This blog is part of an ongoing series exploring how Aera Skills solve real-world supply chain challenges.

Efficient fuel pricing is essential for competitiveness and margin growth — yet daily market shifts and manual analysis make it hard to respond with speed and consistency. AI and automation help teams act faster and with greater confidence by turning near real-time market intelligence into clear, policy-aligned price recommendations.

With the Competitive Pricing Optimization Skill, the Aera decision intelligence agent has achieved a 15% increase in fuel sales, generated more than 10,000 pricing recommendations, and reduced manual effort by over 80%. These results reflect a shift from spreadsheet-heavy work to a closed-loop system that executes decisions in minutes.

The Challenges: Manual Work, Complex Calculations, and Market Timing

Many oil & gas companies still rely on manual processes for fuel price analysis. Shifting market dynamics, competitor changes, and supply-demand fluctuations create bottlenecks that lead to missed opportunities. Common challenges include:

• Manual competitor analysis across prices, market conditions, and customer preferences.
• Complex pricing calculations using MOPS, ocean freight, exchange rates, and competitor adjustments.
• Market-timing delays that slow responses to market and competitor price shifts.
• Inconsistent strategy across account managers, weakening competitiveness and margin performance.

Left unresolved, these issues reduce responsiveness, erode margin, and slow execution across the network.

The Aera Solution: AI-Driven Competitive Pricing

Aera, the decision intelligence agent, uses the Competitive Pricing Optimization Skill to automate price recommendations using near real-time market intelligence — improving accuracy, speed, and consistency from ingestion through execution. It does this by:

• Automating price-build calculations using market data, exchange rates, ocean freight, and capture periods aligned to customer schedules.
• Analyzing competitor positioning against baselines and applying strategy based on market stance.
• Generating intelligent recommendations at the Product–Terminal–Customer level factoring in conditions, supply adequacy, and projected impact.
• Enabling rapid decision execution with actionable recommendations and supporting analytics for immediate system updates.

Behind the scenes, a team of AI agents structures incoming data, evaluates it against strategy and constraints, and reasons about the best move for each station—all with traceable logic and built-in governance.

Case Study: From Manual Updates To Market-Speed Decisions

A leading oil & gas company needed to optimize Terminal Gate Pricing across wholesale and transport customers in Australia. Manual pricing created delays, reduced competitiveness, and hindered revenue capture.

After implementing Aera’s Competitive Pricing Optimization Skill, the company automated daily and weekly workflows across 10+ price elements, enabled real-time competitor analysis, and accelerated price updates with Product–Terminal–Customer recommendations.

• 15% increase in fuel sales
• >10,000 pricing recommendations generated
• >80% reduction in manual effort

Together, these improvements enabled faster, market-aligned pricing that protected margins and strengthened share in priority locations.

Why Aera: What Sets It Apart

Aera transforms competitive pricing from a manual, time-intensive process into a streamlined, intelligent system of action powered by decision intelligence. By standardizing guardrails and closing the loop from recommendation to system writeback, teams respond to market moves in minutes while protecting margin and brand position. What sets it apart:

• Unified decision intelligence integrating market data, competitor pricing, supply-demand analytics, and pricing strategy in one platform.
• AI-augmented workflows improving productivity with automated price calculations and intelligent recommendations on daily and weekly schedules.
• Closed-loop execution enabling end-to-end automation—from market data ingestion to system writeback—for immediate price implementation.

With Aera, pricing teams can move beyond slow, manual routines and toward faster, more reliable decision-making—confident that every price change is timely, consistent, and aligned to strategy.

Ready To Transform Your Competitive Pricing?

For more on how Aera can help you improve responsiveness, eliminate manual effort, and maximize revenue capture, download the Competitive Pricing Optimization Skill brief or schedule a demo.