PayPal and Google expand partnership to power agentic commerce

The companies are working to establish standards to ensure merchants, consumers and autonomous AI agents are operating with sufficient risk controls and safety features

PayPal Holdings and Alphabet’s Google have forged an online-shopping partnership that will combine their respective payments and artificial intelligence (AI) tools for transactions.

The tie-up announced on Wednesday (Sep 17) will add PayPal checkouts to several Google products and also create an AI collaboration to help sellers showcase their wares to specific customers and prepare for a world where autonomous AI agents shop on behalf of consumers.

The companies are working to establish standards to ensure merchants, consumers and autonomous AI agents are operating with sufficient risk controls and safety features. The partnership comes days after Google unveiled a new agent payments protocol designed to help securely initiate agent-led payments.

“This is an opportunity for these two companies to come together and think through what the future of commerce is going to look like,” Alex Chriss, the chief executive officer of PayPal, said.

New products and services related to their pact will be rolled our as soon as the fourth quarter, Chriss said.

The partnership could allow an autonomous agent to shop on a consumer’s behalf, using PayPal’s customer data to find items that fit the shopper’s preferences, in what has been referred to as agentic commerce.

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The PayPal data gives AI “the ability to be a really deep shopping companion for you”, Chriss noted.

On the payment front, PayPal Enterprise Payments will process card transactions for Google Cloud, Google Ads and Google Play. PayPal has been separately expanding a suite of offerings that allow customers to pay with cryptocurrencies.

“A big part of the future of commerce is going to be agentic and it’s going to be crypto-enabled,” Chriss said.

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The expanded Google partnership comes months after AI firm Perplexity chose PayPal to power agentic commerce across its platform. BLOOMBERG