How Can eBay Reap the Benefits of AI?

At the Code Conference earlier this month, eBay CEO Devin Wenig revealed that the company started getting very serious about using AI last year, noting that e-commerce is essentially a data business and that AI may be more important for eBay than its peers due to the "breadth of [its] inventory." Wenig further explained that eBay plans to formulate a strategy focused on using data to predict what consumers might want and offering a wide selection of products. In fact, eBay aims to use algorithms over the next three to four years to better understand consumer intent and create an ecosystem involving social networks and messaging applications to allow for better targeting, R.W. Baird analyst Colin Sebastian wrote in a note earlier this month. "They have the most data. Their data is very actionable," Wedbush Securities analyst Gil Luria said of eBay.