PayPal has announced a new partnership with OpenAI that will let users purchase items directly inside ChatGPT, starting next year. This is all possible because PayPal is adopting the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open-source standard designed to make shopping with AI agents a reality.
The ACP was co-developed by Stripe and OpenAI to create a common language for buyers, AI agents, and businesses. Its primary job is to handle tasks like coordinating checkout and securely sharing payment info. The ACP is designed from the ground up to support physical goods, digital products, and even subscriptions.
OpenAI was the first major company to adopt the protocol with "Instant Checkout," a feature that launched for US users late last month. The feature lets people buy products from merchants on platforms like Etsy and Shopify without ever leaving the chat window. In this scenario, ChatGPT acts as a personal shopper for the user, while the merchant continues to handle the order, payment, and shipping with its existing systems.
PayPal said that it will be using OpenAI"s Instant Checkout feature alongside ACP. This will connect its network, allowing "tens of millions of small businesses and the largest brands in the world to sell within ChatGPT."
When customers check out with PayPal, they will get the company"s buyer protection, post-purchase services like package tracking, and help with dispute resolution. PayPal is also managing the card payment processing behind the scenes using a separate delegated payments API.
PayPal also plans to launch its ACP server, which will make the product catalog of its merchants discoverable right within ChatGPT. This will begin with categories like apparel, fashion, beauty, and home improvement. Businesses will not need to build any new integrations, as PayPal will handle all the merchant routing and payment validation behind the scenes.
And lastly, thanks to the new partnership, PayPal is giving its more than 24,000 employees access to ChatGPT Enterprise. Its engineers will get to use OpenAI Codex, an AI-powered coding agent designed to help out with things like writing new code, tests, and fixing bugs.