Perplexity Picks PayPal to Power Agentic Commerce Purchases
Artificial intelligence (AI) search company Perplexity has launched a partnership with PayPal.
The collaboration will see Perplexity use PayPal to power agentic commerce on its Perplexity Pro platform, according to a Wednesday (May 14) news release. Beginning this summer, U.S. consumers can check out instantly using PayPal or Venmo when they ask Perplexity to look for products, book travel or purchase tickets, per the announcement.
“Perplexity wants to have accurate, trustworthy answers wherever people are making decisions. PayPal is a natural partner because we share a vision for how important trust is in the age of AI,” Perplexity Co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas said in the release.
“This partnership unlocks new possibilities, where conversations now drive commerce,” PayPal President and CEO Alex Chriss said. “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.”
According to the release, the partnership integrates PayPal’s commerce solutions, allowing users to buy products or services right in the Perplexity chat interface.
It also expands Perplexity’s commerce tools to PayPal’s more than 430 million active accounts in roughly 200 markets, while employing that company’s fraud detection and data security protocols, according to the release.
This week also saw reports that Perplexity was in talks to reach a $14 billion valuation as it seeks to introduce its Comet browser to compete with tech giants like Google.
As PYMNTS wrote in the wake of that news, this development could be a signal that “AI might already be poised to do to traditional internet and information gateways what WiFi did to the ethernet cable.”
In the middle of this shift are startups like Perplexity and OpenAI that are “both implicitly and explicitly challenging big tech’s long-standing dominance in web access,” that report said.
The goal is to make traditional internet interfaces obsolete via AI’s digital retrieval dashboards.
Rather than clicking through pages of links, PYMNTS wrote, modern consumers want immediate answers to their queries. AI can help with that in ways that traditional page rank algorithms and web access browser software cannot.
“Picture this: Instead of typing ‘best Italian restaurant in Brooklyn,’ users can ask an AI agent — which knows their budget, dietary restrictions and maybe even blood pressure — and in seconds the reservation is booked,” PYMNTS wrote.
“Welcome to the AI interface era of the internet, and, one day, even commerce,” the report added.
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