About Ajinkya Kale, Senior Applied Researcher, AI at eBay Ajinkya works with next-gen ecommerce chatbots. He is the founding member of the AI team for New Product Development initiative at eBay. He leads research efforts across Natural Language Understanding, knowledge graphs, query understanding and user behavior mining chatbots. About Anuj Vatsa, Senior Software Engineer, New Product Development at eBay Anuj leads the effort in building the question answering service by building powerful ecommerce/world knowledge graph that helps the eBay Google Assistant Skill / eBay ShopBot Facebook Messenger ask meaningful questions. He is responsible for writing scala service on top of the Neo4j graph database.

Specifically, these products are working within the first stage of AI, artificial narrow intelligence. We, designers, play a key role in shaping how AI will develop. We already have the necessary skills to push it forward. My next post will touch on how design makes AI smarter. But before we go there, it's beneficial to understand where we are at in the three stages of AI to be better informed on how we can use design to improve AI.

The following eBay scientists and engineers are the authors and great minds behind this post: Amit Srivastava, Sanjika Hewavitharana, Ajinkya Kale, and Saab Mansour. The ability for computers to understand online shoppers' intent has been an elusive goal. There are several reasons for this, but the main culprit is the stateless nature of today's search engines. This means a shopper must accurately specify all of the key attributes for a desired item inside a search box, in a single instance. Anyone who shops online knows how difficult and frustrating it can be to refine a search and explore for items at the same time.

With more selection available to online shoppers than ever before, finding items that are perfect for you and your budget can be time consuming. At eBay, our focus is to help shoppers find their version of perfect and simplify the shopping experience. In addition to major enhancements we've been making to our core platform, we've also been hard at work on a new commerce experience powered by artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and human judgment. We're starting to bring this experience to life with eBay ShopBot, which debuts today in beta on Facebook Messenger. Our vision is to make shopping with eBay as easy as talking to a friend, whether you are looking for something specific or just browsing for inspiration.

With more selection available to online shoppers than ever before, finding items that are perfect for you and your budget can be time consuming. At eBay, our focus is to help shoppers find their version of perfect and simplify the shopping experience. In addition to major enhancements we've been making to our core platform, we've also been hard at work on a new commerce experience powered by artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and human judgement. We're starting to bring this experience to life with eBay ShopBot, which debuts today in beta on Facebook Messenger. Our vision is to make shopping with eBay as easy as talking to a friend, whether you are looking for something specific or just browsing for inspiration.