Artificial intelligence engine Perplexity.AI will soon enable PayPal and Venmo payments for products, travel, and tickets that are found via its tool.
Announced Wednesday by PayPal Holding Inc., the service will be enabled this summer for U.S. subscribers to Perplexity Pro, which is $20 per month. This is the second commerce function for San Francisco-based Perplexity, having enabled its own Buy with Pro in November. That service is enabled via a platform integration with Shopify Inc. and merchants using Shopify. It, too, is only available with the Pro subscription.
PayPal said the payment, shipping, tracking, and invoicing will be handled with PayPal’s account linking, tokenized wallet, and passkey checkout flows. Users will have to have a PayPal account. There are more than 430 million active accounts globally, PayPal says.
In the existing Buy with Pro on Perplexity, a search for Birkenstock sandals yielded three product results along with information about the footwear maker. Two of these product results had a Buy with Pro button. A similar search on ChatGPT, another popular AI search service, generated Web site listings from retailers for Birkenstock sandals with links to make purchase at retailer Web sites.
“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,” Alex Chriss, PayPal president and chief executive, says in a statement. PayPal says in a reply to Digital Transactions News that as more consumers use AI services to make “shopping decisions it improves the customer experience if they are able to checkout inside the chat as well.”
PayPal says the Perplexity integration will follow the same safety and security processes as a merchant offering PayPal on its Web site.
PayPal is one of many payments companies to embrace AI. Visa Inc. launched Visa Intelligence Commerce, an AI-based shopping service in April. PayPal then also made software developer tools available to enable agent-based AI experiences. Mastercard Inc. also unveiled Mastercard Agent Pay, an agentic payments technology that can offer tailored recommendations within AI conversations.
