eBay executives shared their thoughts about AI and agentic shopping in a post on the eBay corporate blog on January 16th. The post comes amid a busy month of AI-related announcements from tech and ecommerce players, including Google, Microsoft, Etsy, Shopify, and PayPal. In Friday’s post, four executives talked about AI trends – here are three of the ways the execs said AI would impact ecommerce.
1 Move from Authentication to Continuous Verification (“Trust”)
Avritti Khandurie Mittal, eBay’s Global Head of Product, said AI will change authentication, which is an area eBay has been focused on especially in its Focus Categories – such as sneakers.
“The real shift will be trust at scale. We’ll move from static authentication to continuous verification — where AI assesses identity, intent, product integrity, and regulatory fit in real time. As a result, trust becomes embedded, not bolted on,” she said. She said by 2026, “AI will absorb complexity across translation, compliance, payments, logistics, and risk so experiences feel local, personal, and effortless.”
Mittal had more to say about AI in a LinkedIn post about her participation at a roundtable in DC at a bipartisan Congressional AI caucus last month, including how AI was impacting buyers and sellers:
“For sellers, AI is removing friction and unlocking scale. More than 10 million sellers are already using eBay’s generative AI tools, creating 300+ million listings – helping small businesses operate more efficiently, reach new buyers, and compete on a more level playing field.
“For buyers, AI unlocks hyper-personalized discovery – connecting the right item with the right buyer at the right moment. Whether someone is a collector, a car enthusiast, or a fashionphile, our goal is to fuel passions through magical and more personal experiences.”
2 Boost Sales of Used Goods (“Sustainability”)
Renée Morin, eBay’s Chief Sustainability Officer, used two examples of how she believes AI will improve sustainability. One is by making it easier for shoppers to discover used (“pre-loved”) alternatives to new products “through conversational agents or by matching an item from just a single photo.”
“I’m also optimistic about the role AI can play in strengthening circular commerce, especially at the end of life stage,” she said. “Using AI to help sort and identify recyclable materials before they reach landfill could be a real game changer.”
3 Accelerate New Features, Speed Debugging
Senthil Padmanabhan, eBay Vice President of Global Verticals & API Platform, said AI will impact innovation, reliability, and developer productivity. eBay isn’t starting with a clean slate. “We build on top of existing products, which demands a nuanced and deep understanding of the company’s business, tech stack, and decision history,” he said.
A company’s specific context and human variance is the hardest part, he said. “In 2026, the organizations that master the ability to deliver this differentiated context to their AI systems will see exponential gains in productivity and unlock massive acceleration in how quickly they can build and ship products to customers.”
Padmanabhan spoke at the Ai4 conference in August where he said eBay developers use Anthropic’s Claude Code to track down bugs, reducing the time it takes from 2 to 3 days to triage to within an hour or 2 – “a massive savings in time,” he said.
In eBay’s introduction to the post, it cited achievements it had made last year in harnessing technology to make the eBay experience simpler, smarter, and safer for buyers and sellers around the world.
“We introduced smarter search and personalized recommendations to help buyers find the right item, launched AI-powered seller tools to streamline the listing process, and continued to expand eBay Live to new audiences, among other innovation highlights.”
More double talk from eBay who innovate nothing.
You would think the way eBay is talking they created AI and are a leader developer.
Like everything else on the site they are a copier of other people’s work.
And yet eBay continues with its massive fraudulent implementation of FVF on shipping. If they compared the cost of shipping labels to what was charged the customer and only charge FVF on any overage that would allow sellers use eBay labels or third party labels to immediately drop shipping cost to commercial rate, leading to more sales. No technical reasons preventing this – they simply want to continue ripping off their customers.
These days even retail purchases of USPS postage could be verified with some modifications to the API used by USPS and eBay to also reverify postage costs.
eBat defrauded its customers by not allowing decimal values in the listing form for years, only fixing that in 2025. This meant packages sent via USPS were charged for high tier Cubic rates, disqualified from Cubic rates altogether, and charged Dimensional Rates when the package did not qualify to such rates.
Even after eBay claimed they added Cubic rates their listing form did support such rates as decimal values were not supported and this rate is determined by rounding the dimensions to the nearest 1/4″ of an inch. Yet PirateShip supported these rates since they were implemented by USPS.
The only thing AI will do is help eBay rip its customers off more efficiently.
“Using AI to help sort and identify recyclable materials before they reach landfill could be a real game changer.”
Plasma gasification can turn almost any sort of waste material into syngas using high temperature plasma. A portion of syngas produced can be used to power the process. The syngas is sold as a clean burning energy source and can be refined into other gases. Further income is earned from dumping fees.
Organic matter leaves the system as syngas whereas inorganic mater leaves the system as glass or metal slag, which are both sold for industrial purposes.
This can be used to dispose of entire old landfill sites, toxic waste dumps, poisons, asbestos, coal, coal ash, medical waste, chemicals, existing municipal trash, the mountains of trash form natural disasters and more. The U.S. military even has used it to dispose of nerve gas.
Imagine instead of having a growing landfill in your area you have a plant that destroys all that trash and turns it into energy, glass slag and metal slag. Ford aircraft carriers use this technology to reduce the size of onboard trash, but does not recover the syngas created.
Why no talk from politicians about this technology? Because its an actual solution that could be taken care of by private enterprise without slush fund government projects.