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Is American Express, described as a victim of the “Ghost GDP” apocalypse in a viral Citrini report on the imagined economic collapse of AI, the end game of doomsday?
In his annual letter to shareholders published Wednesday, AmEx CEO Stephen Squeri promised the company that it can thrive in the current and disruptive era of commercial intelligence. Even better, Squeri says strong fundamentals and a 2025 banner could not have positioned the company better at the start of a new era.
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Squeri highlighted the continued appeal of fee-based membership cards for both business and personal users. On Wednesday, AmEx also introduced a refreshed version of its Graphite business cash back card. The company said certain business cardholders will get a new benefit: a $300 credit toward a ChatGPT Business subscription.
On the personal side, AmEx’s Platinum rewards cards are always a boon for business. Card fee revenue has now grown by double digits for 30 consecutive quarters, reaching a record $10 billion last year, the CEO wrote. A full 70% of the 12.5 million new credit card accounts opened last year were for cash payment products, with Gen Z, millennial and international customers driving the growth.
In other words, the only thing standing in the way of AI commercial agents delivering a sustainable future that disrupts the credit card ecosystem as we know it, as Citrini says, is the little dopamine rush a millennial gets when they book a “free” flight to Bali.
AmEx, however, is elbowing its way into an important seat at the table in the agent’s future:
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In the letter, Squeri announced that the company will launch its American Express Agetic Commerce Experiences (ACE) developer kit next month, which will allow select partners to “seamlessly integrate our payment capabilities into their agent infrastructure.”
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Meanwhile, the company is working to make many of its membership benefits, such as hotel or restaurant reservations, “discoverable” and “activated” by AI agents. If you feel like it you know how to play the points system, wait and see what your AI shopping agent can do.
You are out: “It’s going to be a bit of a journey” before we get to that future, Squeri said in an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, noting how most users have yet to give their final say on anything AI does. Recent problems in the AI commerce ecosystem support him. For example, OpenAI this month began sunsetting ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature, which it launched in September with retail partners including Walmart and Shopify. Instant Checkout has largely failed to attract users, and analysts told CNBC that OpenAI underestimated the difficulty of completing a transaction. So, for sure, buying through an agent may be the future of commerce. And, everyone said the same thing about Alexa when Amazon first introduced the home pod assistant ten years ago.
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