PayPal Promotes Anshu Bhardwaj to Accelerate Growth
Seeking to revitalize PayPal, chief executive officer Enrique Lores is betting that artificial intelligence can unlock sizable efficiencies that the company can funnel back into growth.
He told investors last week that artificial intelligence opens the door to reworking PayPal’s technology stack, customer support, and other core functions, including automated customer-service chat support, smarter routing and triage for service requests, more personalized in-app experiences, and risk controls that can help flag suspicious activity earlier in the transaction flow.
Recent updates around PayPal Holdings, Inc. have centered on a simplified operating structure, new leadership assignments across key units, and a stated push to embed artificial intelligence into how teams build products and run day-to-day operations. Investors and analysts have broadly framed the announcements as an attempt to pair cost discipline with faster product iteration, while watching for execution risks and measurable payoffs from the reorganization.
Artificial Intelligence-Led Overhaul and New Leadership
To steer that push, he named Anshu Bhardwaj the company’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Transformation & Simplification Officer in late April.
At the May 27 Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference, Lores said the effort will be driven process by process under a leader who reports directly to him.
One executive reporting to me will examine every workflow, redesign it, and apply technology and artificial intelligence to make it run better.
Security and trust are expected to be part of that operational focus as well, with artificial intelligence applied to areas such as anomaly detection, behavior-based risk scoring, and faster identification of potential account-takeover and fraud patterns as activity moves through checkout and other payment flows.
For legacy financial-services platforms, artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming the mechanism for modernizing operations at scale while maintaining reliability, compliance, and customer trust.
Cost Targets and Organizational Changes
A key part of Bhardwaj’s remit is helping the San Jose, California company reach $1.5 billion in cost savings, alongside owning the enterprise strategy for artificial intelligence adoption, coordinating technology integration across teams, and overseeing end-to-end process redesign so simplification efforts translate into measurable performance gains.
Lores said there is ample room to trim expenses, and the company expects to achieve that run-rate reduction over the next two to three years, according to its first-quarter earnings presentation.
To hit that mark, PayPal is expected to shrink headcount by about 20%, according to The Wall Street Journal in May.
Management layers are also on the chopping block. “In some areas we have eight or nine layers; we can operate with six, with seven only as an exception,” Lores said at the conference.
Meanwhile, he is relying on Bhardwaj and a mostly internal bench to drive the transformation. In investor discussions, the plan has been cast as a way to improve operating leverage while freeing up resources for higher-return initiatives, with analysts and investors focused on how quickly simplification shows up in execution speed and customer-facing product improvements.
Expanded Executive Lineup
Alongside her appointment, Lores also reshuffled senior responsibilities across several business areas:
| Executive Name | Position | Division/Responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| Frank Keller | President | Leads the legacy checkout technology group, with responsibility for running and modernizing core checkout capabilities. |
| Antonio Lucio | Chief Marketing and Corporate Affairs Officer | Oversees marketing and corporate affairs, including brand and external engagement priorities tied to the broader transformation. |
| Alexis Sowa | Interim Head of Consumer Financial Services and Venmo | Leads consumer financial services and Venmo on an interim basis, focusing on consumer product execution and platform coordination. |
| Jeff Pomeroy | Interim Lead for Payment Services and Crypto | Leads payment services and crypto on an interim basis, with responsibility for delivery and operational alignment in those areas. |
The operating model Lores described is designed to keep day-to-day ownership inside each division while centralizing simplification standards and prioritization through Bhardwaj’s organization, so high-impact use cases can be implemented consistently across checkout, consumer, Venmo, payment services, and crypto.
Bhardwaj’s Experience and Track Record
Bhardwaj is not a newcomer. She joined under former chief executive officer Alex Chriss in November 2024 after being recruited by Chief Technology Officer Srini Venkatesan, and has served as senior vice president of engineering overseeing checkout, wallets, and global products.
She arrived with deep retail experience from senior posts at Walmart and Sam’s Club.
At Walmart, she was chief operating officer for technology strategy and operations, spearheading a digital revamp across Walmart and Sam’s Club, including global e-commerce. At Sam’s Club, she served as chief product officer for , leading Scan & Go and a cashierless app-based checkout.
Mandate and Near-Term Objectives
Lores outlined two goals for Bhardwaj’s team.
- Drive an enterprise-wide agenda for artificial intelligence and simplification to accelerate execution and lower operating costs.
- Set and deliver a targeted plan focused on high-impact use cases with measurable value.
The end state, he said, is to move PayPal from merely using artificial intelligence to becoming an artificial intelligence-native payments company, with implications for competitive positioning, scalability, and the pace at which the company can test, ship, and iterate on new capabilities across its product portfolio.