eBay have hired Jan Pedersen as vice president and chief scientist, Artificial Intelligence (AI) who was previously vice president of data science at Twitter. Jan will lead the company’s AI strategy, including computer vision, natural language understanding and machine learning, to deliver new customer experiences across the eBay platform.
Jan joins eBay at an interesting time, as well as their below the bonnet innovations in search and recommendations are powered by AI, so are their more visible features such as eBay’s Image Search and Find it on eBay features are powered by AI as are their ShopBot on Facebook messenger and their integration with Google Assistant.
“Jan is a true pioneer in the industry, with over thirty years developing search, deep learning, machine learning and AI technologies at scale. He joins us at a pivotal moment when AI sciences including computer vision and deep learning are now capable of transforming personalized, immersive shopping experiences. eBay runs on AI and our continued innovation under Jan’s leadership will transform each meaningful moment we have with our buyers and sellers.”
– Devin Wenig, president and CEO of eBay
Jan’s main responsibility will be to chart eBay’s technology strategy as it relates to AI, including enhanced ways in which eBay interacts with its consumers. He will set the agenda for AI R&D investments, lead a team of research, data and applied scientists and further our leadership in AI-enabled commerce.
Jan Pedersen’s career
Prior to his time at twitter, Jan spent close to a decade at Microsoft in various search related leadership roles and was a technical fellow and chief scientist for Core Search (we know that Tamebay readers are keenly interested in eBay search and how their products are presented in search results so this is definitely an interesting aspect of Jan’s career). Jan’s career began at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and he has held chief scientist roles at AltaVista, Yahoo, and A9. Credited with numerous patents, he holds a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University.
One Response
Does this mean I will now be talking to a computer for “advice” when there is a problem on eBay rather than the Manila call centre?
Furthermore, amongst numerous other glitches eBay messages and basket are still broken,,,,, looks like he will be working overtime then. Best not get in the way of him delivering the ultimate “customer experience”, I’m still waiting for that fist full of crisp tenners to come out of the computer drive every time I log into eBay