Today, we’re excited to unveil Retailer AI, our first-generation AI agent designed for retailers, grocers, and convenience stores to electrify the future of fuel retail, delight existing clientele, and attract new customer cohorts.
Retailer AI is a first-of-its-kind low latency model designed for real-time conversation, on-device processing, and real-world contextual awareness.
It gives EV drivers an intuitive, intelligent, voice-activated user interface to answer their questions about charging, retail offerings, and local amenities in real time. Drivers can also use it directly to order food inside stores, tap into loyalty programs, and more. Integrating all those functions on one platform facilitates a more comprehensive, seamless, holistic charging experience, driving stronger customer retention.
With Retailer AI, we’re bringing agentic AI to fuel retail parking lots across America to advance our mission of rapidly electrifying global car energy infrastructure.
Intelligence while you shop and charge
We developed Retailer AI based on a simple observation: Drivers desire and deserve seamless, convenient experiences. While it’s a simple conclusion, our perspective on it is grounded in learnings from our work serving tens of thousands of EV drivers that have used our fast, reliable EV charging stations. In addition to the speed of charge and reliability of our network on the whole and individual ports, drivers also gravitate towards features like tap-to-pay and voice-activated customer interfaces that make their lives easier
As an avid EV road tripper myself, I often find myself in new locations, sometimes deep in the Canadian Rockies or the Pacific Northwest. When I stop to charge and shop, I’m often unfamiliar with what's around me, whether its local offerings and amenities, food ordering options, opportunities to earn reward points on loyalty programs, access discounts, or otherwise.
Making it easy to access and explore this type of information quickly and accurately through an intuitive, intelligent, voice-activated user interface is a product I myself am excited to use and know many other drivers will benefit from. Put succinctly, this is a platform that’s built from first principles, my own experiences, all the data we process day in, day out at Electric Era, and that prioritizes delighting drivers. In turn, happy charging customers invariably drive better, if not fantastic, business outcomes for fuel retailers and EV charging station owners and operators.
In designing the product, we also wanted the experience to feature human-centric, holistic design and UI. Our engineering team worked hard to achieve a lightweight, end-to-end architecture to make the platform’s responsiveness surprisingly fast. We also wanted it to unlock actionable convenience and utility for the driver by focusing on real-world contextual awareness.
Built on technology that drivers love
Retailer AI is built on top of the EV fast-charging engineering foundation that drivers already love. Since our launch in 2023, Electric Era has served ~15,000 EV drivers and delivered a near industry-leading session reliability of 90%, second only to Tesla, and a per port uptime of 99%, all while expanding rapidly and maintaining a 96% driver rating according to PlugShare.
Retailer AI provides next-generation intelligence on top of the exceptional charging experience drivers' deserve and already expect and enjoy from our stations. Building on our foundation of reliability, Retailer AI will further streamline and enrich the driver experience. We will be rolling this functionality out to select charging stations later this year. Stay tuned for future announcements about locations and launch customers.
Onwards!
Quincy Edmund Lee
CEO and Founder, Electric Era