“And we would expect over time for that number to decrease.”

In context

“Stephen Squeri : Yes. So let me talk a little bit about AI. And I think every company out there is engaged with this at this particular point in time. I'm not so sure how many companies have really committed to actual in P&L savings in the -- for 2026 and probably not even to 2027. I think when we look at it, one of the first places that we have deployed it and we've deployed it in multiple places in the business right now is technology. And from a technology perspective, what we're seeing is anywhere from a 30% to 40% decrease in cycle time from a coding perspective. Now that's really not a savings because what that does is it allows us to do more. And so that's what we're doing. So we are -- if you remember early on, I mentioned that we have a large backlog of technology projects. And so we're getting to more things quicker. From a servicing perspective, both from a travel and from a card servicing perspective, we've equipped our customer service and travel agents with AI-powered tools. And so what we've seen there is a lack of acceleration in hiring of more travel representatives, more customer service reps, even as the business continues to grow. And if you look at how many customer travel, how many representatives that we had servicing our customers, that number really hasn't grown. And we would expect over time for that number to decrease. And I think that will normally decrease from an attrition perspective. From a marketing perspective, we're really using AI right now to streamline some of our marketing campaigns so that we're getting out the marketing campaigns a lot quicker, and that gets you time to time to money. And I think that's critically important. And look, we've used AI in credit and risk and fraud for 15, 16 years. But now what we're doing is how do you implement sort of unstructured data, Agentic in that to help make the decisions a little bit better. So look, we're investing in it. I think one of the things and other companies will talk about this as well, as you look to integrate AI within existing systems, you need to either as you redo them, embed it within or you need to put a layer above so that you can integrate these systems in a seamless way. And by doing that, what you're doing is making it a lot easier. I mean, we just launched a servicing portal for our CCPs, our card member service representatives, where we've embedded within and it will reduce the handle time for them and enable them to give our customers a much better experience. So a lot more to come on this. Again, I think we're further along on this than I would say we are in agentic ecommerce. This is more in the early innings. But like every other company, I mean, we have high hopes that this will streamline make us more efficient, make us more productive and eventually hopefully drive more top line revenue growth and more earnings growth as we move on.”