In this insightful conversation, Karen Nikoghosyan, CEO of eSwap Global, shares his entrepreneurial journey from a young software engineer in Armenia to leading a multi-channel inventory and order management platform. Alongside host Michael Bernzweig, they discuss the transformative role of AI in e-commerce, emphasizing its impact on customer experience, operations, and the competitive landscape. The discussion also covers the challenges and opportunities of AI-driven marketing and the future of AI employees in e-commerce.
In this insightful conversation, Karen Nikoghosyan, CEO of eSwap Global, shares his entrepreneurial journey from a young software engineer in Armenia to leading a multi-channel inventory and order management platform. Alongside host Michael Bernzweig, they discuss the transformative role of AI in e-commerce, emphasizing its impact on customer experience, operations, and the competitive landscape. The discussion also covers the challenges and opportunities of AI-driven marketing and the future of AI employees in e-commerce.
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Michael Bernzweig (00:05.563)
I hope everyone enjoyed that last presentation. Coming up next, the CEO of eSwap Global, Karen Nkagosian, leads a multi-channel inventory and order management platform trusted by Amazon, eBay, and Shopify sellers to unify listings, stock, and shipping in one streamlined system. With that, Karen, welcome to the event, and we're looking forward to your presentation.
Karen Nikoghosyan (00:34.666)
Thank you very much for the introduction and thank you very much for the chance to talk with the audience. I will try to give a presentation about e-commerce change by 2013 and I will try to keep it short, just give the brief info like what we think, what will happen. So as the world is changing, it's changing very fast, everyone can see that. So it's changing by AI and other tools.
So I want to talk that the first biggest changes that e-commerce are being hit is by AI. And my first thing that I'm talking is how the AI is going to transform the e-commerce for the customer experience up to the operations. What will change in their operations and how the AI agents will change the life of the businesses and e-commerce sellers by 2013.
So it's changing every day, every day we're getting new AI tools and they are bringing extra value to our businesses and even to my businesses. And they are helping to do a more efficient and more operative business. So I'm going to talk three main things that is changing. So in the world, AI agents are starting to sell products.
for the brands, what's going to happen, some brands will ask AI, some kind of AI employees to run their e-commerce businesses. And AI is going to be competitor of another AI agent and it's going to beat others. So who is running the best AI agent will get more sales and more revenue. But how it will work so.
For running an AI agent, you will need another tools because e-commerce operations is very different than their order management, analytics, shipping management, a lot of operations are connected with AI. So what's going to happen, AI agents are going to use another AI tools which will make their work more efficient.
Karen Nikoghosyan (02:53.482)
So that kind of tools are a lot of them and available in the market. I'm not going to give any names during this presentation, but one of them are like for AI prediction tools, they are predicting like the stock levels, inventory accuracy and how many vendors to choose to work. What are the best ways to get your product?
and it's connecting with operations like buying the product, delivering it to your warehouse, storing it, making sure it's in the right warehouse from where you are selling the most and sending the product to the end customer. That's how the AI tools now working. One of the major problems that AI tools are
giving you an opportunity is not to oversell and undersell your products. This is doing some analytics considering the seasonality of the products and also other factors. So basically what's happening, you are giving your history, your e-commerce business history to some AI tools and they're analyzing your business.
and based on your business and based on your data, they start to give you more recommendations. Currently, we are on a stage that AI is just giving us recommendations of what to do. And they are some kind of final decision makers in this process. But as it's going, we can see that some tools have...
operational independency and they can make decisions already like on operations flow, how to manage, what to order and so on. So people are trying to put their e-commerce businesses on autopilot. So this is what's going actually to happen. So how many employees do you need to operate your e-commerce business? Now,
Karen Nikoghosyan (05:06.698)
It's considered the size considering the size of the business it can be like up to 1000 2000 or for small businesses like five to ten people but when you start to use AI tools like AI for operation you can just replace your Department with one AI tool. So a lot of things are going to change in the job market of e-commerce considering Considering how well
the AI tools are performing now and how accurate are they because there are always human error like if you have a department of operations, if there is some kind of miscommunication, there can be some problems that can hurt your business. But if it's doing by AI, most probably it will go well.
Because AI is showing better results day by day as we see Also what's going to happen like if you are working in one market and not familiar with another market 98 % of e-commerce sellers don't want to go to other markets Why it happens because they aren't familiar with the law. They aren't familiar what competitors they have the pricing
How to get the warehouses how to do operations in new markets? So what's going to be changed like there will be AI agents with a specific knowledge of the countries Like agent for Canada agent for the US states and different and they have all the regulations They know how to efficiently run the economy in your state
And that will help a lot to deploy new markets using AI tools. This is what's going to happen. So like extra revenue streams per business simply using some AI tools. That's the next steps that are going to be. And by 2013, I think that almost all of the e-commerce sellers, e-commerce businesses
Karen Nikoghosyan (07:28.786)
will have their AI employees. They will trust them, they will give them independence to do some decision making regarding their business, their business process. And what it means? It means that a lot of things are going to change. Now businesses are competing with their marketing, but now marketing is being replaced by AI marketing.
And so one AI is going to compete with another AI model to see who is bringing most customers to the businesses and who bringing most sales to the businesses. That's what's going to happen. So people need to choose the right AI employer. Like now it's nowadays, if you're hiring someone, you want to hire the best, you want to pay.
the best rate possible but get the most most effective results. It's going to happen with AI as well. Companies will start selling AI employees so with a different experience, different results and different case studies and you will choose with who will be your employee at the moment and you will start working with them.
So what's the role of AI in the business? Firstly, like it's going to be more personalized in the e-commerce, personalization is the key to success. People like to get personalized emails, personalized recommendations, like what to buy, where to buy, if it's the right time to change something like their mobile devices or not.
And with this change, it will be easier for any type of brand to run a personalization on their businesses and get more customers and keep their customers loyal to their business using these tools. Another thing I already talked a bit, it's automation. So AI will start managing all your inventory.
Karen Nikoghosyan (09:39.388)
all our customer service and all our marketing. So what I mean by inventory, it's getting products from A point and delivering up to the end customer considering the last mile delivery. The customer service also is a crucial that AI is replacing because it's very important that people are having some issues with their order and they need to get immediate help.
to hurt your brand reputation. So they're starting to chat, to send messages in all possible channels. Maybe it will be the Amazon, Walmart, WhatsApp, your website, email and so on. And it's taking a lot of time from brands simply to answer to the customers that, your order is on the way, here's your tracking information. So 95 % of...
tickets that customers are open regarding their orders have the very simplest answers like, just please wait, everything is okay, nothing to worry, something like that. And here's your up-to-date information about your order. So AI can replace that and AI can help you to solve the problem. The next thing is predictive analytics.
so about pricing and about forecasted demand. So the pricing is one of the most important things also because some brands are trying to get to in buy box of Amazon to sell most of their products and the same thing is going to happen with Walmart and same thing with their own store. So everyone want to have the better price at the point at the same moment so they can sell
more and they can make more profit. With AI tools, AI can monitor everything and can get the best results. And with using AI, you can monitor 1000 competitors, but you cannot monitor like 10 of them or 12 of them manually because it's a lot of work to do.
Karen Nikoghosyan (11:52.842)
So some models are already in the market and allowing to monitor 1000 different competitors with 10,000 of SKUs and it's a lot of work they are doing and it's very fast they are working and they are very efficient. The last thing is fraud prevention which is also very important so when running an e-commerce everyone knows that there are a lot of fraud orders happening.
we need to prevent not to have problems. Let's consider returns, let's consider payment transactions, broken products and so on. AI is also going to analyze and give solutions and also early warnings on how to be aware and not to get into that. So these are the important things that are going to happen.
So just to wrap everything that I said, everyone need to start using AI a day early, as soon as possible. Because once you start learning a new thing, you can understand what's performing better, what tool to choose, where to replace an employee with an AI at the moment, and when is the right time to do it. Because now most of the things
still need an employee on the top of that. So a human who can control everything. But from time to time, everything changes. For example, the price analysis, no one needs people to do that. No one need to hire cheap teams overseas to do the price checks. So now everyone is hiring AI tools to do that. So.
Just start using AI, start doing it day early and yeah, feel free to reach out to me if you need any help, I will try to help you on that.
Michael Bernzweig (14:01.479)
Now, Karen, you mentioned in your presentation, multi-channel, and you mentioned a whole variety of different channels. Are retailers seeing differences in terms of fulfillment as opposed to manufacturers who might be fulfilling directly to customers or distributors? you see differences in the AI across the channels?
Karen Nikoghosyan (14:31.146)
Can you rephrase the question so I can understand?
Michael Bernzweig (14:35.682)
Yeah, so different organizations are using multi-channel solutions. For organizations that are distributors versus manufacturers versus retailers, is there a difference in the importance of having a solution in place or is it important across all three types of operations?
Karen Nikoghosyan (14:43.572)
Mm-hmm.
Karen Nikoghosyan (15:05.118)
Yeah, actually there is no difference in what type of operations you are. You will need some kind of AI to help on your operation. If you are even doing direct to customer, the simplest way to sell your products to your customers.
you still need something to automate or to manage to your operations and your inventory. And also you need competitive pricing. So you need to use some kind of tool. If you are doing multi-channel, the need of AI is rising like 10 times because it's not possible to check a lot of things when you are running multi-channel. For example, if you're selling on Amazon, on eBay, on Walmart, on wafer, there's a need of some kind of tool that can start money.
and give you the better results.
Michael Bernzweig (15:55.184)
Fantastic. Well, it was a great presentation. I hope a lot of individuals in the audience took away some of their next action items. We will have the Q &A session coming up in just a few minutes. So for anybody that has questions, type them into the Q &A and we will get to those in just a bit.
Karen Nikoghosyan (16:18.004)
Thank you.