eBay Hypes Agentic AI Experience Rolling Out To Limited Number Of Users
eBay is supercharging personalized commerce - and AI hype - with announcement of new Agentic AI experience rolling out to a limited number of users.
The company revealed the new feature in a corporate blog post today, saying it represent "an important next step in eBay’s AI-first customer experiences."
May 6, 2025 By: eBay News Team
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 — your next favorite find awaits.
We are pairing agentic AI capabilities with eBay’s scale, infrastructure, decades of customer insights, and product knowledge to streamline the experience for our customers.
This marks a milestone in eBay’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...
...At eBay, all AI-powered features are developed in close collaboration with our Responsible AI team to ensure they align with our values of safety, fairness, transparency, and accountability.
eBay also provided a video showing a mocked up example of what chatting with eBay.AI will supposedly look like in the app.
The press release also says that the new experience is currently available to a small percentage of US customers and will become available to more users on a rolling basis.
But don't get too excited just yet, that's also what they said when they announced AI-powered Magical Listing back in September 2023, which is just finally starting to roll out to all private/personal accounts in the US, UK and Germany after a 1.5 year delay - and even after all that extra time, it's still not ready for primetime.
Liz Morton
Like the AI description generator and AI image enhancer before, eBay's "just take a picture and let AI do the rest" listing tool not only fails to live up to the hype by still requiring far too much manual entry, in my testing it also completely failed to identify common items like a mousepad or Starbucks mug, showing eBay still has a long way to go on image recognition technology.
But that's not all - from "find visually similar", to Explore and Shop The Look for fashion discovery, and a variety of other ways eBay is trying to stuff AI into every aspect of the buying and selling experience, the features constantly either don't deliver promised functionality, provide wildly inaccurate and irrelevant results, and/or are so bug-riddled at launch that they are unusable.
Liz Morton
And despite eBay's warm and fuzzy corporate speak about AI Responsibility and "values of safety, fairness, transparency, and accountability", they continue to use AI to summarize item descriptions both on and off the site without seller's explicit consent or even knowledge, or protection from the increase Item Not As Described claims which are sure to follow.
First, eBay launched their Facebook Marketplace partnership without disclosing to sellers that they would be using eBay.AI to summarize product descriptions - including adding in hallucinated details of products which are not in the seller provided information and not included in the item for sale.
Liz Morton
In theory, sellers can opt out of having their items cross posted to Facebook this way, but it requires contacting eBay customer service to do so and in practice, many sellers say they have been unable to opt out and have gotten nothing but the runaround from support.
And now, they are using eBay.AI to summarize descriptions shown to some buyers within the eBay app as well, with similarly bad results - only this version doesn't even offer the pretense of an opt out and since it is a limited test, sellers have no way to control it or even know if/when it is being applied to their items.
Liz Morton
I would love for Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov to explain how undisclosed testing which alters sellers' descriptions without their explicit knowledge or consent and no way to opt out, then holds the seller financially liable if the buyer claims the item does not match the eBay.AI created summary is in any way compatible with "values of safety, fairness, transparency, and accountability."
Not only is it ethically dubious, this kind of undisclosed AI testing could end up causing regulatory and legal problems for eBay - especially since the plans to train their AI on user data revealed in their most recent Privacy Policy update have already drawn questions and concerns from regulators in Germany.
Liz Morton
And as companies further insert AI into every facet of the user experience, it also raises new questions about product liability.
In a recent example on Etsy, a buyer left a seller a negative review because the cake they sold was not vegan, but the seller had not advertised it as vegan and in fact stated clearly in the description the cake contained milk and eggs.
The erroneous - and potentially consumer harming - information showing that item in a search for "vegan cake" was entirely produced and published by Etsy's own LLM powered search algorithm.
Liz Morton
The idea of marketplace liability is nothing new of course - since the dawn of the internet and ecommerce, legislators and regulatory agencies across the globe have wrestled with the subject, especially when it comes to sites like Etsy and eBay which historically have leaned on the fact they are "just a venue" for items sold by third party sellers.
While that "just a venue" stance is no longer true for eBay, it hasn't stopped them from forwarding that argument to defend themselves against a lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, seeking to hold the company liable for illegal chemicals, pesticides and emissions control cheat devices sold on the platform.
U.S. District Judge Orelia Merchant agreed with eBay, dismissing the case in a ruling stating that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects eBay from liability for items sold by 3rd parties on their site.
Section 230 states:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
eBay.AI description summaries pose an interesting question - can companies be held liable when information does not come from another information content provider but rather from LLMs or other technology the company has put in place between sellers and buyers on their platforms?
eBay and other marketplaces can of course be expected to fight tooth and nail to preserve Section 230 as a "get out of liability free card."
If they lose, not only could they be subject to massive regulatory fines and product liability lawsuits, but it could also expose just how much of their publicly reported Gross Merchandise Volume/Sales over the years has been built on fraud, counterfeits and other illegal activity, potentially impacting stock prices and leading to shareholder action or SEC investigations as well.
In fact, eBay's Government Relations team recently visited Illinois lawmakers specifically to lobby against a proposed law which seeks to hold marketplaces as well as sellers responsible for product liability claims and they also continue to lobby at the federal level to keep Section 230 protections in place.
If potential product liability risks aren't enough to cause investors to question eBay's AI endeavors, at the very least they should spend time using the products themselves (or read independant reports from actual users) before falling for the latest hype-cycle press release.
For those who have been paying attention long enough, the siren song of "magical" innovation will sound familiar as it's just the latest in a long history of unfulfilled eBay AI promises - anyone remember ex-CEO Devin Wenig's failed attempt at a "smart personal shopping assistant" with ShopBot Beta in 2016?
Liz Morton
Meanwhile, basic site functionality continues to suffer from near daily business impacting technical problems that eBay has still yet to meaningfully improve 6+ years after Elliott Management cited technical misexecution as one of the reasons they launched an activist campaign calling for changes at the company in 2019.
"While machine learning and augmented reality are promising future technologies, eBay's publicly touted initiatives in these areas will add little value if the core platform continues to have critical functionality failures."
Those words ring just as true today as when Elliott wrote them 6 years ago and Mekel-Bobrov, CTO Mazen Rawashdeh and the Board of Directors' newly created Technology Committee would be wise to heed them before another activist decides it's time to call for changes at the company once again.
Do you think eBay's current AI offerings deliver promised performance and live up to the values of safety, fairness, transparency, and accountability? Let us know in the comments below!
