Why is Ebay Cutting 6% of its Workforce?

eBay has announced it is cutting around 800 roles – equivalent to 6% of its workforce. 

According to the company, these cuts will be spread across the company and based on current and future operating priorities. 

It previously announced it was reducing its headcount by 1,000 employees in 2024, and laid off 500 employees in 2023. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the company said: “We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce.

“We are grateful for the contributions of the employees impacted and are committed to supporting them with care and respect.”

The company shared its fourth quarter and full year results in February, which saw an increase of 15% in revenue to US$3bn in Q4 and an increase of 8% to US$11.1bn for the full-year. 

eBay's evolving people strategy

eBay has increased its investments in AI in recent years, as part of efforts to build a more intuitive and effective platform. 

As part of this, the company has shifted towards an AI-embedded workforce model designed to boost employee productivity while improving the customer experience. 

The company has introduced a network of AI ambassadors across its teams to support employees with integrating AI into their workflows.

It has also launched an internal AI tool called ‘Employee CoPilot’ for customer service staff, which analyses real-time user data and sentiment to generate personalised service scripts – reducing ticket handling volumes by 30%, according to eBay. 

Making every minute matter

As the company has developed these capabilities, it has increased its focus on productivity. 

Jamie Iannone, CEO of eBay, previously told Business Insider that the company measures productivity by asking employees if they are making every minute matter. It has been testing out new solutions in order to make that possible, says Jamie. 

“For our employees, leaders across our company have been working on piloting several different approaches, all meant to unlock the creativity of our software engineers, analysts, customer-service representatives and content creators and make it easier for employees to spend more time on the highest-value work,” he said. 

More recently, this has led to a shift towards agentic AI that can handle complex customer tasks. 

Jamie discussed this shift in a 2025 earnings call, saying: “we believe our scale, our unique inventory and our differentiated value proposition as well as accelerating our own AI capabilities position us extremely well to thrive in an agentic commerce future.”

What AI developments say about the future of work

Many business leaders are predicting that developments in AI will reshape traditional workforce models. 

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, suggested on the V2C podcast that he believes Klarna’s headcount could fall from 3,000 to 2,000 by 2030. 

This prediction follows previous reductions in employee headcount at the company through job cuts and natural attrition, which has seen the company’s headcount fall from 7,000 to 3,000. 

Sebastian said: “I want to be honest about the fact that I do think there's going to be a very big shift.”

“I'm an optimist at heart, but I also want to be a realist around what's going to happen in the shorter term, and it's going to be a lot of turmoil in this”.