eBay assists shoppers with agentic AI tool

eBay is equipping customers with agentic AI capabilities to help personalize and streamline their shopping experience.

The e-commerce retailer is making a new shopping agent with agentic AI functionality to what it terms a “small percentage” of U.S. shoppers, with wider rollout expected in the coming months. Agentic AI goes a step beyond generative AI by analyzing massive amounts of data in near-real-time and then automatically taking action based on the results. 

The new eBay agentic AI shopping assistant delivers real-time, hyper-personalized product picks and expert guidance based on a customer’s shopping preferences as they explore the eBay site. 

"With almost 30 years of experience serving our customers and backed by our vast technology infrastructure, eBay is uniquely positioned to fuel AI-driven personalization and automation," said Mazen Rawashdeh, CTO, eBay. "These agentic AI advancements help us to better serve our customers with efficiency and a deep understanding of their needs, while positioning eBay at the forefront of the futuristic, agent-powered ecommerce landscape."

eBay’s new shopping agent will show up wherever a customer is in their buying journey, either by reacting to their request or through predictive messaging inline on the page the user is visiting.

eBay is also participating in the research preview of Operator, a new agentic AI solution from OpenAI, developer of the ChatGPT generative AI model. To use Operator, consumers describe the task they would like performed, such as locating a desired product to purchase, and Operator automatically handles the rest.

"We believe that the whole shopping experience will be AI-infused in the future,” said Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, chief AI officer, eBay. “We continue to stay at the leading edge of AI-powered commerce, powering a growing suite of agentic tools and services to enable secure and highly personalized experiences that make shopping on eBay easier and more meaningful.”