PayPal has its startup energy again.

Here's one measure of the change: PayPal recently completed a Java upgrade across 3,000 applications in two months. Previously it would have taken eight to twelve months. With 8,000 developers and a codebase spanning decades, that kind of acceleration seemed impossible.

But it's happening because of how the company adopted Cursor.

#Start with high-impact teams

PayPal recognized early on that AI needed to be an intrinsic part of its products and how it worked. But it also needed to move carefully. The company moves money for more than 400 million customers around the world, and the cost of mistakes is high.

So when they rolled out Cursor, they started with their highest-impact teams building the most impactful products where speed to market was essential. Within two weeks, those teams were deploying daily instead of weekly or biweekly.

Adoption spread organically across the organization as engineers saw what their peers were accomplishing with Cursor. Teams with high Cursor adoption rates—many exceeding 90%—showed dramatic improvements in deployment frequency and lead time.

#New ways of working

Software development has fundamentally changed too. The old linear software development lifecycle—design, code, build, deploy—has given way to something more iterative. Teams move from idea to working prototype in hours, then iterate from there.

That process has collapsed traditional role boundaries. Product managers are bringing functioning prototypes to engineers instead of just PRDs while engineers are replying with their own prototypes of what the product could look like.

This shift, in process and in how roles are defined, is changing what matters in engineering. Now it's much more about creativity and problem-solving.

Prakhar Mehrotra, Global Head of AI at PayPal, compares engineers using Cursor to superheroes who can move beyond hypersonic speeds but still have to decide where to apply their powers.

#Measuring what matters

While the way PayPal builds software has changed, the company has continued measuring what has always mattered: deployment frequency, lead time from idea to production, change failure rate. They also deliberately avoid metrics that could distort how people work.

Teams with high Cursor adoption are deploying multiple times per day instead of once per week. Lead times have shrunk. Change failure rates have dropped.

Based on those metrics, Chance believes PayPal could even be ready to deliver 40% more capabilities in 2026 than it shipped in 2025.

#The intelligence shift

Mehrotra sees what's happening at PayPal as the leading edge of a larger shift. The last 20 years were about organizing and distributing information. Something different is underway now.

A fast, full embrace of that shift is allowing PayPal to transform its business, from payments to commerce more broadly. That expanded sense of possibility is pulling engineers in and making them want to contribute to what PayPal is doing.

If you're excited about leveraging agents to transform your engineering team's velocity, please reach out to our team to start a free Cursor trial.