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Paypal has signed a deal with OpenAI to integrate its digital wallet into ChatGPT so users can pay for items found through the leading consumer AI tool, the company told CNBC exclusively.
The company’s shares jumped as much as 13% following the news.
The deal, reached over the weekend, means that starting next year, both sides of the PayPal ecosystem will be able to connect to ChatGPT: PayPal users can buy items through the AI platform, and its merchants can sell there, with their inventory listed there, according to PayPal CEO Alex Chriss.
“We have hundreds of millions of loyal PayPal wallet holders who will now be able to click the ‘Buy with PayPal’ button on ChatGPT and enjoy a safe and secure payment experience,” Chriss said in an interview.
The move makes PayPal an early part of OpenAI’s efforts to expand the use of ChatGPT for e-commerce. The idea is that its more than 700 million weekly users can rely on artificial intelligence to help them find items, like a human personal shopper. Last month, OpenAI said its users could purchase from Shopify And Etsy merchants, and two weeks ago it announced an e-commerce deal with Walmart.
“It’s a whole new paradigm for shopping,” Chriss said. “It’s hard to imagine that agent commerce won’t play an important role in the future.”
PayPal is attempting to position itself as the payments backbone for the coming era of agentic AI shopping, announcing recent deals with Google and artificial intelligence company Perplexity. The financial technology company, which also reported its third-quarter results on Tuesday, issued a statement on its OpenAI deal after the CNBC report.
The company will also handle merchant routing, payment validation and other behind-the-scenes aspects of payment processing for PayPal sellers on ChatGPT, so individual merchants do not need to register with OpenAI, the company said.
Chriss touted the fact that both consumers and merchants were verified by the fintech company, reducing the risk of fraud for either group. Users can withdraw funds from linked bank or credit card accounts, or stored balances, to pay for purchases, and they will benefit from protections, package tracking and dispute resolution.
“It’s not enough that a transaction can happen,” Chriss said. “This is a collection of trusted merchants, the largest PayPal merchant network in the world, who are verified, with the largest set of verified consumers in a consumer wallet.”
PayPal also said it is expanding the use of OpenAI’s enterprise AI products to its employees to speed up product cycles.