Perplexity partners with PayPal for in-chat AI shopping

Perplexity is extending its bet on chat-powered shopping, aiming to stand out in the crowded generative artificial intelligence market against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The company said on Wednesday that it’s partnering with PayPal to let users make purchases directly in chat. U.S. customers will soon be able to book travel, buy products, and secure concert tickets without leaving the platform.

Payments will be completed in the chat with PayPal or Venmo, and PayPal will handle processing, shipping, tracking, and invoicing. Purchases will be completed with one click, with the help of the payment company’s passkey checkout.

“Perplexity wants to be wherever users are asking questions and making decisions,” said Ryan Foutty, Perplexity’s vice president of business. “Our vision for assistive AI is that everything just gets better and easier for people — wherever they are and however they prefer to make decisions.”

Perplexity jumped into e-commerce last year, adding a shopping feature for paid U.S. users and integrating with sellers using services like Shopify. Now Perplexity is allowing users to complete transactions within a chat, a feature that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has yet to roll out.

PayPal is competing for AI deals against companies including Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard.

In April, Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal — three of the largest payment providers in the United States — each in quick succession began launching new tools to integrate artificial intelligence into online transactions.

Visa debuted Intelligent Commerce in April, a technology that lets AI systems select items and securely complete payments with tokenized credentials. They’ve partnered with Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, among others.

“Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf,” Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said in a statement. “These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well.”

Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay also in April, describing it as a solution that will integrate Microsoft’s leading AI technologies, including Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Copilot Studio, with Mastercard’s trusted payment solutions “to develop and scale agentic commerce, addressing the evolving needs of the entire commerce value chain.”

Mastercard added that it plans to collaborate with Microsoft on new use cases and expects to expand these capabilities with “other leading AI platforms to follow,” according to the release.

Meanwhile, PayPal introduced a developer toolkit designed to embed its payment capabilities into AI-powered shopping experiences.

The simultaneous announcements signal a broader industry shift toward leveraging AI agents to handle everything from product discovery to payment completion.

PayPal technology chief Srini Venkatesan said PayPal’s system can directly connect to the merchants, handling…