AI search engine Perplexity has a business strategy in place, and it's sticking to it. The startup announced a partnership with PayPal to allow users to make purchases without leaving the chat interface. US customers will soon be able to book travel, buy products, and purchase concert tickets directly within the app.
The Race to E-Commerce Among AI Agents
"Perplexity wants to be everywhere users ask questions and make decisions," said Ryan Foutty, Perplexity's vice president of business. “Our vision for assistive AI is that everything simply becomes better and easier for people—wherever they are and however they prefer to make decisions.” This development follows Perplexity’s foray into e-commerce last year, when it added a shopping feature for paying users in the US and integrated sellers using services like Shopify. Now, Perplexity is taking this a step further by allowing users to complete transactions within a conversation, a feature OpenAI's ChatGPT has yet to roll out.
The entire process, including payment, shipping, tracking, and invoicing, will be handled behind the scenes through PayPal account linking, a token-secured wallet, and passkey payment flows, potentially eliminating the need for passwords and simplifying the experience: essentially, the user will only have to make their request in a single request or simply click.
In April, Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal—three of the largest payment providers in the U.S.—each launched new tools to gain a foothold in online transactions via artificial intelligence. Visa unveiled Intelligent Commerce, a technology that allows AI systems to select items and complete payments securely with tokenized credentials. For its part, Mastercard presented Agent Pay, a solution integrating Microsoft's AI technologies with Mastercard's payment solutions.
"The next generation of commerce is happening on the AI agent side. People are starting to research and buy online through agents," said Srini Venkatesan, PayPal's chief technology officer, referring to AI-driven systems that can complete tasks without human intervention.
PayPal's advantage in this area comes from its ability to securely verify both buyers and sellers. The service authenticates users through their wallets and automatically fills in billing and shipping information. It's easy to pay online... almost too easy!
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