In the face of falling share prices and anticipated job cuts, PayPal is charting a future-focused turnaround built on artificial intelligence.

During the company’s first-quarter earnings call, CEO Enrique Lores struck a candid tone, telling investors that PayPal must “recommit to the fundamentals” — specifically, by “becoming a technology company again.”

The message behind his remarks was clear: PayPal is positioning itself for an AI-driven turnaround.
Lores made this explicit on the call, telling analysts that leading companies differentiate themselves through innovation, and that PayPal must now act decisively. That shift includes modernizing its tech infrastructure, accelerating its move to a “cloud-native” model, and “aggressively adopting AI in our development processes,” he said.

The latter, he added, is expected to boost developer productivity and significantly reduce time to market.

It amounts to a notable acknowledgment that PayPal has yet to fully integrate AI internally, even as AI-assisted coding has emerged as one of the most impactful applications of the technology.

Across the consumer tech sector, companies have been rapidly embedding AI into software development workflows.

Spotify, for instance, said in February that its top engineers hadn’t manually written production code since December.

At the same time, engineering teams are increasingly competing through what some describe as “tokenmaxxing” — tracking how extensively developers are using AI tools as a proxy for experimentation and productivity.

“I think the changes that AI will enable us to do are … going to be very significant,” said Lores. “This is why we created a group last week, reporting to me, that is going to be in charge of driving — function by function, process by process — this AI transformation. And this is not about adopting AI as a technology, where we have done many pilots in the company, and we have seen what is possible. It’s really about understanding how can we redesign the key processes … this is what we have seen that really will drive significant savings.”

Announcing an AI-driven cost-cutting strategy while simultaneously eliminating thousands of roles highlights a familiar critique of the technology — that efficiency gains often come with a human toll.