Spot AI acts as an always-on operations manager for a fourth-generation fuel and convenience retailer, giving leadership the data to prove offline marketing ROI, measure its hospitality promise, and keep every store safe.
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A legacy brand with no way to measure what works
Blackmon Oil is a four-generation family business that trucks, wholesales, and retails fuel. Its retail division pairs Exxon-branded pumps with convenience stores, most of them in rural communities. Since the stores opened in 1990, all of the marketing had been done in-house, DIY-style, by the family.
Kelsey Blackmon came to the business from a large, data-driven marketing agency, where she led strategy development. She built the marketing department from the ground up, spending 2024 creating a new brand: The Neighborly, a convenience store experience rooted in Southern hospitality.
To keep investing in that brand, Kelsey needed to prove her campaigns were working. However, the marketing tactics that matter most in small towns, such as billboards, youth sports sponsorships, and local festival shirts, had no reliable way to connect to store visits.
“Digital is great because it’s going to give you some analytics and reporting. But traditional marketing is really, really hard to quantify,” she shared.
The brain behind the cameras they already had
Kelsey first looked at door-swing counters to track store visits, but found the options too expensive and inaccurate. For example, a group of four people walking in together registers as one door swing.
Spot AI solved both challenges Kelsey was running into. Because Spot AI could run on the existing cameras in many of The Neighborly’s stores, no new hardware costs were incurred. And because every count is tied to video, the data can be verified.
“[Spot AI] allows us to literally spot check, no pun intended, on that data and confirm that we’re actually seeing what we’re hoping to see.”
Connecting billboards to store visits
With Spot AI, Kelsey counts people entering each store and tracks how traffic shifts by time of day. She puts three things on one timeline: foot traffic from Spot, sales data, and marketing activity. When a campaign launches, she can see whether store visits move with it.
For the first time, Kelsey can bring the board clear evidence of which campaigns drive store visits, and make the case for continued investment.
“You put sales data here, foot traffic here, marketing initiatives here, all on a timeline, and you start to get a beautiful spark line that really shows results.”
Measuring the hospitality promise
Because Southern hospitality is the core of The Neighborly brand, Kelsey wanted a way to know whether every customer actually feels it.
She set up Spot AI’s unattended kiosk agent to alert the team when a customer reaches the register and no employee arrives within a few seconds. Over time, the reports show whether slow service clusters around a particular shift, day, or store.
The goal is to fix patterns, not to micromanage people. When the data points to a systemic issue, the team can retrain a store or update a policy. If an individual conversation is ever needed, the footage provides clear documentation.
From marketing tool to store-wide operations
What started as a marketing tool now covers security, safety, and store operations. The Neighborly runs several Spot AI capabilities across its locations:
- People counting in every store, the modern version of a door-swing counter
- Aisle-level heat maps that show where customers shop, for merchandising and layout decisions
- Unattended checkout alerts that track how quickly customers are greeted at the register
- Parking lot loitering detection to keep lots safe overnight at 24/7 locations
- Slip-and-fall detection for early awareness of incidents inside stores and on the lot
“I consider Spot AI our AI operations manager. It allows us to have that extra eye in the sky at all times, observing, collecting information, doing fact-finding, and then it’s serving up those insights to us on a silver platter.”
Early signs are already positive. Kelsey reports that visibility into checkout-counter coverage has led to more targeted training and clearer service expectations, and she believes customer service sentiment has improved as a result.
For Kelsey, the results depend on one thing: data she can trust. Every Spot AI report and agent alert links back to the footage it came from. When a number looks off, she can see exactly what happened.
"Camera systems are nothing new. But by utilizing AI layered into our legacy camera networks, we are able to have a real understanding of what's going on at each location and use that information to make impactful decisions."
What’s next: from insight to action
Kelsey sees a wide-open highway of opportunity and is already planning the next set of use cases:
- Labor planning: matching Spot AI traffic data with The Neighborly’s AI scheduling platform to staff stores by time of day and season
- Drive-by conversion: measuring how many passing vehicles pull in, by pairing a line counter on the road with vehicle presence at the pumps
- Merchandising tests: using aisle-level heat maps to test product placement and store layout
The Neighborly didn’t need more cameras to get here. As Kelsey puts it, Spot AI was “the brain behind the eyes we already had,” and that brain now informs decisions from the billboard budget to the checkout counter. As the company opens its 12th store and builds out its marketing team, it has the foundation to carry a four-generation legacy forward.