How Mitesh Shah is Building the Intelligence layer for Global E-commerce

When Mitesh Shah looks at the e-commerce landscape, he sees a fundamental disconnect. While 92% of leading e-commerce companies leverage AI for personalization, each merchant operates in isolation—like islands of data in a vast digital ocean. As Senior Lead Product Manager for AI Personalization at PayPal, Mitesh is building bridges between these islands, creating what industry observers call the most significant advancement in commerce intelligence since the invention of recommendation engines.

"Every merchant knows their own customers, but no one sees the complete picture," Mitesh explains. "My vision is to create an intelligence layer that benefits everyone—merchants gain sophisticated personalization capabilities, consumers get truly relevant experiences, and the entire ecosystem becomes more efficient."

A Vision Shaped by Experience

Mitesh's journey to reimagining commerce intelligence began at Amazon, where he served as founding product manager for Buy with Prime. This role gave him deep insight into how trust and infrastructure could transform merchant capabilities.

"Buy with Prime was about extending Amazon's trust and logistics to any merchant," Mitesh recalls. "We proved that when you give merchants access to enterprise-grade capabilities, remarkable things happen—25% average conversion increases, billions in gross merchandise value. It showed me the hunger for democratized access to sophisticated commerce tools."

The experience taught Mitesh a crucial lesson: merchants didn't just need better logistics—they needed better intelligence to compete effectively in the digital economy.

The Context Revolution at Uber

At Uber, Mitesh's perspective evolved further. Leading product for post-trip experiences, he built systems that automated millions of customer interactions weekly. But the real breakthrough was understanding how context transforms user needs.

"We discovered that the same customer needed completely different experiences depending on their situation," Mitesh explains. "Someone taking Uber to the airport has different needs than someone going to dinner. Context changes everything."

His work on third-party fleet integrations added another dimension. By enabling traditional taxi companies to join Uber's platform—bringing New York's yellow cabs and European taxi cooperatives into the system—Mitesh saw how powerful it could be when separate systems could share capabilities while maintaining their independence.

"We created a way for traditional operators to benefit from Uber's technology without losing their identity," he notes. "This taught me that the future isn't about consolidation—it's about intelligent collaboration."

Democratizing AI at Scale

Moving to Block (formerly Square), Mitesh faced a different challenge: how to give small businesses access to AI capabilities that only tech giants possessed. Leading the company's generative AI transformation, he launched Square Copilot and Square AI, bringing sophisticated analytics to hundreds of thousands of merchants.

"I watched brilliant entrepreneurs—coffee shop owners, boutique retailers—trying to compete without the tools that made digital commerce effective," Mitesh reflects. "Square AI let them ask questions in plain language: 'Which customers haven't visited in 30 days?' or 'What are my best-selling items on weekends?'"

But even as these tools democratized access to AI, Mitesh recognized a deeper opportunity. Each merchant still only understood their own slice of customer behavior. The next leap would be connecting these islands of intelligence.

The PayPal Vision: Multi-Modal Commerce Intelligence

These experiences converged when Mitesh joined PayPal as Senior Lead Product Manager for AI Personalization. PayPal's unique position—processing hundreds of billions in transactions across millions of merchants—provided the perfect platform for his vision.

"I realized we could build something transformative," Mitesh explains. "Not by selling or sharing merchant data, but by creating an intelligence layer that ingests merchant catalogs and matches products to customers based on their unique patterns."

Mitesh's approach is revolutionary in its elegance:

Catalog Intelligence: The system ingests merchant product catalogs and performs multi-modal analysis—understanding not just product attributes but visual elements, descriptions, and contextual signals.

Pattern Matching: Using cutting-edge AI techniques including embedding search with multi-modal features, the system matches products to individual customer preferences based on their transaction history, demographics, and behavioral patterns.

Solving Cold Start: By leveraging Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to create dense user representations, Mitesh's team eliminates the "cold start" problem—enabling personalization even for new customers or merchants.

"We're not sharing data between merchants," Mitesh emphasizes. "We're creating intelligence that understands both what merchants offer and what customers want, then making perfect matches."

From Vision to Reality

Under Mitesh's product leadership, this vision is delivering remarkable results across multiple dimensions:

• Significantly improved conversion rates for new visitors who benefit from intelligent personalization from their first interaction
• Meaningful increases in average order values as recommendations align with customer preferences and patterns
• Reduced cart abandonment through checkout experiences that adapt to individual customer needs

"The impact goes beyond metrics," Mitesh notes. "We're seeing small businesses compete more effectively, consumers discover products they genuinely love, and the entire ecosystem become more efficient. That's the real measure of success."

Enabling the Future: Agentic Commerce

The most transformative aspect of Mitesh's vision is how it enables the next generation of AI-powered commerce. As AI assistants become more sophisticated, they need deep understanding of both available products and human preferences.

"Imagine asking your AI assistant to help plan a vacation," Mitesh illustrates. "Our intelligence layer understands your preferences—budget ranges, brand affinities, style choices—and can instantly match them against millions of products across thousands of merchants. No twenty questions needed."

This capability addresses a critical gap. Current AI assistants can search and compare, but they lack the deep understanding of both merchant catalogs and customer preferences that makes personalization meaningful.

The Product Philosophy

Throughout his career, Mitesh has maintained a consistent product philosophy: technology should be invisible but impactful. This principle, refined through experiences at Amazon, Uber, Block, and now PayPal, guides every decision.

"The best products don't announce themselves," he explains. "When our intelligence layer works perfectly, merchants see higher conversions, consumers find exactly what they want, and no one thinks about the complexity behind it."

This philosophy extends to privacy and trust. Rather than viewing them as constraints, Mitesh sees them as fundamental product principles.

"We're not in the business of selling data," Mitesh emphasizes. "We're creating value by making connections—between what merchants offer and what customers want. That's a completely different model, and it's one that aligns everyone's interests."

Building for Global Scale

The scope of Mitesh's vision requires thinking at unprecedented scale. Processing patterns across hundreds of millions of users and billions of transactions, while maintaining real-time performance, demands constant innovation.

"Every product decision has to work globally," Mitesh explains. "We're not building for one market or one type of merchant. We're creating infrastructure for the future of commerce worldwide."

This global perspective influences every aspect of the product strategy. From handling diverse market preferences to adapting to local commerce patterns, Mitesh's team builds with worldwide applicability in mind.

Industry Impact and Recognition

Mitesh's vision for multi-modal commerce intelligence has resonated throughout the industry. Product leaders at major technology companies have noted how his approach provides a blueprint for the next generation of commerce platforms—one that benefits all participants rather than consolidating power.

The real-world impact is visible in the thousands of merchants now offering sophisticated personalization they couldn't achieve alone. Small businesses report competing more effectively, while enterprise merchants appreciate how the system enhances their existing capabilities.

The Road Ahead

Looking forward, Mitesh sees current achievements as just the beginning. His product roadmap includes:

Predictive Commerce: Moving beyond reactive matching to systems that anticipate needs before they're expressed.

Expanded Modalities: Incorporating voice, visual search, and social signals into the intelligence layer.

Global Commerce Graph: Creating connections between merchants worldwide, enabling truly global personalization while respecting local preferences.

"We're building for commerce experiences that don't exist yet," Mitesh explains. "In five years, today's e-commerce will seem as outdated as mail-order catalogs."

A Connected Future

As e-commerce approaches $10.4 trillion globally by 2028, the need for intelligent, privacy-preserving personalization becomes ever more critical. Under Mitesh Shah's product leadership, PayPal is positioning itself not just as a payment processor, but as the intelligence layer that connects the global commerce ecosystem.

From his early work at Amazon democratizing enterprise capabilities, through understanding context at Uber, to bringing AI to small businesses at Block, Mitesh's career has been building toward this moment. His vision of multi-modal commerce intelligence represents the culmination of these experiences—a product strategy that benefits everyone in the commerce ecosystem.

"The future of commerce isn't about bigger platforms or more data," Mitesh concludes. "It's about intelligent connections that make every interaction more relevant and valuable. That's the future we're building at PayPal."

In an industry often focused on competition and disruption, Mitesh Shah stands out as a product leader focused on connection and collaboration. His vision doesn't just solve today's personalization challenges—it creates the foundation for entirely new forms of commerce that put both merchants and consumers first.