eBay CEO Jamie Iannone promotes the company’s AI program and recent stock rally in the laudatory Semafor CEO Signal feature.
The interview, originally featured in Semafor’s invitational newsletter for CEOs of large companies, credits Iannone’s shift in strategy toward “focus on verticals” and “enthusiastic buyers” and adoption of AI to “reduce friction” for eBay’s outperformance in the stock market – but do these claims reflect reality current state of buying and selling in the market?
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Semafor says: “The focus is on eBay’s most passionate users and applying AI to the vast data set from 134 million active buyers, 2.4 billion listings and 30 years of proprietary pricing and sales records. »
What they don’t say is that under Iannone’s leadership, eBay has actually significantly lost buyers, with Q2 2025 marking the 13th consecutive quarter where they had less Active buyers only in the first quarter of 2018 – a fact that cannot be erased by achieving minor growth of around 1% year-on-year in recent quarters.
Note: eBay changed the definition of GMV and Active Buyers at the end of 2021 and restated both figures going back to 2018 (chart reflects figures restated according to eBay’s amended reports.)
eBay currently defines active buyers as “all buyers who have paid for a transaction on our Marketplace platforms in the previous 12 months. Buyers may register more than once and, therefore, have more than one account.”
Semafor also says: “Much of eBay’s marketing has targeted the 16 million enthusiasts who the company says represent 70% of the value of goods sold on its site.”
But again, they failed to mention that “enthusiastic buyers” (those who shop on eBay at least 6 times a year, spend at least $800 a year, or those who also sell on the site) fell from ~17 million to ~16 million in Q4 2022 – where they have been stuck ever since, including eBay’s latest earnings report for Q2 2025.
eBay executives have pulled out all the stops to try to reinvigorate the growth of enthusiast buyers over the last year with deep discount offers and new features specifically designed to encourage activity that would meet enthusiasts’ criteria – but so far, none of those efforts have succeeded in making a difference.
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Later in the interview, Iannone also mentions that he encourages all eBay employees to buy and sell on the site – and while that may be a small percentage, it’s worth noting that employee activity is also factored into the total statistics of active and enthusiastic buyers presented in the quarterly earnings reports.
At least Iannone was smart enough not to repeat in this interview the laughable claim that no counterfeit item has ever passed through eBay’s authentication centers.
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Unsurprisingly, much of the interview focused on eBay’s AI initiatives, with Iannone touting how the technology has “removed friction” when buying and selling on the site.
“Our competitor created friction in the process,” he says, but AI has been a “real game changer” in helping eBay reduce that friction. A user wondering whether to sell a trading card, for example, can now take a photo with their phone, and eBay’s AI tools will identify the collectible, write a description of it, suggest an attractive background for the image and offer advice on how to price it.
This all sounds good, if it works – which many users often say it doesn’t.
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Far too often, eBay’s AI tools simply don’t live up to the hype, often still requiring far too much manual input or providing wildly inaccurate or irrelevant results.
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Beyond that, eBay uses AI in other troubling ways, altering seller images without disclosing them or summarizing seller-provided item descriptions and details with questionable results that can lead to negative buyer experiences and unfair items that don’t match the claims described.
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Iannone claims in the interview that he personally saved eBay $1 million by using AI to create a 3-minute video for an internal presentation on his vision for the company.
Iannone’s AI program extends to commissioning AI-written “backing music” for its appearance at the eBay Open event, themed to its latest marketing campaign. For the company’s AI Week and another recent gathering of senior executives, he went even further, using an AI video generator to create a three-minute film laying out his vision for the company’s future.
“I built this with another person in a few days,” he says. Having done something similar in the past, “I would have gone to an agency, written a creative brief, probably spent hundreds of thousands, if not a million dollars, to film this whole thing, etc.” And me and one other person were able to put that together, and people were blown away.
I sincerely doubt that Iannone previously spent a million dollars on agencies creating internal pitch content like this – and if he did, then former CFO Steve Priest has a lot to answer for if he allowed this kind of spending to be a regular occurrence at the company.
But the anecdote may still be an interesting insight into how Iannone personally uses AI, especially when seen alongside a recently posted job posting showing that eBay is looking for a AI Design Technologist, Office of the CEO.
The role will report to the Chief of Staff to the CEO, serving as “Strategic technical partner and prototyping force multiplier” while “help shape and define what the future of eBay should look like in an AI-powered world.”
The emphasis on such a crucial strategic AI position being nestled in the CEO’s office is interesting and potentially raises questions about why this role does not instead report to Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, and whether this could create internal tension, conflict and/or confusion.
Beyond the hype around AI, Iannone told Semafor that he considers eBay customers his other biggest source of inspiration. “They are on site 24/7, and they have the best ideas on what could help them. »
The article goes on to say that Iannone “places a high value on engaging the site’s most ardent users” with the recent eBay Open event, which included in-person opportunities for users to provide feedback to eBay staff, as an example of the value eBay places on seller engagement.
Iannone says his own conversations with eBay users have led to changes, such as increasing the limit on the number of photographs in each handbag listing and alerts that notify sellers when a buyer is loyal enough to merit a special offer or personalized note.
“When the CEO talks to sellers and buyers all the time, and the whole organization starts doing it, you can dramatically improve the pace of innovation,” he says. For the same reason, he encourages staff to buy and sell regularly on the site. His own recent purchases include a pair of refurbished headphones for his daughter. (“It has a two-year warranty. A new product comes with about 90 days or a year,” he enthuses.)
Again, I highly doubt Iannone’s daughter will jump through the many hoops and hurdles other buyers have reported with the Allstate warranty that eBay provides for refurbished items if these headphones break, but a publication built entirely on the premise of having access to the “top executives in the world” is unlikely to be inclined to push back on blatantly stupid anecdotes like this.
With this in mind, this article reads like another carefully curated interview that is part of an explicit communications strategy by “leveraging media relations to elevate eBay’s brand and reputation… fostering relationships with key media… [and] by placing executive profiles, bylines and speaking engagements that advance the company’s narrative.
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Beyond that – if you were to spend 5 minutes scrolling eBay Community Forums or by talking to a random selection of actual buyers and sellers (not carefully screened by eBay), it would be immediately clear that neither additional photos for handbag listings nor repeat buyer notifications were high priority action items and that there were far more important issues that users would prefer Iannone to focus on.
For a seller’s perspective on eBay Open and the company’s struggling seller engagement efforts, watch this recent video from Flippin’ Ain’t Easy.
What do you think of eBay CEO Jamie Iannone’s talks with Semafor CEO Signal? Let us know in the comments below!
