3 ways Etsy is investing in AI, according to its CEO

Etsy CEO Kruti Goyal said she thinks about artificial intelligence (AI) in three ways: making the online marketplace more personal and more discoverable, while learning how the next generation of the shopping experience is going to evolve.

She noted that agentic AI experiences still account for less than 1% of Etsy’s overall traffic as of the end of its fiscal Q2 2026. AI trends are still comparable to what Etsy noticed earlier this year, she said. That is, Etsy has seen higher intent and average order value (AOV) from AI-referral traffic.

“We see the biggest opportunity for AI on Etsy itself,” Goyal said on the marketplace’s Q2 earnings call. “It’s really about using AI to make Etsy much, much better at connecting the right buyers with the right sellers.” Chief financial officer Charles Baker said Etsy is spending more money on AI usage and computing this year.

“But the overall spending that we’re doing on hosting and bandwidth and technology is exactly where we thought it would be this year,” Baker said. “And we’ve been able to find offsets in other places.

And shifting usage patterns allows us to absorb the cost of the incremental compute without going higher on our overall sort of infrastructure cost, so we feel really comfortable about our ability to continue to manage that AI cost, hosting bandwidth cost as we look forward.” Etsy is No. 20 in the Global Online Marketplaces Database.

The market research tool ranks the 100 largest marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV). Charts & Data Etsy Q2 revenue grows 6. 2% as app users place more orders Abbas Haleem | Aug 11, 2026