Over the past two years, eBay Inc. has continued to invest in artificial intelligence (AI); now, it’s putting that capital to use to test emerging opportunities in agentic commerce.
The online marketplace has increased its use of generative AI as a way to improve its selling experience, in part through its “magical listing” technology for sellers. CEO Jamie Iannone outlined the agentic AI use in eBay’s Q3 2025 earnings call with investors.
“In addition to selling, we’ve been testing a variety of agentic experiences in search and shopping to learn how buyers and sellers engage with AI at different phases of the customer journey,” Iannone told investors. “This includes both on eBay agentic experiences like our AI shopping agent pilot and third-party agents from companies like OpenAI.”
So far, OpenAI has worked with Etsy to launch what the former calls “instant checkout.” That refers to an agentic commerce process in which an AI agent autonomously makes a purchase on a user’s behalf. OpenAI had announced that it would also work with eBay and Instacart, allowing the online marketplaces to use its Operator agent.
Earlier in October, OpenAI and Walmart announced a partnership that would allow consumers to shop from the retailer when using ChatGPT.
In the Oct. 14 announcement, Walmart referred to the partnership as “ushering in the next generation of retail.” It said it’s combining its assortment and delivery speed “with the power of AI” in a statement announcing its partnership with OpenAI.
EBay ranks No. 6 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database. The database ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).
How eBay is approaching agentic AI and commerce
“Our AI shopping agent has given buyers a new way to shop across our inventory with personalized product picks and expert guidance based on their individual shopping preferences,” Iannone told investors. “As the pilot has progressed, we’ve significantly improved the underlying technology powering the experience. For example, we were able to build hyper-optimized large language models in-house that perform specific shopping agent tasks at lower latency and for significantly reduced cost versus commercial models.”
Through the learning and improvements eBay has made, it is “now poised to gradually bring agentic capabilities into the core of eBay’s business through the main search experience,” according to Iannone.
eBay provides a visual for investors displaying how it is incorporating agentic AI into its product suite. | Image credit: eBay Investor Relations
The learnings have also guided the development of what eBay refers to as a “unified agentic commerce platform.” Iannone said it integrates eBay’s hybrid cloud infrastructure, LLM ecosystem, model context protocol server and other agentic protocols with a proprietary data layer.
“This platform enables a fully connected experience between eBay agents and generalized third-party agents from companies like OpenAI, which allows us to service the most personalized and relevant products to shoppers in real time based on our 30 years of listings, pricings, transactions and behavior signals,” Iannone said. “We believe this platform will enable us to deliver more personalized, seamless and trusted experiences for eBay buyers regardless of where they started their shopping journey.”
These capabilities will help improve the “on-eBay experience” with agentic tools, he added.
“Our agentic commerce platform opens up entirely new opportunities for eBay by enabling connectivity between on-eBay and third-party agents to facilitate personalized conversational shopping experiences that bring eBay’s unique inventory and trust to wherever buyers begin their search,” Iannone said.
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