A casual glance at the resume of Ajay Chawla might suggest the founder and CEO of one of metro Detroit’s fastest-growing, AI-centered technology firms created his own alter ego as a Michigan Hall of Fame high school lacrosse coach.
In reality, the 51-year-old Chawla juggles the task of managing his OnTrac AI business from its headquarters in Bloomfield Hills with his duties on the playing field as the head varsity coach of Brother Rice High School’s highly rated lacrosse team.
The records of the two distinctly unrelated endeavors validate the success Chawla is enjoying while wearing both hats.
When he launched OnTrac AI in April 2024, Chawla says he began with six employees. Now the company has more than 100 workers.
“We have 30-plus employees in metro Detroit, and I say plus because we literally hire every day and I don’t even know how many people we have now,” Chawla says.
“We probably have 10 open jobs in metro Detroit, maybe 15. We have 30 (more) offshore, we have people in Florida, we have people in Canada, and then we have a delivery center in India, in Chennai, where we have around 60-some people.”
According to a company fact sheet, OnTrac AI’s revenue has quadrupled since the summer of 2025; it’s expected to at least double again by the end of this year.
While declining to share specific numbers, Chawla is willing to talk more generally about his company’s revenue.
“We had a couple of clients doing in the hundreds of thousands (of dollars) when I bought the business,” Chawla says. “We grew pretty quickly over the last two years, to where we’re now in the tens of millions of dollars.”
Chawla apparently wasn’t overly preoccupied with directing the meteoric two-year rise of OnTrac AI.
Last year, his Brother Rice lacrosse team won the Division I state high school championship; it was the eighth Division I championship the team has won since Chawla took over as varsity coach in 2014 (overall, the team has won 28 state championships).
Lacrosse and Brother Rice, located in Bloomfield Township, have been constants in his life. He was a player on the Brother Rice team before graduating in 1993 and attending Marymount University in Virginia. Three years of playing on Marymount’s lacrosse team prepped him for later returning to Brother Rice as an assistant coach.
Chawla says the key to stoking two disparate careers simultaneously is straightforward.
“You have to have a great team at the office that can cover for you when you’re on the field, and you have to have a great staff in lacrosse,” he says. “It really is a challenge — especially coaching Brother Rice, a very high-level program.”
His record is now 218 wins, including the eight Division I championships. In 2024, Chawla was inducted into the Michigan High School Lacrosse Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
He notes that coaching a top-ranked lacrosse team and running his technology business share overlapping values.
“I think there are a lot of principles that cross over,” he says, “(including) how you run a team, how you motivate your team, and how you figure out what motivates each person to play really well.”
His approach to motivating players is the same one he takes with his employees.
“Everybody in this office is motivated by different things. And as a leader here, I have to figure out what motivates my team in the office, just like I do on the field. I have to get the best out of my players or my employees,” he notes.
“Lacrosse has been a blessing to me. It has built relationships, many of which I do business with. I do business with kids I’ve coached. My executive vice president of sales, I coached him when he was at Brother Rice.
“We’ve had early success here at OnTrac, and we’ve had great success on the field, and (players and employees) get that culture. It’s that winning culture. We have this mindset every time we step on the field: We’re going to win. We have that same mindset here. I’m a very competitive individual, and we set out to win.”
OnTrac AI focuses on devising and implementing AI solutions for manufacturers. The “lion’s share” of the business, Chawla says, is concentrated on automotive manufacturing.
“We have clients in other businesses, but our bread and butter has always been manufacturing. We’re in a heavy manufacturing state, and I think that part of (using) AI is how does that allow us to bring more manufacturing back to the state?” he says.
“How can we control more of what we do here using AI, and how can we be more competitive with the lower-cost countries using AI? I think we’re starting to see that with robotics and different things.”
Chawla emphasizes that his Detroit roots and his preference for hiring staff from the metro area and Michigan gives his company an edge with local manufacturers over larger national consulting firms.
“I grew up in the (automotive) industry,” he says. “(I’ve seen) my friends’ parents being executives or working at Ford, (and) half my friends (have worked) for Chrysler, GM, or Stellantis. That’s how you differentiate your efforts here versus the (national firms). I think we’re more grounded in the business.”
Chawla also credits his company’s growth to relationships he has built over the years.
“People I had done business with in the past have helped grow our business, but there’s also people who took flyers (about) me and my company because they knew my reputation in the industry, and my reputation overall to be able to get stuff done,” he says.
Detroit, he adds, is home to OnTrac’s largest clients.
“They range from the biggest OEMs in the world to some Tier 3 suppliers and some other non-automotive manufacturers like Carhartt,” he says. “We have a roofing manufacturer, roof shingle manufacturers, and a company that makes the majority of the buns for McDonald’s. They’re still a manufacturer, but they’re different types.”
OnTrac AI’s mission is all about process automation — using technology to automate complex business processes for each client.
“We look across our portfolio of partners, from Microsoft to Google to Anthropic, and say, what’s the best fit for this customer, for that need?” he says. “We’re looking at the use case the customer has, and saying, this is the best solution for that use case. And then our engineers go in and implement that for them.”
Chawla says all OnTrac programs are custom-built for each client.
“We’re not taking off-the-shelf software and putting it in. We’re taking platforms that are out there today and we’re building around it, so the customer has a complete solution,” he explains.
“If you think about a supply chain, with AI we’re helping the purchasing department buy better and buy right across industry — (whether) I’m buying aluminum for a vehicle, or I’m buying nuts and bolts for transmissions, or I’m buying flour for (hamburger) buns,” he says.
Chawla says using AI allows his company to go into the market, test-price material, negotiate, and purchase at the best price for the clients.
For larger companies, he uses AI to do predictive analytics at the front end.
“(When) I know that aluminum is going to be up in the next three months, I better buy big now. Or if I know it’s going to go down, I’m going to buy what I currently need. And that’s the same in every commodity across the world,” he says.
Chawla says AI technology allows OnTrac AI to analyze long-established buying practices between a manufacturer and a favored vendor, to determine if the client is getting the best deal possible.
“Now, with AI, I have the ability to go test 30 other companies and get quotes and establish subquotes,” he says. “So now I’m multiplying my efficiency and capability across all these spots, or agents, that are out there — going and finding out different things — and now I can buy better.”
In the automotive space, where margins are often tight, shaving off a half a point of cost can be a big deal.
“It doesn’t matter if that’s bread-making, making clothing for Carhartt, or making buttons for car parks. It doesn’t matter,” he says.
“You’re buying the same. And I think the same thing applies in finance, accounting, and HR — all the main functions of a business are often the same. It’s just different places.”
Chawla says his company doesn’t take a preset approach with a new client.
“Oftentimes when we go in, we’re going in on the front end and doing the process efficiency first, and then automating it with AI, and that’s a big deal — especially in the automotive industry,” he says. “In Tier 2 and Tier 3 manufacturers, and even in Tier 1s and OEMs, you may have 30 people doing the same thing and they’re all doing it a different way, because that’s the way they just do it.
“And so, you have to bring efficiency to it before you automate it. So, a lot of times we come in and we make processes a lot more efficient, and we find out that this is a better thing to automate, or you don’t really need to automate it.”
Across the board, top executives of the biggest manufacturing companies, including the Detroit Three, are mandating that their senior leaders adopt even more AI initiatives.
Such automated technology allows OnTrac to drill deep into previously inscrutable business transactions such as thousands of individual payments on accounts receivable or auto warranty claims from dealers around the country to determine the validity of each item.
Companies that routinely pay refund claims for spoilage or breakage of goods they ship no longer have to accept those claims as the cost of doing business, he says. AI technology allows OnTrac to examine each and every claim submitted by a distributor.
A $5 claim that falls under the percentage of loss acceptable to a client shaves $5,000 off a monthly bill when that distributor submits 1,000 such claims that are bogus, Chawla says.
“And that’s what’s happening, and some of these companies are running off hundreds of thousands of dollars a month,” he says. “So we went from saying, hey, we’re not gonna look at anything under a certain dollar amount, to we’re just going to look at everything now.”
That type of AI review not only benefits a client’s fiscal performance, but it also sets new standards in a given marketplace.
“The indirect effect is the mindset now of that distributor. (It’s) ‘Oh, my God, they’re checking everything,’” Chawla says. “In the automotive space, where margins are really tight, if you can shave off half a point of your cost, that’s a big deal on your margins, for sure.”
