In 2025, our teams continued to harness technology to make the eBay experience simpler, smarter, and safer for buyers and sellers around the world. We introduced smarter search and personalized recommendations to help buyers find the right item, launched AI-powered seller tools to streamline the listing process, and continued to expand eBay Live to new audiences, among other innovation highlights.
As we kick off 2026, we asked leaders across eBay what they see as the most transformative tech trends to watch in the year ahead. From supporting sustainability to enhancing personalization to making shopping more fun, here’s what they had to say.
Trust Will be the Real Currency
Avritti Khandurie Mittal, VP & Global Head of Product
AI’s real power in commerce isn’t to make it more automated — it’s to make it more human.
Artificial intelligence’s real power in commerce isn’t to make it more automated — it’s to make it more human.
By 2026, AI will absorb complexity across translation, compliance, payments, logistics, and risk so experiences feel local, personal, and effortless. The real shift will be trust at scale. We’ll move from static authentication to continuous verification — where AI assesses identity, intent, product integrity, and regulatory fit in real time. As a result, trust becomes embedded, not bolted on.
We’re likely to see a broader shift from transactional to agentic commerce. AI agents won’t just recommend products — they’ll negotiate, verify provenance, optimize payment and delivery, and execute complex cross-border transactions end-to-end. The outcome isn’t a zero-click economy; it’s a zero-friction one.
Trust, not transactions, will be the real currency of global commerce in 2026.
AI Will Encourage More Conscious Commerce
Renée Morin, Chief Sustainability Officer
We’ve seen firsthand how technology and AI can make shopping sustainably even simpler.
As AI continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, I see tremendous potential for it to accelerate sustainable commerce in bold, innovative ways in the year ahead.
At eBay, we’ve seen firsthand how technology and AI can make shopping sustainably even simpler, for example, by helping shoppers easily discover pre-loved alternatives through conversational agents or by matching an item from just a single photo.
I’m also optimistic about the role AI can play in strengthening circular commerce, especially at the end of life stage. Using AI to help sort and identify recyclable materials before they reach landfill could be a real game changer.
Looking ahead to 2026, I believe AI will be one of the most powerful tools shaping a more circular, conscious, and connected future of commerce.
Context Will Unlock Developer Productivity
Senthil Padmanabhan, VP, Global Verticals & API Platform
Organizations that master this ability will unlock massive acceleration in how quickly they can build and ship products to customers.
Thinking about how AI will impact innovation, reliability, and developer productivity in large engineering organizations by 2026 naturally leads back to one central idea: delivering the right context to the right model at the right moment. This remains one of the most complex and high-impact challenges in AI today and represents one of the field’s unsolved frontiers.
While most Gen AI demos showcase clean-slate, greenfield scenarios, the reality inside enterprises is far more intricate. We build on top of existing products, which demands a nuanced and deep understanding of the company's business, tech stack, and decision history.
AI will eventually get us to 90%, but the remaining 10% is where we unlock 100x leverage — and that last 10% is defined by a company’s specific context and human variance. In 2026, the organizations that master the ability to deliver this differentiated context to their AI systems will see exponential gains in productivity and unlock massive acceleration in how quickly they can build and ship products to customers.
Making Shopping Fun Again
Adrian Fung, Global Chief Marketing Officer
For a lot of people, shopping is not just a task to be done quickly. It's a joyous experience.
I think the one area that AI is going to rapidly evolve in is how it connects shoppers to ecommerce brands on a much more emotional level.
For a lot of people, shopping is not just a task to be done quickly. It's a joyous experience. It's a passion and something for them to enthusiastically dive into. In short, shopping should be fun.
Whether you're looking for that perfect dress on Friday night or that cool Pokémon card that you just have to have, shopping is not just a task to be done. It's the way you want to spend your time — to really express yourself, to really express your passions. Brands that recognize this really have an opportunity to make an AI experience that is emotionally rich, and connects with customers in ways that leave them wanting more.