PayPal is investing in agentic commerce, expecting it to be the company’s next growth engine in an AI-driven market. 

The company today announced a deal with OpenAI making PayPal the first payments wallet inside ChatGPT. 

The San Jose, Calif.-based company is “building for a future where consumers can pay through AI agents powered by Google, OpenAI, Perplexity and others,” Chief Executive Alex Chriss said during the company’s third quarter earnings call today. “Our strategy is to meet our customers everywhere they shop, whether online, in-store or agentic.” 

While the company accelerates growth in branded experiences, it is also developing tools in agentic, ads, stablecoins and digital wallet verticals to establish avenues for future growth, Chriss said. 

The company is not only powering its agentic AI tools internally with LLMs, but is helping its merchants and SMBs to showcase their products on all AI platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity through a single integration with PayPal, Chriss said. 

Bet on agentic AI payments 

PayPal and its payments peers are betting on the growth of agentic AI, anticipating that “consumer behavior will shift,” toward the technology, Chriss said. 

Agentic AI is set to influence more than $1 trillion in e-commerce spending, which is expected to amount to nearly half of all online spending by 2029, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group on Sept. 23. 

This year, PayPal has teamed up with multiple companies to provide agentic AI payments services, including: 

• Amazon Web Services; 

• Google; 

• Mastercard; 

• Microsoft; and 

• Perplexity. 

“Together with Perplexity, Google and most recently OpenAI, we are not only giving customers the flexibility to use PayPal or Venmo everywhere they shop, but also connecting them to our tens of millions of merchants, including small businesses globally,” Chriss said. 

Other major payments services, including Stripe and Visa, have also launched agentic AI solutions to provide consumers with better payment capabilities. 

By the numbers 

In Q3, PayPal reported: 

• Revenue of $8.4 billion, up 7.3% year-over-year; 

• Monthly active users of 227 million, up 1.8% YoY; and 

• Total payment volume of $458 billion, up 8% YoY. 

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