PayPal is looking towards the future, despite its falling stock and looming layoffs. In its first-quarter earnings call, CEO Enrique Lores told investors that PayPal needs to “recommit to the fundamentals,” which included “becoming a technology company again.”
There was no need to read between the lines — PayPal was pitching an AI-powered turnaround.
Lores explicitly said so, telling analysts on this week’s call that leading companies find ways to differentiate themselves by innovating, and that now is the time for PayPal to take action. This includes modernizing its tech platform, moving faster to become “cloud-native,” and “aggressively adopting AI in our development processes,” Lores said. The latter would increase developer productivity and shorten time to market, he added.
It’s a startling admission from PayPal that it has yet to fully embrace AI in-house, when AI-assisted coding is one of the breakout areas where the technology has truly excelled.
Other consumer tech companies have rapidly adopted AI in recent months to assist with coding, with Spotify even declaring in February that its top developers haven’t written a line of code since December. Meanwhile, top dev teams are trying to outcompete one another by tokenmaxxing — a proxy for understanding who at the company is experimenting with AI more often, based on the number of AI tokens they use.
PayPal is only now catching up, it seems.
Lores said the company has formed a new “AI transformation and simplification” team to help with its enterprise AI agenda. Combined with the planned layoffs, which Lores characterized as PayPal removing layers from its organizational structure, the addition of AI-enabled processes is expected to bring the company at least $1.5 billion in cost savings over the next two to three years, he said.
The company announced last week it was reorganizing its business, which streamlines the operation into three segments: checkout solutions and PayPal, consumer financial services (and Venmo) as well as payment services and crypto. In ad …