Devin Wenig, here at eBay's Manhattan offices, joined the company in 2011 and became CEO in 2015. Devin Wenig buys his garbage bags, shampoo and even toothpaste on eBay. That's not typical for your regular eBay customer, who may visit for a car, cardigan or collectible coin. But as eBay's CEO, the 50-year-old Wenig likes to buy as much as he can from the site, now the world's third-largest e-retailer after Amazon and Alibaba. Wenig, who took over at eBay in mid-2015 after the company split with PayPal, met with CNET at his firm's Manhattan office last week during a snowstorm.

"I absolutely think that we can be a leader in artificial intelligence, and I think its future importance to commerce is significant," Wenig said. "I think horizontal use cases of AI are very far away -- this idea that you'll talk to something and it will do anything for you. Though both Wenig and Bezos have hammered the importance of artificial intelligence, Wenig said eBay will stay away from other Amazon strategies, like ramping up faster delivery. Instead, eBay will focus less on speed and more on providing unique products and breadth of selection, Wenig said. "My entire philosophy is to be less like our competitors, and not more like our competitors," Wenig said.