American Fintech giant PayPal is launching Artificial Intelligence (AI) products as it looks to revive its dominance with emerging technology.
The PayPal AI Feature
Announcing the PayPal AI feature is the company’s way of bringing new life as new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Alex Chriss is making good on his commitment to resolve some of the age-long challenges the firm has faced in some of its product offerings.
As Chriss noted, the PayPal AI solution will directly address the Checkout issue 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 has increased the checkout speed by about 40%.
The PayPal AI push will notably do more than this as another tool dubbed “Smart Receipts” can be leveraged by merchants to recommend items for purchases to customers directly from its app plus an accompanying cashback. Additionally, PayPal will deploy its AI to enable merchants to find customers around the globe.
While these innovations were not unexpected from a tech leader like PayPal, they are coming at a time when the company needs a proper revamp seeing its share price has tanked by more than 15% thus far this month.
On January 17th, PayPal’s, $PYPL, CEO said he was going to “shock the world” on January 25th.
Just now, PayPal released new AI features and a way to earn cash back through the PayPal app.
The stock just crashed nearly 5% in a matter of minutes.
It is also down nearly 15% from… pic.twitter.com/iMi36njFxn
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) January 25, 2024
“The outcomes of the innovations … are promising and should improve consumer and merchant experiences,” Andrew Harte, an analyst at BTIG, said in a research note. “That said, we do not think investors will view any of them as groundbreaking new information, but instead initiatives they would have expected the company to already be working on.”
CEO Chriss has named 2024 a transition year and the PayPal AI product would be explored to help the firm regain its dominance in the payments technology world.
Strategic Pivot to Artificial Intelligence
The PayPal AI initiative is not an uncommon trend in today’s tech world as the new technology is shaping the fortunes of most economies already embracing it.
While PayPal has made a series of strategic moves to expand its offering based, first by diverging its support assets into cryptocurrencies and through the launch of the PayPal USD (PYUSD) stablecoin, pivoting into AI is a strategic way to secure its place in a world dominated by Large Language Model (LLM) applications from OpenAI and Google.
Additionally, Elon Musk’s X is launching a Payments tech and with the integration of Grok AI, might place a formidable challenge to PayPal if it failed to step up its game.
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