eBay and OpenAI want to train small businesses in getting the most out of AI (www.techradar.com)

eBay and OpenAI have launched "AI Activate," a £3 million program to onboard up to 10,000 UK small and medium-sized businesses selling on eBay in 2025 with tailored AI training, a dedicated eBay team to help build custom GPTs, and one year of free access to ChatGPT Enterprise. The initiative will deliver online training in the final two months of 2025 before expanding to in-person support in 2026. eBay frames the effort around practical use cases — financial analysis, marketing and promotion, inventory management, and customer research — building on its existing generative-AI tools (10 million sellers have used them to create more than 300 million listings). For the AI/ML community this is significant because it accelerates real-world deployment of domain-specific LLM applications at SMB scale, funding hands-on adoption rather than purely academic or enterprise pilots. Providing ChatGPT Enterprise and assistance building custom GPTs lowers barriers to creating task- and store-specific agents, which could generate a wave of lightweight, data-connected LLM apps that automate operations and personalize commerce. The program also highlights broader policy and research opportunities: measuring productivity impacts, best practices for safe model customization, and how platform-integrated LLM tools affect competition and data governance in e-commerce.