eBay is integrating agentic AI directly into search, CEO Jamie Iannone told Wall Street analysts during the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings on Wednesday. That helps explain why eBay hasn’t announced a version of Amazon and Walmart’s AI shopping assistants (Rufus and Sparky, respectively).
Iannone said eBay began rolling out agentic search to a subset of its US mobile traffic in December. “This technology allows buyers to shop using natural language in a back-and-fourth dialog, just like they would with a knowledgeable sales associate that understands their style, preferences and shopping history,” he said.
“As a result, new buyers are able to seamlessly filter results and more easily discover the amazing breadth and depth of inventory on eBay just like enthusiasts have been able to do for many years.”
The CEO said eBay plans to scale agentic search to more users throughout 2026, laying the groundwork for an even more personalized shopping journey for eBay customers.
Beyond building agentic capability in-house as his first priority, Iannone said eBay has built a unified agentic commerce platform that enables it to plug into third-party agents and test different types of experiences to see what works best for the eBay marketplace.
Iannone said eBay feels well positioned when it comes to agentic search because its inventory is “really different” from most marketplaces – “roughly 90% of our GMV is non new in season, and two-thirds of that intersect with focus categories, recommerce, or with C2C. So these are highly considered purchases of unique items – think used, refurbished, collectible, or luxury items where conditions, scarcity, and the human judgment matter.”
And he feels confident because of eBay’s experience with trust, which he called a huge differentiator. “You think about seller feedback, authenticity guarantee, and the post-transaction protections that we provide, that’s hard to replicate – along with financial services and global shipping solutions – really do kind of reduce the transactional friction for buyers and sellers.
“So all of these factors, I think, put us in an incredibly strong position to thrive in an agentic AI world, and I’m really excited by the investments that we’re making and the customer responses to how we’re using that technology on the eBay experience.”
Iannone said the traffic coming from AI is very small right now – and that’s the case in general, not just for eBay – but the traffic that is being driven is high-intent, and eBay is seeing high conversion.
He added that eBay’s enthusiast buyers who are part of the pilot love the ability to have a back-and-forth conversation. “The ability to kind of refine and filter their items using agentic search and get to the things that they want – it’s really resonating on the platform.”