Raffaele Tiberio is the founder and CEO of DeliverAl, an end-to-end facilitator for all businesses seeking effective and affordable e-commerce solutions. Here, he speaks with LIRA Strategies Partners Founder and Managing Director Raffaella Campagnoli about the concept behind the venture.
Founder and CEO, DeliverAI
Raffaele, you recently launched DeliverAI; can you tell us more about your business objectives?
At the start of the pandemic, we started thinking about how to support small and medium companies and businesses in their digitalisation journey, overcoming all the barriers generated by an over-competitive market.
DeliverAI actually enables e-commerce in two to three days, starting with pre-existing websites or social media (Instagram and Facebook) pages, at a very affordable price. We started developing the platform for F&B businesses, and specifically for restaurants, which were suffering due to the impact of the pandemic, and also because of the very high commissions charged by aggregators such as Deliveroo or Talabat. After eight months of operations, we have acquired a significant number of restaurants that are happy with the solution and already started enhancing the platform to also embrace non-food retailers’ needs.
This sounds very interesting – could you please describe in more detail how DeliverAI works?
The platform operates using a very easy method; we communicate with our clients in a one-hour call, understanding their business objectives and catalogues. Then, we produce a demo on our proprietary widget, showing them how e-commerce would work, and we finalise it together, connecting the widget to their website and/or social media pages. That’s all. Done! The client can control the catalogue, pricing, preparation and delivery of their orders directly on our app or the dashboard we enable for managing all back-office activities (for example: promotions, loyalty points, CRM, analytics, delivery locations, pick-up options, delivery fees).
That seems very simple, indeed! Are you also offering payment and delivery services?
Of course, the platform is already designed to be integrated with both payment gateways and delivery services.
Depending on the type of business and its delivery locations, we engage with national or international partners, taking care of the fulfillment of each order. Also, in this case, everything is connected to the platform so clients can easily track the status of the order, from preparation to final delivery. Like you, Raffaella, would observe, we’re building an ecosystem of partners around DeliverAI; we have web developers, fulfillment partners, mobile and payment operators, and many other specialised providers. We’re expanding the network continuously to offer our clients a wider range of options.
How can you describe the benefits that DeliverAI offers clients?
Well, the benefits are aplenty: what our clients are experiencing is a facilitation of the digital transformation, especially small and medium-sized companies, from restaurants to retailers, which are not equipped with the internal capabilities to make it happen themselves.
DeliverAI provides them with a solution which is complete, and easy for them to directly manage, allowing what a full team of professionals would do: from loyalty programmes, promotions, and e-commerce design and activation, to programme management, plus various system integrations.
Also, DeliverAI’s name comes from the fact that we’re enabling artificial intelligence for them: we can activate digital marketing based on end consumer analysis, suggest initiatives and activations, manage social media campaigns, and more. Our pricing model is as simple as the solution: small set-up fees (less than AED 10,000, one shot) and a monthly subscription fee varying from AED 300 to AED 900, according to the package they choose.
As the leader of DeliverAI, what are your future plans for your platform? What’s the expansion strategy?
My experience comes from working with big companies: I had been working at Accenture Technology for many years, and so were some of my teammates; now, we’re partnering with organisations such as EY and Etisalat to enable the platform to be scaled modularly.
We’re targeting different segments for our expansion: from Banks, where we’re keen to white-label our platform, enabling their SMEs to go for e-commerce, to Hospitality, offering solutions to medium-size chains, F&B outlets, retailers and manufacturers who are willing to expand their business geographically with an asset-light, turnkey enabler.
