Perplexity AI announced on Wednesday that it has partnered with PayPal to enable direct purchases through its chat interface.
The partnership will strengthen Perplexity’s agentic-commerce offering, a rapidly growing trend in which AI agents not only assist consumers with shopping but also handle transactions for them. Users will be able to check out instantly with PayPal or Venmo when they ask Perplexity Pro to find products, plan vacations or buy tickets, starting this summer in the United States.
Payments will be processed through the chat interface using PayPal or Venmo, with PayPal handling processing, shipping, tracking and billing. Purchases will be completed with a single click using PayPal’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 becomes better and easier for people wherever they are and however they prefer to make decisions.”
The partnership will also extend Perplexity’s commerce solutions to PayPal’s more than 430 million active accounts across nearly 200 countries.
Perplexity, similar to ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, provides information by searching the internet. It is backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, AI giant Nvidia and Japan’s SoftBank Group.
AI Payments Race
Perplexity entered the e-commerce space last year, offering a shopping feature for paid US users and integrating with sellers through platforms such as Shopify, while PayPal competes for AI partnerships with companies like Stripe, Visa and Mastercard.
Visa introduced Intelligent Commerce in April, a technology that enables AI systems to select products and securely execute transactions using tokenised credentials. It has collaborated with Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI and Perplexity, among others.
“Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer. “These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users but also by banks and sellers.”
Mastercard announced Agent Pay in April, describing it as a solution that integrates 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.
