PayPal – Alex is Gone, Enrique is In.. Recommended Focus

Don’t say I didn’t tell you. As I related in June 2025 The Shakeup PayPal Needs, Dan created a dumpster fire that the BOD just added to in their AWOL engagement. 

Yesterday PayPal delivered FXN Branded growth of 1%, and announced that PayPal CEO Aex Chriss is out and HP’s CEO Enrique Lores is in (March 1st).  This event serves as the final, public admission of a decade-long strategic failure. Lores replacement of Chriss hopefully marks the end of an era of “spectator leadership” and the beginning of a desperate attempt to reintegrate a fragmented “mash” of acquisitions into a cohesive operating model. To understand the depth of the “dumpster fire” that Lores inherits, let’s look back across the last eight years, beginning with the BOD’s decision to renew Dan Schulman’s contract, a move that effectively decapitated PayPal’s operational core and set the stage for its current state of institutional irrelevance among top merchants

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Retailer Actions in Agentic Commerce

Navigating a New Demand Paradigm and Its Two-Sided Imperative

The rise of agentic commerce, where AI agents could potentially execute purchases for consumers, signals more than an evolutionary step in e-commerce; it represents the emergence of a new type of demand: a direct customer buy order, theoretically complete with payment authorization. This presents a two-sided imperative for retailers. Firstly, ensuring your products are discoverable and favorably considered by these AI agents an “SEO for the agentic era.” Secondly, developing the organizational capacity to act on this demand, potentially bypassing traditional e-commerce pathways for direct fulfillment via APIs, with updates to fraud and risk screening.

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