Podcast: The connected hub with Q8 and Scheidt & Bachmann

In this episode of Talks on Mobility, MobilityPlaza sits down with its 2026 Ambassadors — Jörg M. Heilingbrunner and Alex Sanchez — to discuss how the digital transformation of service stations is now happening in real time.

In this episode of Talks on Mobility, MobilityPlaza sits down with its newly named 2026 Ambassadors — Jörg M. Heilingbrunner of Scheidt & Bachmann and Alex Sanchez of Q8 — recorded as a live roundtable session on the Connected Mobility Hub stage at UNITI expo 2026 in Stuttgart. The conversation moves from digital transformation and AI use cases to the connected vehicle, payment fragmentation, and what a true multi-energy mobility hub could look like by 2030.

Both figures agree that transformation, long discussed as a future prospect, is now accelerating in real time. Heilingbrunner points to external pressures — energy costs, market volatility, and the shift toward e-mobility — as forces that leave operators no room to wait. Sanchez, working from inside a legacy-heavy international network, offers a more grounded counterpoint: for oil companies managing decades of accumulated technology, ambition has to be balanced against the practical work of modernizing what's already there.

Throughout the conversation, both ambassadors keep returning to the same idea from different angles: technology only matters if it's tied to a real business case. Heilingbrunner walks through how AI is being applied across customer service, product development, and predictive maintenance, while Sanchez, more skeptical of buzzwords than most in his position, insists that a use case has to prove its value before it earns a place on the forecourt. That same discipline shapes their view of the connected vehicle, where both see genuine near-term potential — from pre-ordering to in-car payment — as one of the clearest paths to offsetting declining fuel volumes with new sources of revenue.

Jörg M. Heilingbrunner

Heilingbrunner is CEO of Scheidt & Bachmann Energy Retail Solutions, a position he has held since 2011, during which he has led the company's shift toward cloud-based solutions and agile working models, positioning it as an innovation leader in payment and energy retail technology. He was named MobilityPlaza's inaugural Mobility Ambassador in 2026.

“It's about customer behavior, because fueling is declining as customers move toward battery electric vehicles. So it's about multi-energy, and how to compensate for this. It's about convenience, it's about connectivity, and of course customers expect a seamless customer journey."

“What we decided in terms of AI is: it's not for the sake of just using AI, it needs to be real business cases.”

Alex Sanchez

Sanchez is Lead Business IT Infrastructure Expert at Q8, based in Antwerp, where he leads the Q8Truck Business IT Infrastructure team overseeing payment technology including the Q8Truck Fuel Card and its authorization and payment infrastructure. He was named MobilityPlaza's first Technology Ambassador in 2026.

“Most of our companies have grown through mergers and acquisitions, and with every step you're complicating your technology landscape.”

“AI has these characteristics too, but we have to first ask ourselves: is it something that will also add value? Because if you continue to experiment and there's no value, it will become one of the buzzwords that ends up in the closet.”