Paypal Investor Day: Declarations, Hallucinations and Complications

Paypal CEO has declared two things: they are going to win checkout and they are going to be the Agentic AI company to help create a full-journey eCommerce experience.

Sounds complicated to me.

Paypal praised its legacy but says it needs to evolve in these ways:

* Buy: Helping buyers at the point of purchase understand how to spend their money.

* Acquire: Helping consumers find their next customer.

* Service: Helping consumers in post-purchase.

Buy:

I expect they are talking about the assets related to Honey. But more, they are talking about pooling resources with friends for specific tasks (like a camping trip they mentioned on the call), and then allowing brands to use that data in their purchase funnels. It's an interesting idea, and perhaps with AI keywords are enough to give the retailer hints. But it's assuming the consumer enters this info which is problematic. How many people will use Paypal Pools?

I didn't even know about the feature, and I track Paypal closely. When is the last time I purposefully opened the Paypal app? Not recently unless forced.

Problematic. And I want Paypal to have data about my purchase behaviors and share those with retailers? Trust issues abound.

Paypal also seems like it wants to build a marketplace using Agentic AI based on Paypal profile data. At this point, I started to wonder what the CEO was smoking. Who the hell starts a shopping journey at Paypal, and if I am using ChatGPT what would be the conversion rate of users conecting their Paypal account to it?

Paypal wants to create a "commerce platform that connects LLMs, merchants, consumers, and Paypal payment instruments."

What the hell this means I have no idea. I like Amazon, it seems to work and I know I will get the item. Who is going to implement your super LLM payment buying API and make it the center of their experience?

Paypal says this is their strategy. But, it's actually a vision. A strategy would help us understand how they pull this off - in this department not much was offered.

Acquire:

I expect them to borrow pages from Klarna's playbook - but Paypal has a much wider reach. Reminds me of Walmart following Amazon. It could work.

Service:

Not clear what Paypal has in mind. I think that Paypal sees what Shopify did with Shop App (nee' Arrive) and so tracking is a challenge.

Paypal wrapped the talk talking about how they are modernizing their development environment, mostly speaking about things the company should have done 10 years ago. Braintree is now "cloud-native". In 2025. Yippee.

All this to say, they are going to build a lot of things. They are going to imagine a lot of things. All the while, what merchants want are just cheaper rates. I am not sure they imagine an architecture where their payment provider is involved in all these areas.

Sounds like big mess. And sounds like Paypal has marketplace envy.