EBay’s CFO on transforming ecommerce with AI

Steve Priest, CFO of eBay, discusses how investments in AI are enhancing the customer experience and helping to support finance as a strategic business partner.

eBay has used AI for more than a decade, says CFO Steve Priest

It’s been nearly 30 years since eBay Inc. first tested the public’s appetite for buying and selling items over the internet. Billions of transactions later, Steve Priest, eBay’s CFO since 2021, is helping lead the company as an early adopter of another emerging tech, generative AI, to enhance its finance function and customer experience. Priest and his finance team are key decision-makers in how eBay is integrating the technology into functional and operational processes to drive efficiency and simplify transactional activities.

Before landing at eBay, Priest served more than two decades in the airline industry, as CFO of JetBlue Airways and prior to that in finance leadership roles at British Airways. In this interview, he shares insights about AI use cases and the importance of finance as a business partner.

Q: How do you view investments in emerging technologies such as AI?

Priest: It’s a great time to be the CFO at eBay. We’re working with nearly three decades of data and because we have our own data centres, we control a very efficient technological infrastructure that allows us to explore that data for decision-making. The company has used AI for more than a decade, primarily to simplify how customers list items for sale, making the process more seamless and effective. Over the last 29 years, we’ve amassed billions of listings, each one with images, commercial data, and sales data. That level of bespoke data has allowed us to build and train our own large language models, from which we can drive better customer propositions.

We’ve had over 10 million sellers use our AI-powered listing tools, which leverage generative AI to fill in the description and other attributes of a listing, sometimes using only a photo of the item to do so. These tools significantly reduce the time and effort it takes to list items on eBay, without sacrificing the accuracy of listing attributes that are essential to finding the right buyer.

I also believe as the finance backbone of the company, we need to be at the forefront of technology to help our corporate support functions innovate. We want to be a strategic partner for the business and to bring insights and solutions to customers. We always ask how our technology investments can drive better efficiencies across the finance organisation and how it can simplify transactional activities so employees can spend more time on higher value-add work.

How are you deploying generative AI to support corporate functions?

Priest: We’ve been exploring use cases to harness the significant amount of data we have to better serve and grow the business. We generate about $75 billion of commerce annually across eBay, and we intermediate all our customer payment processes. That creates a lot of complexity, and we need the right foundational technology to make sure that it all runs smoothly. We plan to leverage generative AI to increase the automation of the reconciliations on our payments platform. From a contracts perspective, we leverage generative AI to pull out the key terms from contracts to confirm that we are accounting for them correctly, and we plan to deploy it in procurement and for running request-for-proposal processes.

Generative AI and easily accessible data can also help us comply with new regulatory requirements, such as making sure we collect the right amount of indirect tax, which can vary in markets around the world where we operate. It could be the nuance of, say, a boot that is used for work purposes versus one used for leisure. Using our data, we can train generative AI to determine the correct associated taxes on such items. Likewise, as sustainability reporting obligations take shape, these technology applications help our chief sustainability officer and accounting team analyse data from across the organisation.

Another consideration is driving cost efficiency. For example, when our engineering team uses generative AI, it can enable us to deliver more products, more quickly for our customers. From a customer support perspective, we also use generative AI to help reduce average handling times, making sure the responses to support requests are addressed in a timely fashion. This all results in increased productivity.

How do you view the CFO role in balancing innovation and risk management at eBay?

Priest: When I think about my priorities, I think about safety and how to make sure we keep the enterprise safe from both a marketplace and financial standpoint. With that foundation, I’m focused on strengthening partnerships, which are important ingredients to how CFOs show up from a strategic perspective. It’s about asking, “How do I partner with the rest of the executive leadership team and broader organisation to inspire greatness in others?” I try to model this approach, thinking of myself as a senior executive, rather than as the CFO, to help drive conversations in the right direction. Partnership is ultimately about trying to get to “yes”, which can help drive innovation and growth by giving people confidence to try new things.

I want to ensure my team can communicate effectively as they work with business leaders to stimulate growth. It’s important to be open-minded about what is possible and not jump to conclusions. I take the time to listen to ideas and think about how we could get to a destination. What would the trade-offs and investments be? How could we think about things differently? Having a get-to-yes mindset means creating an environment for people to speak up and offer ideas, while maintaining controls and financial rigour. That’s an important mindset to maintain, particularly for a tech company.

When trying to convince fellow C-suite leaders and the board to understand the need for a tech transformation journey, what’s the best approach to have?

Priest: When it comes to transforming corporate support functions, we generally don’t hear much about them when everything is running smoothly. Boards and some of the executive team members will generally lean, rightly so, on investing in the customer. But I go back to the concept of financial safety. If you don’t have the right finance IT backbone and stability, there could be a huge level of distraction for the rest of the company when you need to fix problems that occur. Since we operate such a large platform, it’s important that we continue to invest in the backbone of the finance architecture of the company to better serve our customers.

What advice would you have for finance executives who want to advance to the CFO seat?

Priest: Do something you feel very passionate about. I’ve always been passionate about travel, and that led me to the airline industry, where I spent 25 years between British Airways and JetBlue. I also like to be challenged so I’m constantly learning, and I love the concept of breaking new ground. Along with being passionate about the people, purpose, and culture, that drive for innovation is what led me to California to work for eBay, which has been a tremendous journey for me.

It’s also important to take some measured risk and be curious. CFOs need to ask a lot of questions, be willing to listen to the answers, and not go into a new company with preconceived ideas. Lastly, it’s important to be a customer of your own company. For example, I use the eBay platform, and encourage my colleagues to as well, because the more we do, the more we can understand the business the way our customers do.

Laura Bauke is manager, Deloitte & Touche LLP, and Craig Schneider is senior writer, Executive Perspectives in The Wall Street Journal, Deloitte Services LP.

As published by the Deloitte US Chief Financial Officer Program in the 12 April 2025 edition of The CFO Journal in WSJ.

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