Pilot, RaceTrac, Weigel's, Love's and Englefield leaders shared which emerging technologies they see having the greatest impact on operations and customer experience in the years ahead with CSP Daily News.
- Pilot Co. is No. 16 on CSP’s 2025 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count. RaceTrac is No. 17, Weigel's is No. 84, Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores is No. 15 and Englefield Oil is No. 59.
Themes include the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and data to drive efficiency, personalization and smarter decision making.
Executives also highlighted friction-reducing tools such as mobile ordering, self-service and faster checkout, along with technologies that streamline routine tasks and allow store teams to focus more on serving customers.
Across the board, retailers stressed that the most powerful innovations—from loyalty programs and retail media networks to smarter equipment and hyper-personalized offers—are those that pair digital advancement with human connection to create more seamless, customer-centric experiences.
These answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Brad Anderson, president of Retail, Pilot Co.
“The combination of next-gen self-service and mobile integration is designed to deliver a frictionless shopping experience to our guests. By expanding mobile ordering and pre-arrival services, we’re striving to reduce transaction times and help drivers get back out on the road. Crucially, this operational streamlining frees up our team members from transactional tasks, allowing them to focus on high-value interactions and deliver an amazing experience for guests. Hyper-personalization presents another opportunity, where AI utilizes data from the Pilot app to anticipate exactly what a specific driver needs—whether it’s a customized offer or an anticipated need for truck supplies—which enables us to optimize store layouts and targeted offers, directly informing our operational merchandising strategy. We’re excited to see how these technologies continue to support our mission of showing people they matter at every turn.” —Chuck Ulie
Ameet Shetty, CIO, RaceTrac
“Everybody is, of course, talking about artificial intelligence. The reality is that every organization, every company, is trying to think about how to take advantage of AI in a positive way. That includes RaceTrac. Can we use it to improve customer experience? Can we use it to operate more efficiently? Can we use it to mitigate risk? How will it help us grow overall? To leverage AI in a positive way, we need to make sure that we're thinking about how to make it something that our employees can use to enable and enhance their job capabilities. We're looking to make sure that it is something that makes it easier for us to meet guest needs.” —Hannah Hammond
Doug Yawberry, president and CEO, Weigel’s
“I think the retail media network and what Nick Triantafellou [director of marketing and merchandising] and his team are putting together right now are going to be very dynamic. And I think that it's a game changer for us in how we operate and from the guest perspective. One of our initiatives this year is to become more guest-centric in what we do, which entails getting more feedback from our guests, from our teams, and then also delivering a great experience. And I think retail media network is a big initiative this year that will help us do that. And I think it'll be a “wow” effect for us, and I'm really looking forward to it. Nick's got a bunch of great ideas and he's putting a lot of things forward to make that work.” —Hannah Hammond
Patrick McLean, chief marketing officer, Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores
“I think there's a big artificial intelligence movement happening in our company right now. As well as myself, we also have a new chief technology officer who's joined us pretty recently. And so, I think both of us are huge advocates for understanding the role that first of all, data and analytics play, and marketing technology and customer experience technology. And then adding an AI layer to make sure that we're efficient in the way that we're delivering solutions for customers. And so, if you were to spend time with us inside the office, you’d probably feel the momentum there within the company. We have a number of pilots going on in the AI space that are customer impacting but are also back-office impacting and all the efficiency promises of AI. But all that does is just give us more capability and more resources to impact the front lines and impact the ability to create better experiences for our customers. We really think that's a key investment for us in this next phase is just understanding the rule that AI and data can play in delivering even better experiences than what we're delivering today. So you combine that with the great human experience that we give our customers, I think that's the recipe for success. Technology-enabled customer experiences matched with human-enabled customer experience. I mean who doesn't love that, right?” —Hannah Hammond
Ashley Englefield DeWitt, president of Englefield Retail
“The tech that’ll make the biggest impact is anything that helps teams work smarter and customers move faster—better data tools, smarter equipment, real-time monitoring and faster checkout. Anything that boosts employee efficiency, improves customer satisfaction and helps us deliver the right product offering is where we want to head.” —Chuck Ulie
F.W. (Will) Englefield V, president of Englefield Energy
“I think loyalty programs for customers and operations that are easy to use and easy to understand will continue to have a great impact over the next couple of years. The information received from these customers will help refine our offering and understand consumer-buying habits.” —Chuck Ulie
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