Perplexity has announced a strategic partnership with PayPal to enhance its chat interface with in-chat shopping capabilities. This collaboration will allow U.S. users to book travel, purchase products, and secure concert tickets directly within Perplexity's chat platform, using PayPal or Venmo for instant payments. Ryan Foutty, Perplexity's vice president of business, emphasized the company's goal to be wherever users are making decisions, enhancing the shopping experience with AI. The integration aims to streamline the shopping experience by enabling one-click purchases, with PayPal handling payment processing, shipping, tracking, and invoicing. This move is part of Perplexity's broader strategy to leverage AI in commerce, positioning itself competitively in the generative AI market alongside companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Perplexity has previously integrated with sellers using services like Shopify, and this new feature allows users to complete transactions within a chat, a capability not yet rolled out by OpenAI's ChatGPT. The partnership comes at a time when Perplexity is finalizing a $500 million funding round, which values the company at $14 billion. This financial backing underscores the company's growth and its commitment to expanding its commerce features. PayPal's technology chief, Srini Venkatesan, highlighted the company's focus on agentic commerce, where AI-driven systems handle the entire purchasing process from search to payment. The use of AI-driven chat for customer service has increased by 42% over the past year, and global sales influenced by AI reached $229 billion between November and December, up from $199 billion the previous year. Perplexity faces competition in AI search from ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's AI Overviews.