This article originally appeared on Tech Gig.

Recently, Ruchi Kumari, a senior tech journalist at TechGig, had an engaging conversation with Prem Bhatia, the CEO and Co-Founder of Graas.AI, a pioneering technology company in the e-commerce sector. In this exclusive interview, Bhatia sheds light on the inspiration behind Graas.AI and how the company is redefining growth strategies for e-commerce businesses through advanced AI solutions.

1. What inspired you to establish Graas.AI, and how does your company differentiate itself in the e-commerce industry?

Graas launched its “Growth-as-a-Service” solution to help brands turbo-charge their eCommerce business.

The growing complexity of the eCommerce sector has made it challenging for brands to maintain profitability. With the increase in number of marketplaces and their associated costs, rising marketing and customer acquisition costs, and fluctuating warehouse and fulfilment costs, brands' profit margins are under significant pressure. They must scale revenue drivers while optimizing operational costs and relying on data can be the most effective way to make informed decisions.

Graas’ AI platform helps brands adopt a streamlined approach to marketing, inventory, and content management through a unified dashboard. With this, brands can make meaningful decisions across the entire eCommerce business that impact the bottom line and allow them to stay ahead of the competition.

2. Can you explain the concept of Growth-as-a-Service and how Graas.AI implements it to benefit e-commerce businesses?

As a brand grows, it becomes difficult to manually track, analyze, and optimize operations, and data becomes crucial for making smart business decisions. However, dealing with data spread across multiple sources makes meaningful analysis a time-consuming task.

Graas connects previously siloed data across business segments to create a unified data pool. It then applies a proprietary AI engine to this data pool, acting as an in-house data scientist. It predicts trends and gives real-time insights and actionable recommendations.

With a plug and play model, this solution makes growth accessible to brands of all sizes, with minimal need to adjust their internal structures - thus “Growth-as-a-Service”.

3. How does Graas.AI leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced technologies to drive growth for your clients?

As brands start to scale, they can no longer rely on gut instinct or personal experience alone to make daily business decisions. Data becomes critical for decision making. However, data can be fragmented, and a brand may not have access to skilled data scientists who can analyze this data and provide meaningful insights. In such a situation, AI tools automate the process of collecting, aggregating, and analysing data from various sources.

Let us take the example of an apparel brand that must look at enormous data points to make daily decisions. Graas can leverage AI for decision making faster. For example, it can track ad campaigns across sales and marketing channels to suggest if ad budgets should go up or down. Or it can look at past sales, current buying trends, stock levels and precisely indicate why there is a change in the inventory movement and recommend the next steps to optimise inventory or change the pricing strategy to boost sales.

Analysing such vast volumes of data manually is tough. But with AI, connecting the dots, businesses can identify threats and opportunities easily and make quick decisions.

4. In what ways do you see AI shaping the future of e-commerce, and how is Graas.AI positioned to adapt to these changes?

E-commerce industry is betting big on AI because of the potential of data to revolutionize operations and decision-making processes.

With such vast volumes of data, it is a mammoth task to perform quick analyses to identify trends, patterns, and anomalies in the data. It lies beyond human capacity and is also very error prone, when done manually. Graas uses AI and ML to automate this process of analysis and arrive at answers for ‘what is happening’ and ‘how the business is doing’. Further, it is also helping brands get deeper answers using root cause analysis of the ‘why’ behind the fluctuations in the revenue metrics.

5. What are some of the key challenges e-commerce businesses face today, and how does Graas address these challenges through its services and AI capabilities?

Today, eCommerce founders are deeply concerned about shrinking profit margins due to escalating input costs. For example, operating a Shopify store often necessitates heavy investment in Facebook and Google ads for visibility. Similarly, marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart require offsite advertising, leading to additional expenses beyond the commissions.

Interestingly, these platforms are now earning more revenue from ads than actual product sales, creating a challenging environment for brands and merchants. The cost of traffic has become comparable to manufacturing costs, ranging from 10% to 40% of total sales.

The other big challenge the industry faces is the sheer complexity of dealing with massive amounts of data while managing so many different variables and moving parts. Many brand owners do not have the people, tools or resources needed to effectively manage and interpret data to identify risks and opportunities in their eCommerce business.

Profitable eCommerce growth relies on operational efficiency, engaging customer experiences, effective marketing strategies, and efficient inventory management. Graas’ AI powered platform ensures that every decision is data-driven, making it a reliable and sustainable way to scale.

Authored By Prem Bhatia, Co-Founder and CEO, of Graas.