Transforming Transactions With Technology: eBay’s Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Launching a new AI initiative is quite different from launching a new technology platform, like an ERP. Find out the key differences on today's episode.

**Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov** (0:14)
I'm Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov from eBay, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:20)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Information Systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Ideas Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:39)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I also co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching AI for six years now, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and deploy and scale AI capabilities across the organization and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:05)
Shervin are excited today to be talking with Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, the chief AI officer at eBay. Nitzan, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Welcome.

**Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov** (1:13)
Thanks so much. Excited to be here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:15)
You've got a relatively new position within the last year or so. Can you tell us what your role is at eBay?

**Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov** (1:21)
Before me, my predecessors, so to speak, have all been chief AI scientists.
And the change to a chief AI officer was actually a strategic one with the recognition that AI is more than just the machine learning models, that AI is the engineering that it takes to productionize those models at scale. And of course, the business impact and business use cases. We really think of AI as an end-to-end experience.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:54)
So eBay is pretty excited about this. What is eBay hoping to gain from this?

**Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov** (1:58)
I think opportunities in every facet of our business, as probably most companies our size would say as well.
I think for us, probably what we're most excited about and the reason that I joined eBay late last year, what made me excited is the ability to create AI-led tools, essentially, that we put into the hands of our customers, both buyers and sellers, to create their own experiences that they share with each other. It's not just about us using AI to build things, but rather us building AI tooling to enable our buyers and sellers to build things. And I think that's really exciting.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:44)
Give us an example of one of those.

**Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov** (2:46)
Most recently, we rolled out our new 3D visualization experience, which is using computer vision on the back end to do the processing and some of the rendering. It's not about us using this technology to create 3D visualizations, but rather we're enabling through our mobile app our sellers to create visualizations of their own items at scale and in a sort of super easy way that doesn't require professional equipment.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:23)
What do you think that eBay is doing uniquely in artificial intelligence?

**Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov** (3:27)
I'll start with sort of the approach, and then I'll get into an example or two.
From an approach perspective, I think we're going at it in a unique way because we're a two-sided marketplace. We worry about buyers and sellers, and so much of our attention is on building capabilities for our customers to use versus building experiences ourselves directly. Building tools for our customers to build experiences, I do think, is unique.
It's unique also from a technology perspective because there's a different level of resilience that's needed, and you have to test far greater number of ways in which it can fail when you're not actually building the experience yourself. You're putting tools in the hands of others to do. So it's almost like we are software as a service within an e-commerce company. So that's sort of one aspect of it. In terms of specific areas of focus that are maybe unique, we are sort of double downing now on visual experiences. We can say computer vision, but I think of it a little bit more broadly than computer vision as an AI approach and thinking of it as intelligent visual experiences that are immersive, interactive, adaptive, et cetera. 3D is sort of the tip of the iceberg, right? But as we get deeper into the quote unquote metaverse and deeper and deeper into ways in which our digital platform is more than just a place to do the commerce itself, we think that visual experiences in real time, live interaction between people, ways of visualizing products that feel like they're in your hands versus just being on a screen is something that will be transformational for eBay.