eBay Agentic AI for Personalized Shopping Experience

eBay just put out a press release hyping a new "agentic AI experience" to "supercharge personalized shopping:

https://innovation.ebayinc.com/stories/ebay-uses-agentic-ai-to-supercharge-personalized-ecommerce/

Today, weâ€™re announcing a new AI shopping agent, representing an important next step in eBayâ€™s AI-first customer experiences.

Seamlessly woven into your shopping journey, this intelligent agent delivers real-time, hyper-personalized product picks and expert guidance based on your shopping preferences as you explore our marketplace. From pinpointing the perfect gift for your best friend to assembling the ideal Spring Break wardrobe, our agent makes discovery effortless, fun, and uniquely tailored to you.

Get ready to shop smarter â€” your next favorite find awaits.

We are pairing agentic AI capabilities with eBayâ€™s scale, infrastructure, decades of customer insights, and product knowledge to streamline the experience for our customers. This marks a milestone in eBayâ€™s advancement of agentic AI, which has evolved from simple chatbots to conversational and interactive agents that are equipped to understand, interact, and anticipate user needs. Such capabilities have the potential to enable us to lead the next generation of shopping and selling, fueling marketplace growth, and solidifying our position in AI-powered ecommerce...

...eBayâ€™s shopping agent will show up wherever the user is in their buying journey, either by reacting to a user's request or through predictive messaging inline on the page the user is visiting.

There's a mocked up video on that page too for those who want to see what it will supposedly look like and they say it's currently available to "small percentage of US customers" - so if the Magical Listing experience is any indication the rest of us will probably see it in a year or two and it won't be nearly as impressive of the mock up. ðŸ˜‚

The part that really got me was the bit about "close collaboration with our Responsible AI team to ensure they align with our values of safety, fairness, transparency, and accountability".

eBay keeps using those words, but based on what we're seeing with undisclosed testing of AI description summaries without the sellers' explicit knowledge or consent and no way to opt out, I do not think they mean what eBay thinks they mean.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Description-highlights-summarized-with-ebay-ai-Can-I-opt-out/m-p/35055670/highlight/true#M2556450

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/eBay-AI-Summaries-In-Facebook-Marketplace-Partner-Listings-Could/td-p/35039811

valueaddedresource

5 View listings

Posted 1 year ago·Last reply 1 year ago

10 comments

chapeau-noir

·1 year ago

No bad meows!6575 View listings

Why am I not surprised that the magical AI shown in that video doesn't even know the difference between 'its' and it's'.

a_c_green

·1 year ago

4168 View listings

@chapeau-noir wrote:
Why am I not surprised that the magical AI shown in that video doesn't even know the difference between 'its' and it's'.

That would definitely suggest that the video was cobbled together manually, and that the images and text were not actually AI-generated.

Just for yucks, I spent some time just now with Google, trying various queries involving the Omega Speedmaster and its "Moonwatch" nickname, to see if the AI-generated text responses would resemble that in the eBay screenshot (and in particular whether it would correctly use "its" instead of "it's" in that sentence), but grammar-wise, the actual AI responses were perfect every time.

chapeau-noir

·1 year ago

No bad meows!6575 View listings

@a_c_green wrote:
@chapeau-noir wrote:
Why am I not surprised that the magical AI shown in that video doesn't even know the difference between 'its' and it's'.
That would definitely suggest that the video was cobbled together manually, and that the images and text were not actually AI-generated.

Just for yucks, I spent some time just now with Google, trying various queries involving the Omega Speedmaster and its "Moonwatch" nickname, to see if the AI-generated text responses would resemble that in the eBay screenshot (and in particular whether it would correctly use "its" instead of "it's" in that sentence), but grammar-wise, the actual AI responses were perfect every time.

It's a very low bar, and I expect you are correct about the video.

bennotbill

·1 year ago

1023 View listings

But will ebay take full responsibility for any bad decisions their agentic agents make?

Not that they take any responsibility for all the bad decisions their allegedly human agents currently make.

valueaddedresource

OP1 year ago

5 View listings

@bennotbill wrote:
But will ebay take full responsibility for any bad decisions their agentic agents make?

Not that they take any responsibility for all the bad decisions their allegedly human agents currently make.

@bennotbill if their attitude toward responsibility for bad information/experiences from their other AI tools is any indication, I wouldn't hold your breath.

Like I said, if their AI Responsibility team really does believe they are living up to the values of safety, fairness, transparency, and accountability then....eBay clearly has a very different definition of those words than I do.

itsjustasprain

·1 year ago

2345 View listings

@valueaddedresource wrote:
@bennotbill wrote:
But will ebay take full responsibility for any bad decisions their agentic agents make?

Not that they take any responsibility for all the bad decisions their allegedly human agents currently make.
@bennotbill if their attitude toward responsibility for bad information/experiences from their other AI tools is any indication, I wouldn't hold your breath.

Like I said, if their AI Responsibility team really does believe they are living up to the values of safety, fairness, transparency, and accountability then....eBay clearly has a very different definition of those words than I do.

I think that in a way it is a good example of the Ebay fascination with chasing the next shiny thing instead of fixing what is already out there and not working properly.

A perfect example of that would be the search utility and its amazing ability to return heaps of mismatched and irrelevant items interspersed with a few actual search hits (unless you are sorting your results by Price + Shipping: Lowest First in which case you will see maybe 50% of your search results in what Ebay calls a "streamlined" set).

This new 'agentic' AI seems to rely on that flaky Ebay searching from what I see in that video demo. They may discover that they are building castles on sand.

valueaddedresource

OP1 year ago

5 View listings

Here's the video eBay provided:

an-57470

·1 year ago

0 View listings

It looks like I'll have to learn how to modify how I search to minimize what AI thinks I want.

dhbookds

·1 year ago

1682 View listings

lol, I had to look up Agentic

AI Overview

"Agentic" means having the ability to act independently and achieve outcomes through self-directed action. It refers to a system or entity that has agency â€“ the capacity to reason, make decisions, and take action based on those decisions. In essence, an agentic entity is capable of functioning as an independent agent, achieving goals and adapting to its environment without constant human intervention.

Elaboration:

Agency:
The core concept behind "agentic" is agency, which is the capacity of an individual or system to act independently and make choices.

Self-Directed Action:
An agentic entity is not just reactive; it can initiate actions and take responsibility for them.
Independent Decision-Making:
Agentic systems can analyze information, draw conclusions, and make decisions without relying on external guidance.
Autonomy:
Agentic systems are characterized by a high degree of autonomy, meaning they can operate with minimal human intervention.
Adaptability:
Agentic entities can learn and adapt to changing circumstances and goals, improving their performance over time.
Examples in AI:
In the context of AI, agentic AI refers to systems that can act autonomously to accomplish tasks, make decisions, and learn from experience. For example, an agentic AI assistant could not only provide information but also take action, like booking a meeting or adjusting a thermostat, based on its understanding of the user's needs, according to Moveworks.

valueaddedresource

OP1 year ago

5 View listings

Oh also, that demo mock up is giving me strong ShopBot Beta vibes....anyone else remember this from 2016?ðŸ˜‚

https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/say-hello-to-ebay-shopbot-beta/