Avito announced plans to invest in generative AI

By 2028, Avito plans to invest about 12 billion rubles in generative AI technologies and earn more than 21 billion rubles. This is stated in the company's new strategy on the introduction of artificial intelligence.

It is noted that the first product launches using GenAI last year earned 670 million rubles. In 2025, it is planned to introduce 20 new scenarios for the use of generative models with a potential of more than 1 billion rubles.

"We initially put a positive ROI approach into the strategy of implementing generative AI: investments should bring profit. We don't want to invest money just in a fancy technology. Our case shows the market that you can really make money on GenAI. We planned to return the investment in 5 years, but we managed to make money in the first year," said Andrey Rybintsev, Senior Director of Data and Analytics at Avito.

In his opinion, the profitability of investments "will ensure the use of large neural networks in the field of recommendations and monetization." Avito is well suited for using generative models, we have many scenarios in creating content and communicating with users, where there is also a guaranteed financial effect," added Rybintsev.

As part of GenAI's development strategy, the company has introduced a new family of generative models — text-based A-Vibe and multimodal A-Vision. The models are trained on the basis of the Qwen2.5 neural network with 7 billion parameters and are specialized for tasks related to buying and selling. A-Vibe works only with text, A-Vision, a multimodal neural network, works with images and text, analyzes the visual characteristics of goods, recognizes text in images, determines the quality of photos and moderates visual content.