IA Summit 2017

Etsy is a marketplace where people around the world connect, both online and offline, to make, sell and buy unique goods. Etsy is also a tech company that invests in the craft of coding and data-driven product development as a strategic priority. Etsy has employed AI and machine learning to tackle personalization, recommendations, image understanding, item similarity, search relevance, spelling correction, and many other tasks. We’ll talk through several examples of how Etsy leverages data, where it’s excelled, and where this hammer hasn’t quite hit the nail on the head.

We will be asking ourselves hard questions, recognizing the limitations of decisions driven purely by big data:
- Who are we satisfying? Our customers or our mathematical models?
- Are those models even an accurate reflection of the outcomes we want?
- In a dual marketplace, where complex changes depend on interactions between both sides of the market, can one metric or measure of success tell the full story?
- How do we consider the impact our models are having on our users?
- Are we even addressing real human needs and motivations in the first place?
- How do we inform and enrich AI with expert created & applied taxonomy & metadata?