Good afternoon.
The first thing on my mind when I sat down to start writing this on Tuesday was the surprising (in that it didn’t leak), but really not-at-all surprising (the company’s been struggling), CEO shakeup at PayPal. Alex Chriss, who joined the payments giant as chief executive in 2023, is out. HP CEO and PayPal board chair Enrique Lores is in.
Among other things, the company has been trying to position itself as a critical player in the emerging world of AI-powered e-commerce, signing on as a partner for AI shopping efforts by Perplexity, Microsoft, and Google, to name a few. And I’ve been fortunate to chat with several smart PayPal folks over the last couple of months who are working hard to push the onetime payments innovator into this new age.
Still, I’ve been left wondering whether there’s truly a company-wide strategy in place on this front, given the company’s more fundamental challenges and the varied takes I’ve heard on how different parts of the organization are envisioning PayPal’s role in an AI-powered future. Is this something core PayPal owns? How big of a role will Venmo play? Or is it still unclear?
And that was before the sudden CEO shift. Now, who knows what strategic priorities the new CEO might have? Could a partial or total sale be on the horizon? Hard to rule it out.
In the meantime, PayPal’s interim CEO told investors on this week’s earnings call that “as AI-powered shopping scales, our aim is to become the default payment option.”
The question is whether the CEO shakeup makes that more or less likely. Many in the space will be watching. I know I will be.
Now on to the good stuff…
The Center Aisle
I probably should have posted a warning before including this close-up of me from the summer of 2018, a few months after this first Amazon Go store opened to the public. Sorry!
Way back in 2015, I was just two years into reporting on Amazon and e-commerce when my side hobby of scouring patent applications finally turned up a gem: Amazon’s vision for building a high-tech store of the future.
“If the user is purchasing items from a retail location, rather than the user having to stop and ‘check out’ with a cashier, teller, or automated check station, the user may simply exit the retail location with the items,” the document read.
To accomplish that, this store would be outfitted with a cocktail of devices, including sensors and cameras, to help link the shopper to the items they grabbed, the document went on.
I remember the sheer thrill of the scoop, and the fact that the company didn’t get back to me when I contacted them told me I was onto something. Plus, the three names listed on the application as inventors were all Amazonians with impressive résumés, including two who had returned to the company years earlier to work on a secretive project. Big deal indeed.
So when Amazon announced last week that it was closing down this chain of futuristic convenience stores, known as Amazon Go, I decided to contact one of the co-inventors to understand the vision from the outset and where things may have went wrong along the way.
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