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LARRY COLAGIOVANNI: Awesome.
I am stoked to have the opportunity today
to share a bit about eBay and how we're taking advantage
of the cloud, artificial intelligence,
and what we call the fabric of commerce
to drive innovation in this space.
EBay continues to be the world's largest global marketplace.
Our mission is to connect millions of buyers and sellers
around the world, empowering people, and creating
economic opportunity for all.
We don't compete with our sellers.
We are a true marketplace.
We offer more breadth and depth of choice
to help people shop for their passions
and find their version of perfect.
Whether it's inflatable pink flamingos or new backcountry
skis or new laptops or luxury vehicles,
we literally have it all on eBay.
And, no, you don't have to sit through an auction
to get any of that.
The reality is 88% of what we sell is fixed price
and you can buy it right now.
And 80% of the inventory on eBay is new.
We have 175 million buyers in 190 markets shopping
our 1.1 billion listings.
To give you an idea of what that looks like, in the US alone,
a watch is purchased every five seconds, a camping and hiking
item every six seconds, a TV, video,
or home audio item every three seconds.
You can imagine the scale of the infrastructure
that we have to build to support that and also
the amount of data that we amass on a daily basis.
One of the things I'm most excited about
and count myself very fortunate to have the opportunity
to work on is our eBay for Charity platform as well.
We also like to give sellers a choice with that.
And so sellers can earmark anywhere between 10% and 100%
of their sales proceeds to benefit a charity.
And we're proud to say that we've raised over $810 million
to date for nonprofits in the US and UK.
I worked in the commerce industry for over 14 years.
And I have to say, it is changing more quickly than I've
ever seen it in the past.
Advances in artificial intelligence, cloud, and fabric
are altering how, where, and when people shop.
The technologies are also shifting user's expectations,
especially millennials and Generation Z,
and driving the creation of disruptive new business models,
such as subscription services, direct-to-consumer,
and on-demand shopping from the home, car, and mobile devices.
Brands, retailers, small and medium businesses
alike must both recognize these opportunities
and take advantage of them or risk being left behind.
My team at eBay was created to enable
us to innovate with these new technologies,
move fast, and target new customers without disrupting
the experience for our existing ones.
EBay no longer wants to rely on users coming to our website
or downloading our app.
Whether it be on Google Home, in Facebook Messenger,
on VR devices, or on the TV, we want
to go where our customers spend their time today into what
we call the fabric of commerce.
This is one of the many ways we're
starting to attract new buyers and sellers to our marketplace.
Last year at Google Next, we demoed for the first time
the voicework we had been doing with Google Home,
helping people find out how much an item was worth.
Since last year, we've continued experimenting
with conversational commerce and expanding our natural language
processing capabilities more broadly on Google Assistant.
We're also using our AI to help buyers
sift through the 1.1 billion items in our catalog
to find what they're looking for without having to scan
through pages and pages and pages of search results
or having to select a bunch of filters
to narrow down the results.
We don't want people to keep coming
back to eBay and every time entering in,
I want a medium shirt, I want a medium shirt.
We want to remember what your interests are,
what size you wear, and which brands
you love to personalize your shopping experience on eBay
and help you more quickly find what you're looking for.
With shoppers relying on image search more and more each day
to find what they're looking for,
we also continue to innovate in the field of computer vision
as well.
Our billion-plus listings and all the images
associated with them have given us the training data
to create industry-leading models to predict
the leaf category of an image.
And since we started using Google's advanced TPUs,
we've been able to improve the accuracy of those models
by 10%.
Not only did they help improve our accuracy,
they cut the time it took for us to create a robust model
from about 40 days to four.
And with the new TPUs that were announced earlier today
with the v3, we're expecting to be
able to iterate on those models in just a matter of hours.
Taking advantage of the cloud TPUs
helps us ensure that our customers see
the freshest possible product listings
and find what they want every time that they shop on eBay.
Our work with computer vision has also
enabled us to start experimenting
with augmented, virtual, and mixed realities as well.
A few months ago, we released a clever solution
built on Google's AR core platform, which
uses augmented reality to enable our tens of millions of sellers
to select the best USPS flat rate box for items
they need to ship.
Sellers select a box size, place the virtual box over their sold
item, and move it around the item
to make sure it will fit inside, helping
eliminate the hassle of finding the right size
box for shipping.
This was one of the first of many innovations
you'll see from us in the AR space in the coming year.
We've also been hard at work improving the customer
experience for those shopping on eBay from China as well.
We started hosting some of our infrastructure
in Google Cloud in Tokyo, closer to where our customers are
today, which helped improve our page load times by over 40%.
As we iterated on the experience,
one of the biggest challenges we faced was localizing it.
While we tried leveraging some of the publicly available
translation APIs, they weren't trained
with commerce-specific data, and thus weren't
accurate enough for the customers shopping on eBay.
So we started training our own commerce-specific models
and built a machine translation service
on Google Cloud that's now powering query, title,
and description translation on our site.
Training the models with the commerce-specific data
helped us achieve a 50% improvement in our BLEU scores
for query translation as an example.
We learned firsthand what a challenge building a localized
site for China can be and how that
can hold back some retailers and whatnot from experimenting
in the Chinese market.
So one of the things that we're doing today
and we're excited to announce is we're actually
making that machine translation service available externally
to all third party developers through the developer.ebay.com
program, so that other retailers and startups and whatnot
can benefit from it as well.
We're starting with Chinese and we'll
add other languages in the weeks and months to come.
To close, the world of commerce is
undergoing yet another massive round of disruption.
The entire ecosystem must recognize
the shifts in technologies and behaviors driving the change,
and be agile and bold enough to capture this opportunity.
Leveraging the cloud, AI, and fabric
are some of the many levers we are pulling
at eBay to do just that.
Thank you.
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