Perplexity AI announces free product to streamline online shopping

Perplexity AI on Wednesday announced it will roll out a free agentic shopping product for U.S. users next week, as consumers ramp up spending for the holiday season. 

“Most people want to still do their own research. They want that streamlined and simplified, and so that’s the part that is agentic in this launch,” Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, told CNBC in an interview. 

The artificial intelligence startup has partnered with PayPal ahead of the launch, and users will be able to directly purchase items from more than 5,000 merchants through Perplexity’s search engine. 

Perplexity initially released a shopping offering called “Buy With Pro” for its paid subscribers late last year. The company said its new free product will be better at detecting shopping intent and will deliver more personalized results by drawing on memory from a user’s previous searches. 

Perplexity declined to share whether it will earn revenue from transactions that are completed through its platform.

The startup’s competitor OpenAI announced a similar e-commerce feature called Instant Checkout in September, which allows ChatGPT users to buy items from merchants without leaving the chatbot’s interface. OpenAI has said it will take a fee from those purchases. 

Etsy and Shopify were named as OpenAI’s initial partners for Instant Checkout, but it also inked a deal with PayPal late last month.

Starting next year, PayPal users will be able to buy items, and PayPal merchants will be able to sell items through ChatGPT.

Michelle Gill, who leads PayPal’s agentic strategy, said the company has been building out infrastructure and protections as AI ushers in the “next era of commerce.”

Part of that means keeping consumers and merchants connected to PayPal as they engage on new platforms like Perplexity, she said. 

Perplexity said PayPal merchants will serve as the merchants of record through its agentic shopping product, which will allow them to handle processes like purchases, customer service and returns directly.

Through its “Buy With Pro” offering, Perplexity had served as the intermediary that completed purchases.

Gill said PayPal’s buyer protection policies, which can help users get reimbursed if there are problems with their orders, will also apply to transactions on Perplexity.

“We’re really excited about this launch because we will see it come to life during a period that’s so organic for people to shop,” Gill said in an interview.

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