✨ Paypal AI Agenda | Day One at Dubai AI Festival
How PayPal is using AI to serve small businesses at scale - straight from the Dubai AI Festival 🔴
Hello from sunny Dubai ☀️👋
As you know, one-fs.com is a proud partner of this year’s Dubai AI Festival, and yesterday was a strong start.
Good conversations, sharp sessions, and great to meet some of you in person!
The day opened with H.E. Essa Kazim, Governor of DIFC, sharing what the Dubai financial free zone has been up to:
Over 180 AI companies now operating from the Dubai AI Campus (part of DIFC)
20+ active AI initiatives with public and private sector partners
A new data protection law designed specifically for autonomous systems
And 26 DIFC services now fully automated, with 15% of all requests handled end-to-end by AI
But the foundations being built here are wider than finance. It’s to make Dubai a centre for AI across sectors and geographies.
Don’t Walk the AI Road with a Red Flag 🚩
H.E. Omar Sultan Al Olama, UAE Minister of AI (yes, we have an AI minister since 2017!), followed with a cautionary message on regulation.
His story about 19th-century UK Red Flag Act (that required someone to walk ahead of vehicles with a red flag) made the point well. It was a reminder not to regulate new technologies based on old assumptions.
His Excellency also referred to a popular story previously told by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai:
“Each morning, a lion knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or it will go hungry. And each morning, a gazelle wakes knowing it must outrun the fastest lion, or it won’t survive.
In the UAE or in Dubai, I don't care if you are a lion or a gazelle. When you wake up, you better start running,”
The lesson? No matter who you are or where you stand, progress and survival demand relentless movement, innovation and adaptability.
And today, he adapted the story to AI:
“In the age of AI, it doesn’t matter if you’re a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.”
H.E. Omar Sultan Al Olama
The UAE’s approach is straightforward: regulate when necessary, but build space to move fast. That framing felt both grounded and ambitious - useful context for anyone launching or scaling AI in the region.
Amazon CTO: AI, Operationalised ⚙️
Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, brought the operational lens. Amazon has been building with AI since long before it was fashionable, as they pioneered eCommerce ML models to deliver a great customer experience (i.e. recommendation engine), for decades.
But they also use AI for:
Intelligent route planning for logistics
Autonomous mobile robots in fulfilment centres
Personalisation features like “customers also bought” that are now baked into e-commerce
Same-day delivery windows in Dubai that are genuinely among the best in the world
For builders, he highlighted tools like Amazon Bedrock (access high-performing foundation models on AWS through APIs) and the company’s broader push on AI education, including ml.aws and the AI & ML Scholarship programme.
🤝 PayPal’s AI Agenda: Making AI Practical for Merchants
In the afternoon, Suzan Kereere, PayPal’s President of Global Markets, took the stage with a refreshingly clear view on what AI means for the future of commerce. Her starting point: small businesses.
While large firms have the data, engineers, and infra to experiment freely, smaller businesses often get left behind. PayPal is aiming to flip that.
“AI isn’t just a department. It’s infrastructure. It’s a mindset.”
Rather than pushing shiny new tools, PayPal is building agentic AI - interfaces and workflows designed to act more like teammates than dashboards:
A virtual agent to suggest the right time to market a product
A tool to guide dynamic pricing strategies based on changing demand
Market expansion helpers that provide tailored local insights for cross-border merchants
And it’s being rolled out right now.
Under the Hood
PayPal is already running over 600 AI models across the business, many focused on risk and fraud prevention. That capability helped them maintain some of the lowest loss rates in the industry during the volatility of COVID.
80% of customer support is now handled by AI agents
Personalisation engines are improving conversion by adapting offers to buyer behaviour
A new Agentic Toolkit lets merchants embed AI directly into their own systems and channels
Internally, the company has rolled out AI tools across teams to improve decision-making, automate processes, and support faster iteration.
Inclusion Built In 👨🍳
Kereere spoke often about AI’s role in creating more inclusive digital economies. For PayPal, this means supporting those who haven’t historically had access to enterprise-grade tools: micro-merchants, side hustlers, youth-first markets, local wallet users.
From AI-powered receipts and checkout experiences to trust-building tools and stablecoin adoption (like PYUSD), the goal is to make commerce feel more personal, more relevant, and more portable.
“No one wakes up wanting to buy something. They wake up wanting to have an experience.”
That lens - experience over transaction - is shaping how PayPal is building its next generation of products.
PayPal’s AI strategy spans risk, personalisation, customer support, product guidance, and internal tooling. It’s designed to scale across the 80+ countries it now serves, and it’s deeply tied to its presence in policy-forward markets like the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
It’s a full-stack transformation.
The company is betting on small businesses, and making AI accessible and relevant at the edges of the market is what will drive the next phase of growth.
Go Paypal! 💪
About Dom Monhardt, founder of one-fs.com
I am a French technologist and product leader living in Dubai, with 15+ years of experience in building cutting-edge and innovative digital experiences.
I am interested in the intersection of business, design, and technology and am deeply passionate about the fintech and digital banking world.