Picture this: You're running a marketplace with 130 million unique items from 5 million sellers, and you need to connect each of your 90 million shoppers with exactly what makes their heart skip a beat. That's Etsy's daily reality—and their "Keep commerce human" mission just got a serious AI upgrade.

Etsy's sellers don't just upload photos—they share stories through images, videos, and text. The challenge? Making sense of this multimodal treasure trove at scale.

Early AI experiments in inventory management revealed the power of high-quality, structured data. This success inspired Etsy to expand AI's role, leading to further innovations in inventory management and discovery. Multimodal AI enables Etsy to analyze and understand listings more deeply, improving search relevance, recommendations, and the overall buyer journey.

Here's where things get interesting. Sometimes shoppers arrive at Etsy knowing exactly what they want. Other times? They're just browsing, hoping something will spark joy.

Etsy's approach is two-pronged: Expert curators create seed collections that capture trends and styles, then AI amplifies this work exponentially.

Etsy also suggests "pathways" for buyers to explore inventory, built using Vertex AI and advanced ML to find semantically relevant objects. This quickly surfaces the best of Etsy in response to each visitor's choices. As buyers interact and search, their intent becomes clearer, allowing Etsy's AI to refine recommendations in real time.

Etsy's AI transformation runs on Google Cloud's heavyweight lineup: Vertex AI, BigQuery, Dataflow, and Gemini models. This isn't just about throwing technology at a problem—it's about creating a foundational dataset that makes everything else possible.

Here's Etsy's secret sauce: "algotorial curation"—a brilliant blend of human expertise and AI scalability. Human merchandising experts identify trends and create curated collections, then AI takes over to find similar items and personalize the experience for each shopper.

The result? An 80x increase in listings per theme. That's not a typo—eighty times more relevant items surfaced for each trend or style category.

🎬 See Etsy's AI Transformation in Action

Watch how Etsy keeps human connection at the heart of commerce while leveraging Google Cloud AI to create personalized experiences for millions of shoppers.

With 130 million items changing daily, static categorization is like trying to organize a hurricane. Etsy uses AI to dynamically understand each item's characteristics, determine optimal categorization, and assess popularity in real-time.

No matter the item, Etsy's AI generates, evaluates, enhances, and regenerates data to improve accuracy and precision, surfacing the ideal item for each shopper.

AI enables this deep understanding of Etsy's inventory at immense scale.

Social media moves fast, and Etsy sellers move faster. When a trend emerges on TikTok or Instagram, sellers quickly create related items. Gemini models help Etsy merchandisers spot these emerging trends and classify new items before the trend even peaks.

Etsy used Gemini to improve alt text generation for listings, resulting in a 5% increase in SEO-driven visits and a 3% conversion lift for sellers. That's the power of AI making content more discoverable across the entire web.

• 80x increase in listings per theme through algotorial curation
• 90 million personalized shopping experiences delivered
• 5% increase in SEO-driven visits
• 3% conversion lift for sellers
• 130 million items dynamically understood and categorized

Scaling AI across 130 million constantly changing items isn't exactly plug-and-play. The biggest hurdle? Creating that foundational dataset using Gemini models—essentially teaching AI to understand the nuanced characteristics of handmade and vintage items at massive scale.

Cost was another consideration.

• Start with the foundation: Invest in creating high-quality training data before building applications.
• Blend human expertise with AI scale: The "algotorial" approach leverages the best of both worlds.
• Think multimodal from day one: Images, videos, and text together tell a richer story.
• Focus on intent, not just content: Understanding why someone is shopping matters as much as what they're looking for.

🐯 Tiger Takeaway:

Etsy cracked the code on AI-powered personalization by remembering that technology should amplify human connections, not replace them. Their "algotorial curation" approach—combining human expertise with AI scale—delivered measurable results across the board. The lesson? Don't choose between human insight and AI efficiency. Use AI to make human expertise infinitely scalable.

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