AI startup Perplexity is deepening its push into chat-driven commerce by teaming up with PayPal, aiming to deliver a fully integrated shopping experience that stands out in a competitive artificial intelligence landscape featuring the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Starting soon, Perplexity users in the United States will be able to book travel, purchase goods, and secure event tickets directly within the chat interface. Payments will be processed through PayPal or Venmo, allowing customers to complete purchases in a single click using PayPal’s passkey checkout. The payment giant will also handle order processing, shipping, tracking, and invoicing, creating a streamlined end-to-end experience inside the chat.
Ryan Foutty, Perplexity’s vice president of business, emphasized the company’s vision: “Perplexity wants to be wherever users are asking questions and making decisions. 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.”
This move builds on Perplexity’s earlier foray into e-commerce, which began last year with shopping options for paid U.S. users and integrations with online sellers using platforms like Shopify. The latest partnership sets Perplexity apart by enabling users to complete transactions within the chat – a feature still absent in ChatGPT from OpenAI.
PayPal, meanwhile, is racing against payment technology rivals Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard for a share of the emerging AI commerce market. In April, all three U.S. payment leaders announced new initiatives to embed AI into digital transactions. Visa launched its Intelligent Commerce platform, enabling AI agents to choose items and complete secure payments with tokenized credentials. Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay, a solution leveraging Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot Studio to expand agentic commerce. PayPal rolled out a toolkit to make its payments easily accessible to AI-powered shopping agents.
Srini Venkatesan, PayPal’s chief technology officer, highlighted the company’s secure and seamless approach: “The next generation of commerce is happening on the agentic side. People are starting to research and shop online through agents. Agentic commerce is not only the searching but making it all the way to the purchase – paying for it and then buying it from that merchant. So that’s what PayPal has been leading, and we’ve been trying to get the agentic commerce piece right.”
PayPal’s system verifies both buyers and sellers, automatically populates payment and shipping details, and handles customer support, all in an effort to minimize friction. “We provide the trust that the business is legitimate on one side, and then the customer is legitimate on the other side,” Venkatesan said.
The Perplexity-PayPal partnership comes as Perplexity closes in on a $500 million funding round, valuing the company at $14 billion. The announcement arrives against a backdrop of explosive growth in AI-powered commerce. Salesforce data shows a 42% surge in AI-driven customer service chat usage over the past year, with buying decisions influenced by AI chats rising 6% in the same period. Global sales driven by AI reached $229 billion during last year’s holiday season, up from $199 billion the previous year.
Major AI players are increasingly focused on search and shopping. ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews have all made significant advances in delivering real-time search and purchase recommendations. As the AI race intensifies, partnerships like that of Perplexity and PayPal are reshaping how people discover and buy products online – all without leaving the chat.
