Online marketplace eBay is partnering with OpenAI to launch a £3m initiative aimed at equipping 10,000 small and medium-sized businesses in the United Kingdom with advanced artificial intelligence tools. The program, called AI Activate, will provide participating sellers with free access to ChatGPT Enterprise for up to one year, accompanied by a comprehensive training curriculum designed to integrate AI into their daily operations and boost productivity.
The collaboration addresses a growing disparity in AI adoption between large corporations and smaller enterprises, which form the backbone of the UK economy. Small businesses account for approximately 60% of private sector employment and half of its turnover, yet they often face significant barriers to implementing new technologies, including high costs, a lack of technical expertise, and uncertainty about practical applications. By offering both a premium AI platform and guided training, eBay and OpenAI aim to level the playing field, enabling entrepreneurs to automate routine tasks, refine marketing strategies, and uncover new business insights without an initial financial investment.
A Strategic Push Across the AI Divide
The AI Activate program is designed as a direct intervention to close the productivity gap. Officials from both companies emphasized that providing powerful AI should not be the exclusive domain of large corporations. Ronnie Chatterji, Chief Economist at OpenAI, described the initiative as “investing in the UK’s economic engine,” noting that small businesses have historically lacked the tools to drive productivity increases in the same way larger firms do. The program targets common obstacles that prevent smaller companies from leveraging AI. By removing the subscription cost for a premium service and offering structured training, the initiative allows sellers to experiment with and implement AI solutions for tasks ranging from financial analysis to creating marketing campaigns and conducting business research.
Research cited by eBay indicates a strong interest in the technology among online businesses, with 69% reporting they are either excited or curious about AI’s potential. However, many have struggled to translate that curiosity into action. Eve Williams, General Manager of eBay UK, stated that the critical question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how quickly businesses can do so before competitors gain an advantage. This program is positioned as a critical step to prevent small British businesses from being left behind in a rapidly evolving economic landscape.
Program Mechanics and Seller Support
Participants in the AI Activate initiative will receive tailored support to ensure the technology is applied effectively. The core of the offering is a 12-month subscription to ChatGPT Enterprise, a business-focused version of OpenAI’s popular language model that includes crucial features not available in the consumer version. Training will begin with virtual sessions, with plans for in-person events starting in 2026.
A key element of the program involves a dedicated team that will work with the 10,000 businesses to develop custom GPTs. These are specialized versions of ChatGPT that can be configured for specific tasks or workflows, trained on a company’s own data to become highly relevant operational tools. This customization is central to making AI practical for diverse business needs, moving beyond generic applications to create tailored solutions that can streamline listing creation, optimize customer service responses, or analyze sales data.
The Enterprise-Grade Advantage
The choice of ChatGPT Enterprise is significant due to its enhanced features designed for professional environments. Unlike the consumer version, the enterprise edition offers robust data privacy, contractually ensuring that a business’s internal data and prompts are not used to train OpenAI’s models. It also provides an administrative console for managing usage, single sign-on capabilities, and shareable conversation templates to standardize workflows across a team. From a performance standpoint, enterprise users receive priority access to the latest models, significantly faster response times, and a much larger context window, allowing the tool to process and analyze lengthy documents or complex datasets in a single interaction.
eBay’s Deepening Integration of AI
This initiative is part of a broader strategy for eBay, which has been progressively embedding artificial intelligence throughout its platform and internal operations. The company has already provided its global workforce with access to ChatGPT Enterprise to enhance productivity and creativity. More visibly, it has deployed generative AI tools that are already having a substantial impact on its marketplace.
According to the company, more than 10 million sellers on its platform have used these tools to help create over 300 million product listings. eBay reports that AI assistance is now used to generate more than 500,000 new listings every day. Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, eBay’s Chief AI Officer, called the technology a “generational opportunity to reimagine buying and selling.” This existing infrastructure and experience with seller-facing AI tools provide a strong foundation for the AI Activate program. The company also stated that these AI-generated listings have already contributed several billion dollars in gross merchandise value, demonstrating a tangible return on its investment in the technology.
Broader Economic and Market Context
The program launches amid forecasts of AI’s transformative potential for national economies. The International Monetary Fund estimates that widespread AI adoption could add as much as £470bn to the UK’s gross domestic product by 2035. However, achieving such gains depends heavily on the broad-based implementation of the technology across all sectors, particularly among the small and medium-sized businesses that constitute the majority of the market. The £3m investment from eBay is a strategic effort to accelerate this process, ensuring that the benefits of AI-driven productivity are distributed more widely.