How to Use AI to Get the Most From Your Employees
With AI increasingly entrenched in corporate HQs, bringing the tool to the frontline worker is next.
Jun 23, 2026
“There is always more work to do than we have employees to do it,” Jeff Hassman said during a 2026 NACS State of the Industry Summit workshop in Chicago. “It really is about how you reallocate and optimize resources so that your people are working on the best things.”
Nearly a decade before becoming the general manager of agentic AI and analytic solutions at PDI Technologies, Hassman was a market manager for a major oil company and retailer in the Mid-Atlantic. There, he oversaw a star category manager for packaged beverages who helped pioneer the now familiar 2-for Gatorade promotion.
The promotion drove “phenomenal” traffic and sales in stores. Hassman said that today, AI could independently accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time.
He stands fast in his belief, however, that if AI were around 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have replaced the high-performing category manager. Rather, using an AI agent would have allowed her to invest her time in developing equally profitable promotions elsewhere in the cooler and beyond.
The promotion was a huge success but was also time-consuming and complex, Hassman said. “The morning boot crowd would come in, they would fill up all their equipment [at the pump], and get everything they need to drink for the day. ... And they loved the 2-for Gatorade promotion.”
But there was a problem: “The first 90-degree day we would have would knock out our entire inventory.”
As a result, the category manager dedicated time each spring to manually calculating and predicting when each store could expect that first 90-degree day so that stores would be prepared.
Beyond predicting the weather, “a big part of this category manager’s success was figuring out appropriate stocking and deliveries each spring by running the calculations … of all of the stores based upon what their cooler sales were, what kind of promotional lift they were getting, what size back room they had,” Hassman said.
Today, the time dedicated to those calculations can be cut to minutes or even seconds by artificial intelligence, according to Hassman—as long as both the data and the direction are good.
With AI increasingly entrenched in corporate HQs, bringing the tool to the frontline worker is next.
Hassman said that the next step is to “work to build a system around our store employees that allows them to focus on the thing that really matters, which is a great experience for our customers—the one thing that AI won’t do for us.
“When we think about building AI systems and processes to save money and drive efficiency, I think that the area of opportunity for us is really about empowering our most valuable asset, which is our store employees,” he said.
Hassman pointed to two things driving the next applications of AI:
- Technology firms continue to improve their AI platforms and performance.
- College graduates are moving into the job market with experience using AI platforms and pointing AI in the right direction to achieve useful solutions.
“I personally really believe that AI is not about doing away with jobs. It’s about empowering people,” he said at that summit, “and when you position it that way and if you treat it that way, then you can grow.”
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