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US-based subscribers of Perplexity Pro will soon be able to pay for products within the artificial intelligence chatbot using PayPal or Venmo. Through a new partnership, the feature, launching later this summer, will allow users to search for and purchase items like flights or event tickets without leaving the conversation.
Since November 2024, Perplexity Pro subscribers who pay $20 a month have been able to receive detailed product recommendations in response to shopping-related queries. This feature was enabled through integrations with Shopify and other seller platforms, providing access to expanded product and merchant data. Perplexity also stores payment and shipping details, enabling one-click purchases within the chat.
Now, users have additional payment options of PayPal and Venmo. PayPal will handle payments, shipping, tracking, and invoicing through its established, secure infrastructure. The partnership could bring some of PayPal’s more than 430 million users over to Perplexity, luring them away from AI rivals like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
AI agents increasingly manage e-commerce purchases
In April, Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal all started rolling out new integrations with various AI tools. Visa partnered with Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, and Perplexity to enable their AI agents to make purchases through its network within user-defined budgets and preferences. Mastercard launched a similar solution for Microsoft to use in Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI services, but says it will be rolled out soon to “other leading AI platforms.”
PayPal introduced a toolkit that lets developers embed shopping capabilities into AI agents built on frameworks from OpenAI, Vercel, LangChain, CrewAI, and Anthropic. Together, these integrations point to a future where AI agents manage the entire e-commerce journey on behalf of users.
”This partnership unlocks new possibilities, where conversations now drive commerce,” Alex Chriss, President and CEO of PayPal, said in a press release. ”We’re making it easy and secure to shop right in the chat when inspiration strikes. It’s a powerful step in making conversational commerce a reality.”
AI-powered shopping surges, but trust and regulation remain major hurdles
According to Salesforce, the number of sales influenced by AI rose by 6% from the 2023 holiday shopping season to that of 2024, with the monetary total of these sales increasing from $199 billion to $229 billion. With demand for AI-based shopping rising so quickly, of course the tech companies want to cash in by enabling end-to-end purchases directly within their AI platforms.
On top of making their service more useful than rivals’, they could negotiate revenue-sharing deals with merchants or payment providers and collect more valuable behavioural data for targeted advertising. Nevertheless, widespread adoption of end-to-end AI shopping ultimately rests on whether users can fully trust that the agent’s recommendations are unbiased, something the AI companies have historically struggled with. Regulators will also sniff this out, which could result in significant penalties.
“Perplexity wants to have accurate, trustworthy answers wherever people are making decisions,” Aravind Srinivas, Cofounder and CEO of Perplexity, said in a press release. “PayPal is a natural partner because we share a vision for how important trust is in the age of AI.”