The news: PayPal will power AI shopping across Perplexity Pro’s platform starting this summer, allowing consumers to make purchases, book travel, and more without leaving Perplexity’s interface.

• Shoppers can ask Perplexity to find products for them and then use PayPal or Venmo to check out.
• The entire purchase process—including payment, shipping, and invoicing—can be managed without needing to enter a password or any other manual inputs.

Key stat: 47% of shoppers worldwide are interested in having AI agents make purchases on their behalf, per Salesforce.

Agentic commerce buzz: Other payment players have recently unveiled AI-powered solutions, including Visa’s Intelligent Commerce, Affirm’s AdaptAI, and Mastercard’s Agent Pay.

PayPal launched its own internal AI features that allow developers to integrate its payment platform’s suite of APIs to create agentic workflows through its Open Platform. PayPal’s Braintree also partnered with Mastercard’s Agent Pay.

Possible value adds: All payment providers want frictionless transaction experiences for consumers to boost checkout conversion.

• With agentic AI, consumers yield much of their decision-making to the AI tool, turning online shopping into a near passive payment transaction.
• Captured within the Perplexity AI and PayPal ecosystem, both companies score the benefit of a captive audience potentially becoming increasingly reliant on the tools they offer.

PayPal could also have Perplexity’s engine offer ads for its products, such as Pay Later, to access more consumers.

A possible stumbling block: Generations of consumers are divided on trusting AI.

• Only 25% of baby boomers believe AI will serve them accurate information, per Five9, versus 62% of millennials and 55% of Gen Z.
• This generational chasm likely blocks the rapid adoption of agentic shopping tools with wealthy boomers but signals takeoff potential among young adults.

Executives, however, trust the tech: Nearly half of US executives are comfortable having agentic AI make decisions and execute tasks for their consumers.

Widespread AI adoption: Beyond the AI hype, professionals consistently overestimate the amount the average consumer uses AI in their daily lives. Just 27% of customers use AI several times a day, per Pew Research, and 33% of US adults have used a chatbot.

Our take: PayPal’s trusted name as a payment provider could help consumers become more comfortable shopping through Perplexity’s platform. While Perplexity is still a small fish in the AI game, this partnership could help its upcoming Comet browser compete with Google for online shopping.