(TechCrunch) Elon Musk has been detailing his vision for X’s, formerly Twitter’s, transformation into an “everything app,” including payments, creator tools, shopping and more, since acquiring the social network over a year ago. Now, the company is committing to a time frame. In an announcement today, X shared its roadmap for the year ahead, which will include AI-powered experiences and the launch of peer-to-peer payments, among other initiatives.
While Musk’s time frames to launch products don’t always hold up, X has been moving forward to acquire the necessary licenses to handle payment processing over the past several months. As of December, X was licensed for payment processing in a dozen U.S. states, and today that number stands at 14, with the recent additions of Arkansas and Pennsylvania.
In Musk’s vision, X users will be able to send money to others on the platform and extract those funds to authenticated bank accounts. He also toyed with the idea of offering users high-yield money market accounts further down the line to encourage them to hold more of their cash on X.
The latter has been a particular source of concern for X advertisers, who have found that despite X’s measures, their ads were placed next to toxic content or hate speech, leading many to withdraw. Musk, speaking at an event in November, told fleeing advertisers to “go f***” themselves, and X has shifted to small-to-medium-sized advertisers to fill the void. Still, the company is trying to court advertisers, as a recent post about its vertical video ad brand safety initiatives revealed earlier this week.
X’s announcement today also suggested that AI would be a part of the platform’s future, following the launch of Musk’s ChatGPT competitor, the feisty Grok chatbot. Though the post did not go into detail, it said that AI would be used to “increasingly power the X user and advertising experiences, including in areas like enhancing search, improving ads, and “fueling a new level of customer understanding,” which seems to be a vague reference to AI-powered ad tools.
xAI, Musk’s AI company, will additionally power consumer-facing features like today’s “See Similar Posts,” as well as an upcoming “See Dissimilar Posts” feature, which will encourage people to “challenge their perspectives,” the post explains. (That promise, however, could be difficult to deliver if X continues to suspend journalists from its platform.)
