Faced with competition from e-commerce giants, even a platform specializing in the sale of handicrafts like Etsy must turn to artificial intelligence (AI), assured its boss Josh Silverman on the sidelines of the Web Summit.
“We couldn’t make Etsy work without artificial intelligence,” he declared on Tuesday, during this major tech gathering in Lisbon.
Launched almost twenty years ago, the American platform says it has some 7 million sellers and more than 90 million buyers.
But competition is tough in the online sales sector, with behemoths like Amazon, Temu or Shein, not forgetting furniture and decoration stores.
AI then becomes essential to control the products put on sale or to ensure that a search on the site leads to the right result, according to Mr. Silverman.
“A traditional search engine cannot tell the difference between a wedding dress and a wedding dress hanger,” he explains. “Artificial intelligence understands the difference (…) and only shows you the wedding dresses.”
For Josh Silverman, who took the reins of the group in 2017, a level of understanding of language “close to that of humans” is necessary to make the distinction, which justifies the deployment of AI on the platform.
– Artisans versus AI? –
But the use of this technology, which makes it possible to generate all kinds of content upon simple query in everyday language, is also controversial.
Objects created using artificial intelligence (posters, art, clothing, etc.) indeed abound on the site, although it is dedicated to crafts.
After “intense” internal debates, Etsy decided not to ban them, Mr. Silverman says, although the use of AI must be mentioned by sellers.
Faced with the anxiety of artisans, the company has issued new rules which specify that all items put on sale must have had human supervision, whether at the level of their manufacturing, design or selection.
This controversy is part of a broader context around the positioning of Etsy, which began as a site selling artisanal objects and is accused of turning away from its origins, welcoming more and more mass-produced objects , in a quest for profit.
Two years ago, the platform provoked the fury of its sellers by increasing the fees charged on each transaction, to 6.5% instead of 5%.
More than 10,000 of them decided to close shop for a week for a “strike” of a new kind, accusing Etsy of “bleeding them dry”.
“On other platforms, sellers are traders who are simply looking to sell something and they can change their tune to sell X or Y in the blink of an eye,” analyzes Josh Silverman.
“Our sellers are artists, creators. Doing business is not their passion, being artists is their passion,” he adds, specifying that 99.5% of them did not have went on strike at the time.
For this former Skype boss, at the end of the day, the interests of Etsy and those of sellers necessarily converge.
“Our sellers hired us to help them sell more stuff and that’s what we’re doing,” he concludes.
