American fintech giant PayPal is launching artificial intelligence (AI) products in a bid to revive its dominance with emerging technology.
PayPal’s AI functionality
The announcement of PayPal’s AI feature is the company’s way of breathing new life into new chief executive officer (CEO) Alex Chriss who is maintaining his commitment to solving some of the age-old challenges the company has faced in some of the its product offerings.
As Chriss noted, PayPal’s AI solution will directly solve the payment problem that has been a bottleneck for users and merchants over the years. With this new feature called Fastlane, users can easily checkout with a simple click, a solution that early testing revealed increased checkout speed by around 40%.
PayPal’s AI push will do much more than that as another tool called “Smart Receipts” can be leveraged by merchants to recommend items for customers to purchase directly from its app plus an accompanying cashback. Additionally, PayPal will deploy its artificial intelligence to help merchants find customers around the world.
While these innovations were not unexpected from a tech leader like PayPal, they come at a time when the company is in need of a proper revamp as its stock price has plummeted more than 15% so far this month.
On January 17, PayPal CEO $PYPL said it would “shock the world” on January 25.
Just now, PayPal has released new AI features and a way to earn money through the PayPal app.
The stock dropped nearly 5% in just a few minutes.
It’s also down nearly 15% from… pic.twitter.com/iMi36njFxn
– Kobeissi’s letter (@KobeissiLetter), January 25, 2024
“The results of the innovations… are promising and should improve the consumer and merchant experience,” said Andrew Harte, an analyst at BTIG. She said in a research note. “That said, we don’t believe investors will view any of this as groundbreaking new information, but rather initiatives they would have expected the company to already be working on.”
CEO Chriss has called 2024 a transition year and the PayPal AI product will be explored to help the company regain its dominance in the world of payments technology.
Strategic pivot towards artificial intelligence
The PayPal AI initiative is not an unusual trend in today’s tech world as the new technology is shaping the fortunes of most economies that already adopt it.
While PayPal has made a number of strategic moves to expand its offerings, primarily by diversifying its support resources into cryptocurrencies and through the launch of the PayPal USD (PYUSD) stablecoin.Betting on artificial intelligence is a strategic way to secure your place in a world dominated by OpenAI and Google’s LLM (Large Language Model) applications.
Also, Elon Musk’s X is launch a payment technology and with the integration of Grok AI, it could pose a formidable challenge to PayPal if it fails to step up its game.
