- Key insight: PayPal has added support for Meta's new Muse AI assistant.
- What's at stake: PayPal is looking to improve checkout volume while investing in new forms of AI to bolster performance.
- Forward look: Muse, which has drawn PayPal and Shopify while running into a roadblock at Amazon, is attempting to add more digital wallets.
Shortly after
"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
PayPal's AI play
Muse is the latest addition to a stack of
As part of a focus on refocusing 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."
Agentic Meta
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
"Partnerships that embed AI agents directly into shopping and payment experiences are likely to accelerate interest in agentic commerce across the payments ecosystem. However, adoption at scale will depend on trust, governance and clear accountability," Parul Sharma, senior director of fraud and identity professional services at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, told American Banker.
Muse is available on iOS, Android, web, and through WhatsApp, with a free tier and premium levels at $20 and $100 per month. Muse is designed to take a step beyond chatbots by performing tasks on a user's behalf, such as browsing, filling out forms and making payments. Its security includes an environment called Muse Secure VM, which reviews outbound activity and requires user approval before a risky action, such as a payment. KBCM estimates Muse had more than 2.8 billion downloads in its first 12 days, making it the top free app in the App Store. Meta did not return a request for comment.
Stripe and its Link wallet provide payments and merchant-facing technology for Muse, which intends on adding more digital wallets.
Muse has its supporters and detractors.
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"The [agentic commerce] ecosystem remains early, constructs are changing quickly, and it is not yet clear which entrants can achieve scale while maintaining the most secure framework," KBCM analysts said. Agentic commerce introduces new challenges around identity, authorization and "Know Your Agent," according to Sharma.
"The industry is also grappling with questions around liability and responsibility when an AI agent initiates a transaction on a consumer's behalf," Sharma said. "We are already seeing payment providers and ecosystem partners address these concerns through new models for fraud protection, risk management and liability allocation."
