As PayPal Holdings Chief Executive Enrique Lores seeks to rejuvenate the digital payments player, he’s expecting that artificial intelligence can provide significant cost savings to reinvest in the company.
With AI, there is an opportunity to reinvent PayPal’s approach to technology and customer support services, as well as other areas, Lores said last week at an investor conference.
To lead the campaign in making that happen, he tapped Anshu Bhardwaj, who became PayPal’s chief AI transformation and simplification officer in late April.
“We have identified one person that will report to me that is going process by process in the company and assessing how the process should be redesigned and how technology and AI can be used to drive that,” Lores said at the May 27 Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference.
He’s counting on Bhardwaj in large part to help find the San Jose, California-based company achieve $1.5 billion in savings. “We see a lot of opportunity to reduce costs in the company,” Lores explained with respect to that effort. That savings is expected to be accomplished over two to three years on a run-rate basis, according to the company’s first-quarter earnings presentation.
To squeeze that kind of savings out of the company, Lores is expected to cut PayPal’s workforce significantly, by 20%, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal in May.
Lores also specifically plans to target the company’s management ranks. "When I look at management layers, in some areas, we have eight, nine management layers," he said at the conference. "We can operate with six, seven as an exception."
But in the meantime, he has tapped Bhardwaj and others, who are mainly already inside the company, to assist him in transforming PayPal.
Along with her, he appointed Frank Keller as president, heading up PayPal’s legacy checkout technology division; Antonio Lucio as chief marketing and corporate affairs officer; Alexis Sowa as the interim lead for consumer financial services and the peer-to-peer payment tool Venmo; and Jeff Pomeroy as interim lead for the company’s payment services and crypto.
Bhardwaj isn’t new to the company. She joined it under former CEO Alex Chriss in November 2024, being hired by the company’s chief technology officer, Srini Venkatesan. Since then, she has been a senior vice president of engineering, overseeing checkout, wallets and global products, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She brought an extensive retail background to the job, after having held top executive posts at Walmart and Sam’s Club.
She was Walmart’s chief operating officer for technology strategy and operations, leading a digital overhaul of its Walmart and Sam’s Club brands, including global e-commerce, according to PayPal. At Sam’s Club, she was chief product officer of SamsClub.com, leading development of a scan and go tool, as well as a cashier-less Sam’s Club app checkout option, the company said.
Bhardwaj’s team will have two goals, Lores said.
“First, they will drive our enterprise-wide AI and simplification agenda, which will accelerate our overall execution and lower our operating costs,” he said at the conference. “Secondly, they will define and execute a focused strategy anchored in high-impact use cases and measurable value creation, ensuring we prioritize where AI can deliver the greatest operational impact.”
Ultimately, Bhardwaj’s team is expected to “elevate PayPal from a company with AI capabilities to an AI-native payments company,” Lores said.
