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Agentic commerce is growing quickly. And it’s shaking up established discovery pathways along the way. The next stage of AI-powered e-commerce is revolutionising the ways that shoppers find, consider, and purchase your products. Here’s what you should know:
In agentic commerce, AI models named agents can act on behalf of users. These agents gather information on available products in response to a user request. The AI shopping assistant then shows the user items that fit with their prompt, considering previous purchases and preferences.
It’s a big change. But it’s already happening. And with PayPal, your business can be part of building the future of agentic commerce.
Right now, most shoppers find products by searching for items themselves. And they’re overwhelmed with options: different marketplaces, payment options, and return policies make it difficult to find the best choice.
Agentic AI cuts through the noise to find exactly what the user wants. It doesn’t browse like a person. Instead, it synthesises information about hundreds of products and creates a shortlist for the customer. Once they’re ready to purchase, they can confirm their identity and check out with saved shipping and payment information. With agentic commerce, AI supports every step in the shopper journey.
In a world where intelligent agents do the browsing, shopper acquisition strategies have to change. The factors that will become increasingly important as agentic commerce grows are data, identity, and trust.
Data is the backbone of AI effectiveness. Beyond just shopper preferences.
When an agent looks for products, it needs to be able to evaluate how well the product fits with a shopper’s request. Take someone looking for a white cotton T-shirt. The agent evaluating products might find a white T-shirt, but without information about the material. That makes it a lower-priority item than a white T-shirt with materials listed.
Data requirements extend to your business’s policies, too. Maybe a shopper needs an order to arrive by next week. Maybe they’re worried about being able to return an item. An agent can take that into account. If your business’s policies aren’t listed, that might mean a missed sale.
PayPal can help. Our 2-sided network of shoppers and merchants gives us insights into purchasing habits and trends.
The best AI agents use as much information as possible to make decisions. For agentic commerce, that means bringing together data about shoppers’ past purchases to inform future suggestions. It’s personalisation, built directly into how they shop.
But collecting that data in the first place is challenging. Between guest checkout and multi-channel sales, it’s difficult to unify a shopper’s info even within a single business.
Get a head start with PayPal. PayPal Open, our unified omnichannel solution, already integrates in-person and online payments with a centralised vault. That creates unified shopper profiles that help to tailor personalised recommendations.
When online payments first launched, they faced scepticism. Now, so does agentic AI.
To feel comfortable trying this new way of shopping, customers need to know that their payment information and data are secure. Particularly as personalised shopping continues to improve. Businesses need to work with platforms that customers can trust.
As the 2025 #1 business in Infegy’s Most Trusted Brand Rankings, PayPal has the established reputation to inspire confidence.1 And we’ve got experience leading the charge on new technologies. In the early days of online shopping, PayPal was a digital wallet that shoppers recognised and felt safe using. We’re bringing the same level of customer care and security to agentic commerce.
We’re not waiting for agentic commerce to happen. We're building it with an agentic commerce toolkit that helps makes it easier for businesses to give the right information to agents. We’ve already laid the groundwork with:
Now, we’re building for agentic commerce with capabilities such as:
Identity verification with one-time passwords at checkout, which helps to protect against fraudulent purchases.
Get a head start on agentic commerce, with PayPal.