Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov and Vice President of Seller Experience Xiaodi Zhang appeared at the VentureBeat Transform conference on Tuesday, July 11th, to discuss generative AI, how eBay has been building AI infrastructure for many years and ways that recent evolutions in the technology can help sellers, buyers and employees. Xiaodi also spoke as a panelist at the Women in AI breakfast panel, speaking on the ways companies are putting the right tools and teams in place to address biases and develop responsibly with AI.
“We’ve doubled down on our investment in generative AI and computer vision technologies because we believe that [they have] transformational value for impacting the customer experience,” Nitzan said at the conference, writes Victor Dey at VentureBeat. Nitzan and Xiaodi also spoke at length about the particular ways AI can help make using eBay’s marketplace more seamless for both sellers and buyers. This notably included tackling the “cold start” problem: buyers expect a wealth of details in an eBay listing, and that can be intimidating to sellers, especially those listing for the first time. Generative AI, said Xiaodi, can simplify that process by filling in those details for them.
Nitzan and Xiaodi also spoke about the need for governance in AI to combat potential issues like hallucination and discrimination.
You can watch Nitzan and Xiaodi’s panels on-demand for free over at VentureBeat (registration required).
