PayPal

Shortly after potentially selling its business to Stripe , PayPal is accelerating its artificial intelligence strategy by partnering with a new AI agent from Facebook parent Meta Platforms. PayPal said it would support Muse, enabling the AI assistant to search and execute transactions on behalf of consumers. It's the payment company's latest effort to embrace new forms of AI to improve performance in branded checkout and other metrics, where PayPal's growth has struggled in recent years. "Meta and PayPal are teaming up to make shopping with personal AI agents even more streamlined.

Soon, PayPal's hundreds of millions of consumers will be able to shop and check out with Muse across PayPal's merchants worldwide," PayPal said in a social media post . Muse is the latest addition to a stack of AI tools that PayPal has added over the past few years. "The [Muse] partnership extends PayPal checkout into an agentic surface at branded merchants," KeyBanc Capital Markets said in a research note. "While this will take time to ramp up, it could positively influence engagement and retention." As it refocuses on digital payments, PayPal has partnered with several agentic and generative AI developers.

For example, PayPal supports ChatGPT Checkout, which lets users complete purchases using a PayPal wallet. PayPal also processes payments for merchants using OpenAI's Instant Checkout. PayPal's AI suite additionally includes Agentic Commerce Services, which sells payment support, order management and connections between merchants and product data, fulfillment and AI-powered checkout. Another feature called PayPal "agent ready" enables merchants to accept payments via different AI programs; while another feature called "store sync" makes merchant data discoverable within AI channels, including the ability to route orders to their existing fulfillment and management systems.

Payment analysts say PayPal's size will play a role in its ability to spread agentic AI among its consumers and merchants — and enhance its attractiveness to potential acquirers. "We are guarded on the role of agentic commerce beyond stablecoin-based micropayments and believe carded transactions will win the day in an agentic world," William Blair said in a research note on PayPal and how a potential acquirer could scale agentic commerce via PayPal's network. "That said, if a hyperscaler takes a different view, we could see significant [AI] value attributed to PayPal's massive 439 million monthly active users."

PayPal's partnership drew fresh attention to Meta's Muse, which launched earlier this month as an AI assistant that has a variety of uses, including agentic commerce. Muse's "Business in a Box," for example, would let someone with a business idea use the Muse "Personal Agent" to create their new business presence and manage all of the functions needed to operate. There are different types of consumer-facing agents, representing an agentic maturity curve, according to Christopher Miller, lead analyst for emerging payments at Javelin Strategy & Research.

"We are currently at the low end of this curve, nowhere near the idea of the fully self-contained agent who also serves a distribution point for financial products, such as an agent that issues its own cards to users," Miller told American Banker. "The recent spate of agents such as Muse, Grok, Instinct and others are all of the type that will need wallets — provided by others — to complete transactions. Muse is an interesting case because it sets aside the existing MetaPay infrastructure in favor of Stripe's Link wallet, which the other two use as well."

Payment experts also say Muse will push payment companies to improve their own agentic AI to provide the same level of expertise to their business users. "Partnerships that embed AI agents directly into shopping and payment experiences are likely to accelerate interest in agentic commerce across the payments ecosystem.