While businesses looking to sell goods and services online are waiting for the basis of agent trade be embroidered, PayPal hopes that modern features will fill this gap.
The payments company is introducing a discovery solution that enables enterprises to make their products available on any chat platform, regardless of the agent’s payment model or protocol.
PayPal, which is one of the participants Google‘S Agent Payment Protocol (AP2)they discovered that it could leverage its relationships with sellers and businesses to pave the way for an easier transition to agent trading and offer flexibility that they realized would benefit the ecosystem.
Michelle Gill, PayPal’s general manager of petite business and financial services, told VentureBeat that AI-powered shopping will continue to grow, so businesses and brands need to start preparing the groundwork early.
“We think that sellers who have historically sold through online stores, particularly in the e-commerce space, are really going to need a way to actively leverage all of these large language models,” Gill said. “The challenge is that no one really knows how fast all of this is going to grow. The problem we’re trying to help sellers think about is how do you do all this with as little touch as possible, using the infrastructure you already have, without having to do billions of integrations.”
She added that AI-powered shopping will also result in “a resurgence of consumers trying to ensure their investments are protected.”
PayPal has partnered with the website builder Wix, CymbioTrade and Shop supplies to deliver products to chat platforms such as Embarrassment.
Shopping with agents
PayPal’s indirect selling services include two functions. The first is Agent Ready, which will enable existing PayPal merchants to accept payments on AI platforms. The second is called Shop Sync and will enable the discovery of company product data through various AI chat interfaces. It pulls information from a company’s catalog and plugs inventory and fulfillment data into chat platforms.
Gill said the data goes into a central repository where artificial intelligence models can ingest it.
Currently, businesses can access store sync with the Agent Ready app, which will be available in 2026.
Gill said Agentic Commerce Services is a one-to-many solution that would be helpful right now as different LLMs pull different data sources to extract information.
Other benefits include:
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Quick integration with current and future partners
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More product discovery options compared to customary search, browse and cart
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Retained customer insights and relationships where the brand still has control over their documentation and customer communications.
Currently, the service is only available through Perplexity, but Gill said more platforms will be added soon.
Fragmented AI platforms
Agent trading is still in its very early stages. AI agents are just starting to get better at reading the browser. while platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity can now display products and services based on user queries, technically, people can’t yet buy things in chat.
The race is now on to create a standard that allows agents to transact on behalf of users and pay for items. In addition to Google’s AP2, OpenAI AND Stripe to have Agent Trading Protocol (ACP) AND Visa launched his Trusted Agent Protocol.
In addition to providing agents with a layer of trust to conduct transactions, another problem that companies face when it comes to agent trading is fragmentation. Different chat platforms operate different models, which also interpret information in slightly different ways. Gill said PayPal has learned that flexibility is essential when working with merchants.
“How do you decide whether you’re going to spend your time integrating with Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT or Perplexity? Each of them now has a different protocol, different directory, configuration, everything else. That’s a lot of time to bet on where you want to spend your time,” Gill said.