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Blog2026-09-07
GetWhy and eBay win Silver at the 2026 ESOMAR Awards for Excellence in AI and Automation in Market Research
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GetWhy
GetWhy and eBay won Silver in the Excellence in AI and Automation in Market Research category at the 2026 ESOMAR Awards, announced on September 2 in Valencia. The winning entry, developed in partnership with eBay's Global Consumer Insights team, was "From Retrospective to Real-Time: How GetWhy and eBay Built the World's Most Human AI Insight Engine."
The award recognizes exceptional use of AI, machine learning, or automation to streamline research processes or elevate the quality of insights, and it is one of the most respected honors in the global research industry.
The problem eBay had
A marketplace moves in days. Traditional qualitative research often moves in weeks.
That tension is not unique to eBay. Qualitative research has always been valued for the depth and humanity it brings, but traditional methods can be slower to launch, more expensive to scale, and harder to integrate into fast-moving business cycles. As eBay’s teams moved at greater speed, the challenge was to make rich consumer understanding available earlier and more frequently, while decisions were still taking shape.
Behind this sat a trade-off the research industry has long operated under: the deeper and more human the insight, the slower and more resource-intensive it can become. For eBay, the opportunity was to find a way to preserve that depth while making qualitative insight more agile, scalable, and accessible.
How GetWhy and eBay solved it
So eBay brought a fair share of qualitative research in-house, and GetWhy provided the engine. Together, GetWhy and eBay reengineered what qualitative research can do at enterprise scale. AI-powered consumer intelligence engine that embeds the human voice into decisions as they are being made.
The platform pairs an AI-Moderator, trained on more than 10,000 hours of expert-led interviews, with a Research Agent that synthesizes findings in real time. Qualitative research now runs at a speed and scale no traditional research operation could match, and it keeps the emotional richness that makes qualitative insight irreplaceable.
The partnership also gave rise to Perspectives, a new intelligence layer designed to surface patterns from eBay’s growing research base and make existing qualitative knowledge easier to explore and reuse.
Nucleus Research summarized the shift as eBay repositioning qualitative insight from retrospective validation to a real-time commercial input. Faster feedback, broader participation, and deeper qualitative context now inform product design, campaign execution, and marketplace strategy while initiatives are still in development.
What it led to
Time to insight fell 80%, so fifteen-day studies now take three. Qualitative reach rose 1,100%, from a few dozen participants to more than 300 in a single study, with 2.4 times more feedback per question.
Cost per interview fell 84% against traditional outsourced research. Across thousands of interviews in 2024 and 2025, eBay avoided roughly $2.2 million in incremental research costs. By eBay's own estimate, matching that volume through external providers would have required approximately $6.7 million.
Since the partnership began in Q2 2024, eBay reports double-digit annual GMV growth in the core marketplace categories where qualitative insight is most deployed. Nucleus Research audited the model independently across speed, scale, cost, effort, depth, and decision influence.
"Our partnership with GetWhy has gone well beyond introducing a new research tool. Together, we have continued to challenge how qualitative insight can be generated and applied: making it faster, more scalable and more closely connected to the moments when decisions are being shaped.
What makes the partnership especially valuable is that we are continuing to experiment with how AI can connect insights, workflows and teams more intelligently, while keeping human judgment and consumer understanding at the centre.”
Christine Moeller, AI Transformation, Global Consumer Insights, eBay
Read the full story
The case study is where these outcomes sit in full: what eBay's insights function looked like before, what changed with a more agile research model and what it returned across cost, speed, and the decisions it shaped. Every figure in it comes from Nucleus Research's independent audit, so the results were assessed from outside the partnership.
