EBay: Agentic AI Could Create New Channel for Online Shopping

Last year was a “transformative” one for eBay as the company deployed artificial intelligence (AI) tools for use by employees, sellers and buyers, executives said Wednesday (Feb. 26) during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

The company’s enhanced core AI platform enabled it to launch its first proprietary large language models (LLMs) during 2024, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone said during the call.

“We leveraged our decades of eCommerce data to build our proprietary LLM models from scratch to accomplish specialized eCommerce tasks at greater levels of efficiency,” Iannone said.

“We also pretrained leading open source models on our dataset to improve their accuracy on specific eBay use cases. By the end of the year, we launched dozens of customer-facing features powered by LLMs across the buyer and seller experiences, search, payments, marketing and specific focus categories.”

New AI tools helped eBay boost productivity in engineering and customer service and improve its platform’s search results; helped sellers generate product listings, enhance product images and automate social media posting; and helped buyers shop and discover products, Iannone said.

In January 2025, eBay announced that it had begun collaborating with OpenAI’s Operator to direct users to eBay listings, according to a presentation released Wednesday. Operator is an AI agent that can use its own browser to perform tasks on the web for users, according to OpenAI’s website.

“This agentic approach to commerce could create an entirely new channel for discovery and shopping online,” Iannone said during the call. “Although it’s early days, we anticipate this collaboration could expand the reach of our sellers, giving more buyers exposure to eBay’s unique and differentiated inventory.”

During 2024, eBay also continued to add payment methods, according to a Wednesday earnings release. These additions included the expansion of Klarna’s buy now, pay later (BNPL) option to six more European countries after a successful launch in Germany, and a partnership with Riverty to allow buyers in Germany to pay using a monthly invoice.

“In payments and financial services, we continue to focus on adding new and locally relevant ways to pay on eBay, to expand buyer choice, drive conversion and optimize our payment mix,” Iannone said.

Speaking of eBay’s acquisition of online automotive transaction solution provider Caramel, Iannone said the move will enable the company to better tap into the collectible car market by enhancing the level of trust for vehicle purchases on the platform; enabling online vehicle purchases in all 50 states; and simplifying the complexities of vehicle sales.

“We also expect an improved vehicle transaction experience to drive synergies within other categories as our average vehicle buyer also spends thousands of dollars annually on P&A [parts and accessories] and non-motor items across the eBay marketplace,” Iannone said.