Starting next year, PayPal’s payment technology will be embedded in OpenAI’s ChatGPT, where users can make purchases within the AI chatbot using their PayPal wallets.
PayPal will also bring its merchants into OpenAI’s burgeoning commerce offering and help merchants process payments through OpenAI’s checkout tools, the companies announced Tuesday.
The arrangement is expected to help retailers of various sizes sell their products to ChatGPT’s 800 million active weekly users. PayPal claims to have 434 million active customer and merchant accounts.
The collaboration is enabled by OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open-source spec that allows AI agents to make purchases on behalf of users.
“By partnering with OpenAI and adopting the Agentic Commerce Protocol, PayPal will power payments and commerce experiences that help people go from chat to checkout in just a few taps for our joint customer bases,” said PayPal president and CEO Alex Chriss, in a statement.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Chriss said the integration will provide users with a trustworthy and secure means of making purchases within the chatbot experience.
PayPal will also aid with logistics including payment validation processes and merchant routing, per CNBC.
The collaboration is part of OpenAI’s nascent but rapidly expanding foray into agentic commerce. Earlier this month, the firm announced a major collaboration with Walmart that will allow users to shop and buy products from the retail giant through ChatGPT. OpenAI also has direct buying from Etsy sellers and Shopify.
As part of the partnership between the two firms, ChatGPT Enterprise will also become available to PayPal’s more than 24,000 employees and give employees direct access to OpenAI’s APIs.
The payments platform has been aggressively ramping up its AI investments, inking deals with AI titans including Google and Perplexity earlier this year.
PayPal’s stock rose nearly 10% today on the Oct. 28 announcement.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment by press time.