A.I. is helping ‘small town America’ embrace the green transition
Good morning, Peter Vanham here in Geneva.
With all the hype about generative A.I., you might have forgetten about “classical A.I.," which uses big data and “machine learning” algorithms to optimize business processes or create new ones.
It’s the kind of A.I. Amazon used to dominate e-commerce and logistics, or what Google or Meta used to keep us scrolling and clicking on recommendations we wouldn't have read otherwise.
But this classical A.I. could aid “small town America” too, by helping it embrace and benefit from the green transition, Arcady Sosinov, founder and CEO of FreeWire, says.
FreeWire, which is backed by BlackRock and BP, sells EV charging stations and batteries. It also provides its clients—mostly franchisees of fuel retailers such as Chevron and Phillips 66—with an A.I. data platform that tells them how to optimize returns on the electricity they sell or the foot traffic that comes into their stores. Here’s Sosinov, in an interview I conducted with him yesterday:
“I’m landing customers that no one else could have landed because I can show them actionable and cash flows forecasts. They’re these franchisee owners that have 15 gas stations. They’re not even sold on climate change. But if you can show them the positive cashflow [of investing in EV chargers], they’re going to go for it every single day.”
These American heartland fuel retailers, Sosinov added, are “most of the U.S.,” and it’s a market that has been largely overlooked by other providers. “It’s not New York or San Francisco. It’s small town America that has small gas stations where people go to buy a pack of cigarettes or Coca-Cola and bring [it] home to their family. How do you tap into that, with the messaging that’s been happening in the industry so far? That doesn’t work.”
More broadly, optimizing energy use and conversion loss through A.I. is one of America’s largest business opportunities going forward, Sosinov says. “The best estimate [I know of] is that 70% of all electricity produced is lost. Our addressable market is that 70%,” he says. And the A.I. used to optimize that market is “not the large language tools, but the real actionable systems that allow a very hard part of our economy to become much more intelligent.”
More news below.
Peter Vanham
peter.vanham@fortune.com
@petervanham
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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