conclude that there’s not going to be a whole lot of staff reduction.

Question No. 3: Do you know anyone using a GLP-1 drug? 81% of people know somebody who is using one. 19% don’t know the people who they know are using it. That fits the statistics we’ve been hearing in each of our groups. That’s good.

No. 4: Do you own an EV? 79% of respondents said that they do not. There’s still a big market for them out there, and adoption will take place over time. But there’s still going to be a market for hydrocarbon vehicles for quite a while.

No. 5: What percentage of people will be using digital ID by 2030? More than 50% or less than 50%? And we had a 50-50 answer on that, so I guess it’s a bit of a coin toss as to how the adoption rate of digital IDs will take place.

No. 6: Would personalized digital marketing in a store make you buy something, or make you feel uncomfortable? Sixty-four percent of respondents thought that personalized digital marketing in a store would help them make a buying decision.

No. 7: If there is another pandemic before 2030, are you prepared? Fifty-five percent said no; 45% said yes. So, that’s something to think about. Hope we won’t need to, but you never know.

No. 8: Do you prefer to shop in a walkout automated c-store, or a traditionally staffed c-store? The overwhelming majority at 75% prefer a traditional staffed c-store over 25% who want a walkout automated c-store, which is very interesting. Quite a result, I think.

And No. 9: How often do you use AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Claude? Six percent said never, 33% said occasionally, and 62% of respondents said one or more times per day. So, it’s gaining in use and popularity.

Thank you for answering the poll questions. If you answered all of the questions, you will be in the drawing to receive this book, “Supremacy,” by Parmy Olson, and we will be sending that out after the summit is over.

Q&A with Gerd Leonhard

Roy Strasburger:

Now, I’d like to welcome back to the stage our keynote speaker, Gerd Leonhard.

Gerd Leonhard:

Hello, everybody.

Roy Strasburger:

Gerd, you’ve had the chance to watch the Summit today and see what the polling results were. What are your initial thoughts and ideas about that?

Gerd Leonhard:

Yes, hello everybody. It’s great to be back. Great event, very informative, I learned a lot, which is good. In regard to the summary, I think what’s happening is that we have huge uncertainty about most things.

This is why we have 50-50 poll results, right? If it was more polarized, there would be less uncertainty. So, it’s quite safe to say that there are many confusing trends. And they’re all running on top of each other. And so, I think we need to understand that all the questions are really about cultural, social and generational differences. For example, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like the elevator talking to me when I go up or down, you know? So, I don’t really care [for a lot of technology in use] in the store. If a machine talks to me, I don’t care for it. I don’t really like it.

But then you have other people my age who are happy to jump in and adapt everything that technology has to offer. This is why I think we’re going to face a lot of fragmentation, which we so far haven’t had in convenience. There are going to be stores that are fragmented in certain areas, most likely the more alternative places to live, like Austin, for example. In that city, you have entirely different products and services – tofu sandwiches and God knows what else – that would not work at all in some other place. This fragmentation is new. Consumers are not going to eat the same rice crackers or chips or drinks in different places across the country. It’s going to be highly fragmented, and that means you have to really know your audience, and you have to specialize. And that also goes for age groups. If you’re going to serve kids from 12 to 18, the store will look different. And fragmentation is the key also to find out what exactly what kind of audience do I have here?

The same question goes for AI. I think we have to realize that AI is a general-purpose technology, like the printing press, like the internet, like the mobile phone, and probably bigger, more like fire, you could say, and that will change everything. But it will not change fundamentally what it means for us to be human.

I think it will have impact on us and how we behave. But in many cases, we may actually say, okay, I want to retain this thing that makes me human, which is other humans, and maybe humans will become a premium product, so to speak. Maybe I’ll pay more to go to a store that’s run only by humans. So, we have to be careful with this techno-optimism. Technology will solve many problems, but a lot of problems aren’t really about technology. They’re really about culture, and so the opportunity is also about culture. And the culture is changing, and that’s what makes it confusing. It’s tempting to want to have all the answers be black or white, but they’re not.

Like I said in my speech, when we invest in technology, we should invest in technology that solves real-life, practical, applicable problems, like analytics, like prediction modeling, like understanding your data, like getting the drivers to be more coordinated, and so on, and so on, and so on. So there are many low-hanging fruits that we can tackle, even if we don’t have a big IT budget, rather than trying to bring “digital humans” to your store. That may be shooting too high. That’s my first reaction and feedback.

Roy Strasburger:

It also seems that unlike a lot of past developments – let’s think about the Industrial Revolution – the digital or technology revolution seems to be dragging people with it going in a certain direction. For example, probably 10% of the retail stores that I go into do not accept cash anymore. You can only pay in a digital manner. You either have to use your phone or a credit card. And that’s forcing people into a digital lifestyle that they may not have taken the first time around.

Since technology is much more on the back side of how things are developing, is technology leading us, as opposed to us leading technology to where we want it to go?

Gerd Leonhard:

I will cite theorist Marshall McLuhan from 1973. He said, first we build technology, and then technology builds us. So that’s kind of what’s happening. I think that how we adopt technology is subject to pivot points. Like I said in my speech earlier, we have to find that pivot point. When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, the music and media business on mobile devices and streaming took off. That was a trigger.

And we have those triggers in convenience stores. One of the triggers is electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles. But again, it’s fragmented; there will be strong pockets of adoption in some areas and less so in others. For example, in Berkeley, California, or Austin, Texas, we’ll have more electric vehicles and more autonomous vehicles, and other areas we won’t. But generally speaking, it is a very serious trend that we have to look at in a very close timeframe. It’s more like five years rather than 10 years. So, we have to look for those trigger points.

One other trigger point that was mentioned earlier was maybe misidentified. It’s not GLP-1, or any of those medications. It’s that people will care more about their health in general, across the board, and we have to adapt to that. We won’t be eating a lot of things that we used to eat 20 years ago when I went to 7-Eleven or another c-store. This is definitely declining for a lot of reasons, and we have to up the ante as far as the quality of food is concerned.

And this is not just about the stores. It’s about the entire food industry adapting to this. I do a lot of work for Nestle and other big consumer companies, and they’re realizing there’s a whole new direction. People drink more water and less beer, and that is just the reality of things. And this is going to get much, much more pronounced as people age. I’m able, for example, to order remotely, with remote deliveries or drones, while young people will go somewhere to meet. These are changes to our behavior, and I think there’s a lot of opportunities in that. It’s not that people won’t buy from convenience stores; it’s just that they will do it by differing means.

Roy Strasburger:

One of the challenges we have in the convenience sector is making sure that we attract customers. And as we heard through a couple of the groups today, it’s a lot about experience, or what we used to call retail theater. We try to think about what the customer experience is when they come into the store. Do you see AI and/or robotics enhancing that aspect of the customer experience, not just about the products and such, but ways that we can use it to become a destination for customers because they like the experience, because of the technology?

Gerd Leonhard:

Yes, I think just like with digital payments, people get used to using technology, scanning the code and finding the nutritional information, or having an augmented reality app that does that, or wearing glasses that I can see the product details. I will go to a store, and I will be able to see where it comes from and what it actually means when I eat it.

All these kinds of things are practical, and they’re not really that big of a technical challenge. It’s more of a behavior challenge, like making payments with a mobile. When did that take off? Really, it was because of COVID. And then, because it’s just absolutely everywhere in terms of availability, we’ve reached a trigger point. And people are not that concerned about tracking of payments overall. That is still a major issue, although it has subsided a little bit. So, I think when we’re looking at that tracking point and looking at what AI will be offering, it will be mostly about small steps in certain directions, rather than I’m going to have a robot that I speak to or doing the cooking. I don’t believe the cooking bots are quite ready for action on the large scale, except for really simple tasks. In the fast-food places, yes, because that’s what they do, and that’s all they do. But in the convenience store, I think it’s going to be more of helper applications, to make people feel welcome.

And again, fragmentation is the challenge. Some people will love it, others will hate it, and people won’t come back if they feel treated like an algorithm. And other ones will like it a lot because it’s hip. In Japan, people love this kind of technical role-play, for example, with the whole culture around the cartoon culture and the cosplay culture and these kinds of things. That would probably not work very well in Chicago. It’s just something that we have to evaluate to see how real it gets.

Roy Strasburger:

Well, you’ve mentioned fragmentation a couple times, and you mentioned it in your presentation. It’s the idea that technology is leading us to social fragmentation. There are examples of social isolation, of people getting involved in technology as opposed to interacting socially. There is a fragmentation of technology haves and have-nots, people who can afford or have access to technology versus those that can’t. Are you seeing that getting more divisive over time, or do you think that we’re going to reach a trigger point where things start moving back to a more socially cohesive structure?

Gerd Leonhard:

Yes. The addiction model in technology has been well tried and tested in social media. The idea that I need to always share and post to be important and to feel important, that is basically an addiction model. As we know from other addictions, like smoking, drinking, and so on, we don’t outlaw all of them, we just make sure that you don’t go overboard. You can go overboard if you choose to, but most people don’t, because there are social contracts and there are rules.

On the other hand, we’re going to start protecting minors and children from a lot of abusive ways of using social media, because clearly one of the main categories of ChatGPT and other bots now is that people ask the bot about self-help and advice. That’s a huge category now. It’s not just 5%; it’s more like 30%. And I think that is very dangerous for teenagers, for example. And as we have in many countries around the world, like in France, you cannot have a mobile phone in the classroom when you’re 10 years old. It’s got to be off.

I don’t know if that’s the right approach. It’s restrictive to me. But on the other hand, we’re also going to have to protect what makes us human, which is the social contract, the interaction. And I think, in some cases, we may be better off to backpedal a little bit on the technology drug, so to speak, to have people have more real-life interactions. But then we also have to be more patient, right?

Now if I write a letter, I go to ChatGPT, and the letter is done 14 seconds later. But you can’t live in a world where you don’t spend any effort. If you don’t spend any effort, you get nothing out of it. You become cookie-cutter.

So, I would very much warn against the cookie-cutter approach, because it wears thin very quickly. That goes for marketing materials, online viral videos, writing text. If you send 47 emails to your customers with a variation of some text that ChatGPT wrote, you don’t have to wonder why they don’t like you.

It’s sort of a give-and-take situation. I would look for the low-hanging ideas and just punch those first and improve the things that were wrong for a long time, like unavailability, lack of scheduling possibilities, and on and on and on. All those things are really obvious.

Roy Strasburger:

I agree, and we need to go with the low-hanging fruit and work with the things that we can.

To go back to your presentation a little bit, you mentioned several revolutions that you see as coming, and some of those were the purpose revolutions, the sustainability revolution, the geopolitical revolutions that are going on. How do those revolutions happen when somebody else, like the technology people, control the information that underlies those various revolutions? It’s somebody else guiding what you see and what you don’t see, very similar to what you may think happens in political contests of what information you see and what information you don’t see to help you make a decision. So are our technology overlords using the technology drug to help us move things in one way or the other that supplants what the average person would want to do?

Gerd Leonhard:

Well, we clearly need a bit of a reset here on this topic of technology, in that I think a lot of technology companies are implying that a sort of dehumanization is good. We can save costs because we have less humans. But then if we’re less human, what’s the point? Then we have fewer customers. If a lot of routine jobs are replaced by machines, which is very likely, then who’s going to be the customer if the truck driver is no longer driving? This is not their concern; it’s really our societal concern. It’s a bit like the oil and gas industry for a long time knew that climate change was a result of the emissions. But it was somebody else’s problem.

So, I think the technology industry needs to be accountable and needs to understand that this is about more than selling their software. There’s more responsibility. When everything becomes technology, they become a lot more responsible. The current political climate is a little bit like if we’re going gangbusters with investments, we want our money back. And that could potentially be a little bit dangerous when we think about not looking at the side effects, just like oil and gas.

We have to be a little bit wiser here. This is why I’m supporting, for example, the initiative to apply rules to superintelligence, as well as regular rules. You could see in the past that every innovation that had standards and regulations and guardrails and social contracts did well. And everything that wasn’t standardized and that went crazy did not do so well, with one exception, and that, of course, is social media, because, again, the addiction factor is so high there. It’s very unhealthy, and you could say that social media is probably the most toxic factor in our media landscape today.

I think we’re going to go back to the near future – I call this a human renaissance – to saying, okay, maybe we should fund more public media again. Maybe the PBS model, after all, is a good thing, to have people who work there who don’t get paid with ads. Instead they get paid with funds, with real money. I think a lot of these things will shake out as we go over the top with digital media, and we may find our way back to a re-humanization.

We should not forget when you go to a store, you want not just the experience of the best food, you [also] want the experience of other people. And we should not remove that. We should make a really good, exciting mix. But then again, like I said earlier, it’s a cultural question. It depends on what people like, right? In Japan, this would work, but that’s not going to work in the U.S. And what works in Switzerland is extremely human. We reject people at the checkout being replaced by machines in Switzerland because we like the people. And we have the money to pay them. So we have to keep in mind what cultural mission do we have with our location, and who’s there.

Roy Strasburger:

It’s taking a step back in the technology. To one of your examples, it’s like moving away from music streaming services and getting into vinyl records and buying the albums again, so that you have the experience and the feeling of actually playing the music and having the album cover art as part of that experience. And then you have to get up every 15 minutes to change the record over to the next side.

Gerd Leonhard:

I would not be that retro. I don’t have a vinyl player. I love Spotify. I think it’s a great thing for everybody. But it does commoditize to a certain degree, and when you commoditize, you have side effects. So, one thing you don’t want for your store, you don’t want that to be a commodity. Even though you may be selling commodity items, you want this to be unique in some way or the other as to what you offer, what the vibe is, so to speak. This is why Starbucks has been, in the past at least, so successful. It’s not the coffee; it’s the vibe. It’s the whole [experience]. We have to keep that in mind.

Roy Strasburger:

One last question or point to discuss before we wrap up. One of the tendencies we’ve been seeing is that when EV drivers go someplace to recharge their vehicle, they tend to stay in their vehicles, possibly because of the technology drug making them want to play games or stay on their emails. Is there a way of using apps or some type of technology-driven incentives that could get them to get out of their car and go into a store? Do you have any ideas on that one?

Gerd Leonhard:

It’s all about incentives, really. Get out of the car and go inside because it’s warmer or give me a free cup of coffee. Maybe I’ll meet other people who are charging the same car that I have, someone with shared experience. Then I have incentive to move. Otherwise, I stay in the car and do my emails.

That is a concern. I don’t think it’s a big concern. It’s just like GLP-1. I don’t think GLP-1 is as big of a concern as we think. It’s a drug. It does require behavior change. You can’t take GLP-1 for the rest of your life just because you haven’t changed your behavior, you know? So we’re not there yet. I think people drinking less, not smoking, being more healthy, and reading the label is a much bigger trend than GLP-1, in my view. It just all comes together, and I think there’s ways to master this. It will be gradual, and in some places it will be extreme. Some towns have lots of EVs compared to others. But generally speaking, it is a gradual thing. If you graphed the acceptance of EVs, it would accelerate in a hockey-stick shape, and then one day it’s just there.

Roy Strasburger:

Well, Gerd, thank you very much for your time today, for participating with us, and for sharing your insights with us. We really do appreciate it.

Gerd Leonhard:

You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure.

Roy Strasburger:

Alright, Gerd, thank you very much.

Gerd Leonhard:

Thank you.

VGN Academic Partnership

Roy Strasburger:

For our last session, we’re going to have Robert Hampton talk to us a little bit about the Vision Group Network Academic Initiative. Robert, we’re going to let you come on board.

Robert Hampton:

Hello, everyone. My name is Robert Hampton, and I am with Eagle Consulting Network. I’ve been working with the Vision Group Network since March on a number of projects, including this virtual summit. Today, I’m going to talk about a project that we have been working on behind the scenes, which is the Vision Group Network Academic Partnership.

We’ve been looking at ways to partner with academic institutions to leverage all of the great student resources in the form of a hackathon, or research project, or capstone project work. Colleges and universities are always looking to expose students to real-world problems and industry challenges. I’ve had good success with this approach in my career when I was a CIO and was able to build a pipeline of talent into the company over several years. To kick this off, we were partnering with the Texas Tech University Computer Science Department, which has been doing capstone project work with companies for a number of years and has had several recent successful student-run hackathons.

We have discussed this in two of our Vision Group meetings and already have two retailers who want to participate. Suppliers are welcome to participate, as well. We’ll be working through the details and formulating the process to kick it off in 2026. If you have any questions, or want to know more, please feel free to reach out. Thank you!

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you, Robert. We’re very excited about where the VGN Academic Initiative will take us.

Closing Remarks & Looking Ahead

Roy Strasburger:

Our last poll of the day is: Would you please tell us that on a scale of 1 to 10, did you find this summit to be informative?

In the meantime, I’d like to thank Gerd Leonhard for joining us today and sharing his insights. Thank you to all of our Vision Group members who gave their time to present today. And, most importantly, thank you to you for joining us and staying with us today during our first Virtual Global Summit.

We will be putting out a Vision Report on this summit, free, as always. The Vision Report will contain a summary of today’s discussions, a transcript of the program, and a link to the recording of this summit, including Gerd’s presentation. We’ll be adding it to our extensive library of free Vision Reports, which you can find at VGNSharing.com.

Now, I’d like to turn it over to our co-founder, Eva Strasburger.

Eva Strasburger:

Thank you to everyone for joining us today. In particular, I want to thank our VGN members, who consistently give their time to share their knowledge. It’s wonderful what you do, and we’re very appreciative of it. I also want to thank Robert Hampton and the VGN team for all they did to help us organize this summit.

Roy mentioned the Vision Reports. Please go as well to our website, VGNSharing.com, to sign up to hear about our future products. Thank you.

Myra Kressner:

Hi! I’m going to close it out. This is, Myra. I join Eva and Roy in thanking everyone who participated: Gerd, Robert, all of our VGN members who shared their report-outs today, and everyone that is on this summit. Your perspectives and insights are what make this network so valuable, and we’re grateful for the time and thought that everyone has given us today.

Before we close, I also do want to extend our sincere appreciation to VGN’s Ally Supporters and our Summit Booster Sponsor. Your commitment to this industry and to our mission of “sharing today to shape tomorrow” is truly meaningful. Your participation in our meetings brings added insight, broader context and fresh ideas, all of which help our members better navigate opportunities and challenges alike. We deeply appreciate your engagement and support.

As we look ahead, I am excited to share that we will be launching the Small Operators Vision Group in just a few months, with plans already underway for two additional Vision Groups in mid-2026. For any suppliers joining us today who are interested in becoming a part of these groups, we’d love to have you. Please reach out to me directly.

Thank you again to everyone who presented and attended this inaugural VGN Global Virtual Summit. We appreciate your time, your insight, and your commitment to shaping the future together. Take care, and we look forward to seeing you soon.