eBay's first chief AI officer is building AI tools to change how people shop online, saying the AI 'paradigm shift' will happen in three phases

• E-commerce companies eBay and Shopify are both building tools that enable online sellers to use AI.
• eBay chief AI officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov said he sees AI bringing a "paradigm shift" to e-commerce.

Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov joined eBay as the company's first chief AI officer in 2021. The new role was an evolution of what was previously the chief scientist position and a signal of how seriously the e-commerce marketplace company is taking AI.

eBay is bringing AI to both sides of the e-commerce equation, innovating for both buyers and sellers on its platform. Its AI initiatives have included generative AI tools to make it easier to list products, a new 3D imaging tool, natural language search to improve search results for buyers, and AI-powered expert content for product categories like electronics and motor parts.

Internally, eBay is also developing AI tools that are aimed at improving productivity and creativity for its engineers, analysts, and content creators.

Mekel-Bobrov told Insider he views the arrival of AI as a "paradigm shift" that "will completely transform e-commerce" and outlined how he sees that transformation taking place over the next three to five years.

In the first phase, he said, natural language search capabilities will become available on more platforms, and shopping assistants will become more common.

"In the second phase, as LLM-powered agents become increasingly popular and their operating cost continues to go down, I expect the trend towards distributed commerce will only accelerate, as e-commerce platforms expand from being a destination consumers go to, i.e., a site or an app, to an experience that shows up wherever the customer is," he said.

Mekel-Bobrov said the third phase would be marked by AI agents being able to plan and complete a series of tasks to achieve a specific outcome.

"This could mean acting on behalf of sellers to reach their financial goals, or on behalf of buyers to complete certain shopping missions, like purchasing everything they need for a trip within a certain timeframe and budget," Mekel-Bobrov said.

He said his work has focused on "smaller sellers who wouldn't otherwise have access to this technology."

"We've witnessed the massive upsides of putting AI in the hands of business owners"

Shopify's AI's efforts have similarly focused on the technology's ability to empower entrepreneurs.

Miqdad Jaffer, a director of product at Shopify, runs a team working to incorporate AI across the e-commerce platform run by the Canadian company.

Jaffer told Insider that business owners often have specific needs that aren't easily solved by the AI tools that are widely accessible today. So the company built a new suite of AI capabilities called Shopify Magic, which uses a combination of anonymized Shopify data and OpenAI's ChatGPT APIs to generate responses to merchants' business needs.

Jaffer's team also recently announced Sidekick, a new AI tool powered by Shopify Magic. It's an AI assistant that can perform tasks for merchants interacting with it using their everyday language.

"We've witnessed the massive upsides of putting AI in the hands of business owners and want every business owner to have access to it — from managing administrative tasks to supporting business operations," Jaffer said. "By deploying AI across Shopify's platform, we're keeping businesses competitive and helping them achieve greater success in today's market."

Shopify has been working on some consumer-facing uses of AI, too. Jaffer oversaw the launch of Shop.ai, a shopping assistant designed to help shoppers easily find specific products within the Shop app, using natural conversation prompts.

Ensuring AI is used responsibly

While Shopify and eBay want to empower merchants to use AI, their leaders also want to make sure that the technology doesn't cause harm. Jaffer said his team works to prevent the models' hallucinations and avoid their inherent biases by providing plenty of context and direction. They've also designed the systems to make suggestions, not decisions.

"AI can help solve cold start problems and provide optionality, but the decision-making should sit with the merchant," he said.

Mekel-Bobrov launched eBay's Office of Responsible AI, which defines best practices for AI across the company. The office has collaborated with Harvard Business School and other academic institutions and companies on researching how to use generative AI responsibly.

"The recent explosion in generative AI poses new challenges to how we evaluate AI systems, new ways in which bias can show up and fairness needs to be established, and ultimately more uncertainty about the potential outputs a model may generate," Mekel-Bobrov said.

This means that the old ways of measuring risk won't be enough, he said.

"We also need to perform more fundamental research on new forms of risk posed by the rapidly evolving AI technologies and how to best mitigate them," he added.