What Do Tylenol, Tequila and Technology Have in Common?

If you utilize one of these properly, then you shouldn’t need the other two.

Before this year’s Fastmarkets Biofuels and Feedstocks Americas 2026 conference in Chicago, Illinois, in early May, we ran a pre-event survey across the industry—feedstock collectors, traders, refiners, technology vendors, logistics providers, and oil and energy companies—and asked a deceptively simple question: “Can you prove it?” Specifically, “Can you prove where your feedstock came from, what attributes it carries, and what programs it qualifies for, without rebuilding the chain of custody from a tangle of Excel sheets and email threads?”

We let respondents grade their own paper. Even with that latitude, the results were uncomfortable. Only about half placed themselves in the audit-ready tier. Nearly a third put themselves in commercial-exposure or structural-risk territory. The weakest dimension by a clear margin—robustness across regulatory regimes, the single quality this business cannot function without—averaged 3.5 out of five. In a heavily regulated market, a 3.5 is exposure and risk: the kind most companies do not want, and few can afford to carry.

I have come to call this challenge the “Three Ts”: Tylenol, tequila and technology.

Tylenol is the structural headache built into the business. The biofuel market is global: A single shipment may need to qualify under dozens of overlapping regulatory regimes. Each has its own rules for mass balance, data custody, auditing and feedstock classification. Some attributes stack. Some are mutually exclusive. None of them care if you are tired. Every shipment is a multidimensional optimization problem disguised as a routine sale. Hence the painkiller.

Tequila is what comes after the painkiller stops working. Most of this work is still being done in spreadsheets, with PDFs emailed between counterparties and reconciled by hand. Copy-paste across systems. Conservative allocation, because nobody can see what is actually long or short until the period closes. Audit prep that takes weeks of manual data assembly. A chief financial officer asking, reasonably, whether margin is being left on the table—and no quick way to answer them. After enough cycles of this, the question is no longer whether the process is sustainable. It is which bottle is closer.

So that is the bad news. Here is the good news: Artificial intelligence (AI) is here—finally, and in a meaningful way.

Technology has stopped being a buzzword in 2026 and started doing actual labor. Consider what a properly built compliance platform looks like now. It looks like a system that ingests, decides, generates and reconciles without waiting for a human to drag a file from one folder to another. AI agents copied on emails read incoming sustainability declarations (SD) the moment they arrive, parse every field whether the SD lands as a PDF, CSV, an Excel file, or somebody’s scanned screenshot, and match each document against open transactions automatically. AI generates new SDs in any counterparty template, at scale, with no human typing. AI reconciles uploaded data against your positions, flags anomalies and updates mass balance across every scheme you participate in—autonomously. Set the assignment rules once—first-in first-out (FIFO), greenhouse-gas (GHG) optimization, country of origin, EU Renewable Energy Directive Annex IX-A versus IX-B—and the system allocates sustainability against contracts without anyone touching a spreadsheet. Real-time position management replaces end-of-period reconciliation—long-short visibility by scheme and by carbon intensity happens continuously, not quarterly. Optimal allocation across mutually exclusive programs happens automatically, not by intuition. Work that used to take an analyst a week now takes 10 minutes, and every action carries a timestamped audit trail. Audit prep that used to take a fortnight now occurs with the click of a button. None of this is hypothetical. The technology exists, it works, and it is in production today.

The deeper point is that traceability is no longer a back-office function. Today, traceability is tradeability. The value of a renewable molecule is no longer defined by its physical properties. It is defined by its attribute stack—origin, carbon intensity, scheme eligibility—and by your ability to prove all of it on demand. The companies that win the next decade will be the ones whose compliance is real-time, agentic, and audit-ready by default.

The pre-event survey told us—in the gentlest possible language—that the industry is not there yet. The technology is. The fix is not to work harder. It is to digitize, automate and let AI carry the load.

Keep the Tylenol and the tequila around if you like. But if you choose your technology wisely, you should not need them.

Author: Dani Charles

Co-founder, Veriflux

720-838-7233

dani@veriflux.io