PayPal’s Honey to integrate with ChatGPT and other AIs for shopping assistance

After teaming up with Google connected agentic commerce last month, payments elephantine PayPal announced Tuesday it’s adding caller features to its PayPal Honey browser extension. The features volition supply AI chatbot users, who are researching items they privation to purchase, Honey’s merchandise recommendations, pricing, and entree to deals.

When users inquire their preferred AI chatbot a shopping-related question, PayPal Honey’s hold volition show links to the products the AI chatbot recommends, on with real-time pricing, merchant options, and offers, PayPal says. The strategy tin besides place erstwhile the AI’s ain recommendations whitethorn person near retired large retailers and aboveground those further options to the consumer.

The features are designed to assistance consumers amended comparison pricing and boost merchant income done the summation of personalized offers, PayPal notes.

The agentic buying integrations are designed to beryllium AI agnostic, PayPal told TechCrunch, but volition initially enactment with OpenAI’s ChatGPT with much to follow.

The institution says the caller features are portion of its broader rollout of agentic commerce initiatives, which see the Google partnership, an agentic commerce offering, a remote MCP server, Agent Toolkit, arsenic good arsenic other, smaller deals — similar an connection to use Perplexity’s premium work for a twelvemonth for free, and escaped entree to its caller Comet browser.

Of course, the AI providers themselves volition beryllium a rival for products similar Honey, arsenic they determination into making merchandise recommendations and connecting users with merchants directly. For instance, conscionable yesterday OpenAI announced a program to instrumentality connected Amazon and Google with its ain agentic buying system, which includes an “Instant Checkout” feature.

While OpenAI’s strategy initially lone supports Etsy with plans for Shopify merchants “soon,” it’s a awesome of what’s to travel successful the AI era. Instead of browsing the web oregon Amazon erstwhile looking for products and recommendations, users whitethorn commencement their buying probe successful an AI chatbot, alternatively of conscionable browsing the web, wherever Honey antecedently had traction, necessitating caller products similar this.

The AI features are launching aft rather a bit of atrocious press for Honey. A YouTuber accused the institution of stealing wealth from influencers by taking recognition for income that creators had driven. The revelation has adjacent led to immoderate lawsuits implicit the matter.