Late to Agentic AI, eBay Adds VP AI Transformation as Competitive Gap Widens
eBay appoints new VP AI Transformation as company lags behind competitors in Agentic AI race.
Michelle Warvel, who joined eBay from Nike in 2022, announced her latest promotion in a post on LinkedIn saying, "As I step into my new role leading AI Transformation at eBay, I’m energized by what’s now possible. When more people have these 'superpowers,' we move faster—and we all get way more creative. I can’t stop thinking about the speed of innovation that’s about to become the new normal."
Warvel also says "It’s not about hype. It’s about pushing into new territory..." - which is more than a little ironic considering eBay's now over decade long history failing to live up to their own hype about AI and machine learning capabilities.
Liz Morton
eBay has struggled with AI integration in the last few years - from a description generator and image background enhancer that were broken and buggy at launch, to Store design, social sharing, and listing tools that don't live up to the hype.
Liz Morton
Even worse, sellers have called out increasing instances of eBay using AI to summarize descriptions and product data, alter images, or otherwise interfere with how items are presented to buyers - raising serious concerns about potential not as described claims and returns.
Liz Morton
And in the UK market, where eBay is giving away free 12 month OpenAI Enterprise subscriptions to some users, sellers say they're disappointed at the lack of integration, asking why new AI features aren't being built directly into the marketplace's own tools.
Liz Morton
On the buyer side, eBay has also been slow to deploy AI functionality. After seeing some initial positive results with Shop The Look and Explore features for fashion, eBay announced a beta test of an "agentic AI shopping assistant" in May 2025 to much fanfare and hype.
Liz Morton
But almost a year later, it's still only available to a tiny percentage of US app users and of the few users who do have access to it, many have taken to the eBay community to complain about it being an annoyance, unsuccessfully trying to find ways to turn it off completely.
While competitors like Shopify, Walmart, Etsy, and Poshmark are all eagerly getting in early on in-chat checkout and other opportunities to partner with OpenAI, Google, Perplexity etc., eBay is taking a much more cautious and exclusionary approach - quietly updating their robots.txt file and User Agreement to explicitly prohibit "buy for me" agents and AI scrappers from interacting with the site.
Liz Morton
Industry observers suggested that rather than being an outright rejection of agentic AI, this move likely signals eBay is simply blocking outside/unauthorized programs, with the eventual goal to introduce an exclusive eBay created and controlled agentic experience more broadly across platform.
Several recent open job ads on the eBay careers page point in that direction as well.
For example, the company is looking for a Staff Product Designer - Agentic Search who will be tasked with "creating innovative and intuitive solutions and tackling eBay’s more grueling challenges through product discovery and design thinking."
And a Director, Buyer Experience AI R&D whose mission will be to "design and deliver transformative machine learning and generative AI solutions at eBay scale — from cutting-edge, personalized product recommendations for millions of users, to unlocking deep semantic understanding of over two billion listings, to building immersive and intelligent shopping experiences that have never been seen before."
Of course it's not surprising to see that eBay considers increasing advertising revenue as a core tenant of how AI should be used to "enhance" the buying experience, given recent controversial changes to Promoted Listings General ad polices, changes to how cost per click ads are billed, introducing ads to drive traffic to affiliate storefronts and eBay Live events, and new marketing terms and conditions expanding the ways in which activity on the site may be counted for ad attribution.
Liz Morton
Strangely, eBay is not using AI for the Item Compare functionality it recently began testing in search - which seems like a big missed opportunity considering product comparison a natural use case for AI that is already being utilized by competitors.
Liz Morton
eBay has also recently doubled down on deploying AI-powered self-service customer support solutions, indicating the company may currently believe AI is more useful as an internal cost-cutting tool than as an external tool to improve buyer and seller experiences.
Liz Morton
And some of the open "agentic AI" job ads make it clear eBay is still heavily pursuing that vision, despite the departure of VP Customer Service & Marketing Technology, Dan Leiva, last month.
It's also not clear who is currently leading eBay's responsible AI efforts as Chief Privacy Officer, VP AI & Data Responsibility Anna Zeiter left the company in December to take on the CEO role at recently launched European social media platform, W - and eBay has yet to publicly name a successor.
Liz Morton
Will Michelle Warvel finally succeed in bringing real "AI Transformation" to eBay after a decade+ of unfulfilled promises and hype? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
