The future of fuel pricing: How AI is changing the game
A2i by OPIS has been building AI for fuel pricing since 2011. At UNITI expo 2026, Frodi Hammer and Jean Cherbonnier explained why the industry is only now catching up.
Fuel pricing has always been a high-stakes discipline. At UNITI expo 2026 in Stuttgart, MobilityPlaza sat down at the A2i by OPIS booth with Frodi Hammer, VP and Founder, and Jean Cherbonnier, Regional Director, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping that calculus.
A2i by OPIS, a Dow Jones company, has been building AI-driven fuel pricing solutions since 2011, long before the term became ubiquitous. What has changed, Hammer argued, is the appetite for it. The arrival of large language models (LLMs) has made AI tangible for executives who previously saw it as an abstraction, and C-level demand for AI adoption is now a commercial reality across the fuel retail sector.
The practical stakes became clear when the conversation turned to recent market volatility. Some retailers, facing sharp intraday cost swings, responded by moving pump prices abruptly and repeatedly, damaging their brand in the process. Retailers using A2i's PriceCast solution navigated the same conditions far more smoothly. "The world moves quicker now than it did 20 years ago, but the patterns are recurring. Having a pattern recognition engine — which is essentially what AI is — that can act on the patterns it recognizes gives you a lot more power in that market,” explained Hammer.
Cherbonnier added that PriceCast's explainability is central to operator confidence: pricing managers can interrogate every suggestion the system makes, and the human always has the final call. "You need to use AI as an assistant that is providing you tons of insight that you never had before," he said.
Looking ahead, they both pointed to the agentic era as the next frontier. Hammer described a platform under development that layers agentic AI capabilities across the full Dow Jones energy data proposition (pricing, forecasting and market news) allowing users to query their data conversationally and surface insights in real time. Cherbonnier framed the broader stakes: volumes are declining, markets are more complex, and geopolitical uncertainty is structural. "We are in exactly the right place," he said, "with an AI engine and a formidable set of information."
