Circle K’s Janeth Falcon, vice president of information technology, spends her days ensuring the company’s stores run smoothly while embracing the latest in digital technology.
- Alimentation Couche-Tard is No. 2 on CSP’s 2025 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count.
At CSP’s C-StoreTec event, she joined Art Sebastian, founder and CEO of Des Moines-based NexChapter, on stage to discuss how Alimentation Couche-Tard-owned Circle K, Laval, Quebec, is modernizing its tech stack, deploying AI-driven tools and empowering store teams to deliver faster, smarter and more personalized experiences for customers.
Check out the interview below.
Inside the store
Sebastian: What do you look for when you walk into a store?
Falcon: Last week, I was on a tour, so I was in Canada visiting 14 stores in three provinces. What I look for is: are our private labor brands visible in the salty snacks area, candy area? Are the promotions clear? Is it appealing when you walk in?
I also go behind the counter because I'm technical, so I want to see the cabling. In one of the stores, that cabling was a mess, to be honest. I talked to the customer service representatives and asked them about how the system was working.
I also go outside, walk the forecourt, look at the items, the pumps. I go to the car wash. I take a look at everything in the store, and more importantly, I talk to the store team members to understand what's working and what's not. I came up with a whole list of items I have to look into for our Canadian stores.
Modernizing Circle K’s technology
Sebastian: Can you talk a little bit about how the tech stack has become a priority inside of Circle K?
Falcon: Our customers’ expectations are changing. They're expecting a faster, smoother checkout process, personalized rewards, real-time communications. The competitive environment has also changed, and that's changed what products we carry in the stores and how we price them, which means we have to have more sophisticated inventory management systems and pricing optimization systems so that we can carry the right products at the right time at the right price for our customers. And the technology landscape has changed. We've gone from on-premise computing to cloud to edge computing; from monolithic, legacy point-of-sale (POS) systems to open, modular POS systems; from transaction, siloed systems to connected, digital systems. So it's imperative that we start to modernize to ensure that we can maintain and deliver on our promise to be fast, friendly and customer ready.
Sebastian: What does “moving to the edge” mean? And why should retailers move to the edge?
Falcon: Edge computing has allowed us to stretch out the life of the POS hardware. Everything's virtualized now. With edge computing, we have two servers, so we have redundancy. If there's a problem with one of the servers, you fail back to the secondary server. It's brought increased resiliency for our stores.
It's also opened up the gateway to the cloud. We're able to implement digital experiences through the edge platform at our store. It's opened a lot of opportunities.
Sebastian: What's required there—more electricity, more wires, more cables?
Falcon: Definitely more cables, so it's important to tag them and make sure it's clear which cable is connected to which device. We have to make sure that our feet-on-the-street companies—we use Owl in the U.S.—are trained to support those devices. It's not something you can flip on a dime. You have to plan very carefully and make sure you have enough power at the store to support it.
Funding and executing innovation at scale
Sebastian: When you look at the tech budget, how much of it is deployed against innovation, new stuff and then keeping the lights on and the important infrastructure stuff?
Falcon: I don't have an exact number, but I would say we get enough funding to do our automated, hyperscale charter. There are enough foundational dollars allocated to progress cybersecurity, resiliency, tech—the stuff that people don't want to talk about, but it's very important to make sure that our stores are operating.
Sebastian: Circle K has massive scale here in the U.S. and abroad, with lots of regulations in different countries. With such a big organization, how do you go about upgrading technology?
Falcon: We start by putting together a technology blueprint, and we make sure that blueprint allows flexibility to meet local market needs. Our goal is to implement global where possible, and if not, regionally. But we have a lot of legacy systems that we have to deal with. It's about trying to put together a roadmap that allows us to best sequence the harmonization of that legacy tech debt and getting rid of that tech debt very slowly. It's important to have a cross-functional team, so having folks from operation, finance, marketing, design, build, implementation—so they have a seat at the table and can help influence the direction of your product-modernization project.
You also have to go slow. Don't take on too many modernization activities at the same time. Less is more. Do one or two things, do them well, knock them out of the park, and then that builds credibility, momentum and trust from your organization. And then you can move on to the next level of modernization.
Do a lot of testing. We do a lot of proof-of-concept testing in our lab then beta testing, then pilot testing. We have defined entry and exit criteria for each phase so we know when we’re ready to move on.
And you need to hold your ground. You can get pressured from your business partners to go faster, but if the data says you're not ready, you shouldn't move forward. Work iteratively and have a fail-fast mindset. Try things out. If they don't work, take learnings, pivot and move to something else. Don't be afraid.
What digitization means for employees and customers
Sebastian: There's a pretty big focus on digitizing Circle K. What does that mean beyond the infrastructure? What will customers see in store?
Falcon: In some stores, you’ll see our artificial intelligence (AI) we call smart checkout. It's our AI computer-vision self-checkout system, and it really differentiates the checkout experience and makes it faster. For us, the best solution is having a customer service representative working with two current checkout systems. We call it assisted checkout—they support the customer and can grab the cigarettes in the back.
We're also piloting workforce management tools. Managers get inundated with reports and tasks—clean the bathroom, stock the cooler, walk the forecourt—and too many tools telling them what to do. The tool we're working on uses AI and logic to intelligently prioritize tasks and limit the number per day.
We also surface sales missions based on sales data, so if we see an anomaly, like a particular product hasn't sold in four days, we'll raise that for them to go check. Is it because the product is not on the shelf? Is it because your product is sitting in the back room? Is it because the vendor didn't deliver the product? Managers can add feedback and pictures to show the action they took.
We compare similar stores in the neighborhood. If there's another Circle K store, and they're selling a particular product but another store is not, we will surface that as a sales mission.
It's about giving, making it very easy for the store managers so that they can focus more on the customers and really focus on delivering the best experience for those customers.
Sebastian: So you're giving the store team members tools to do their job better and be more efficient. Does that lead to a reduction in labor hours or redeployment?
Falcon: It's redeployment. It's about reallocating those labor hours to be more customer-facing and to address tasks that need to be completed in the stores.
Sebastian: Where are you finding talent in technology?
Falcon: Part of it would come from our help desk. That's a good way to bring in talent, from people that support our stores. We also work with our recruiting companies, and they look for talent. We attend conferences, and we talk to people who are interested in new opportunities. It's about networking. It's about leveraging recruiting teams, leveraging LinkedIn to find the right talent out there. And even our vendor partners are also a good source for new talent.
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