Booking travel can be a hassle, enough of a stress for consumers to farm the task out to artificial intelligence, PayPal's Michelle Gill told American Banker.
"Travel is one of the biggest and most complex purchases people make online," said Gill, general manager of small-business and financial services at PayPal, which has launched a hotel booking service as an early use of agentic commerce. "Travel is an emotional purchase, where trust, value and confidence come to bear in different ways, which makes it a good fit."
Her work comes as PayPal's rivals embrace agentic AI, with
Across all industries, investments in agentic AI are projected to total $7.28 billion in 2025, with growth in pace to reach $41 billion by 2030, according to the
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PayPal's agentic AI journey
As part of her new duties at PayPal, Gill is assembling a team of people from different PayPal departments to "think through" how to enable and expand agentic commerce.
Agentic commerce refers to consumers or companies using AI agents to execute transactions. A person could ask ChatGPT or a similar program to "find a red sweater on Amazon." The AI agent can shop for that sweater and buy it with minimal interaction from the consumer.
Agentic commerce has grown out of prior advancements, such as e-commerce product recommendations or assistants such as Siri. In the case of agentic commerce, the digital assistant is performing more complex tasks.
"When you look at conversational platforms, the way that we get information has already changed," Gill said. "We have gone from search to prompts."
PayPal's early forays into agentic commerce include travel. The payment company has partnered with Selfbook, a hospitality software company. Selfbook and PayPal are using technology from Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, to support automated hotel searches, booking and payment.
Selfbook is integrating with PayPal, Venmo and PayPal's buy now/pay later service for AI-driven payments. PayPal is working on adding other elements of travel, such as airfare and related expenses, into agentic commerce.
"With travel, even small upgrades can be big," Gill said.
Travel includes searching for hotels, often in unfamiliar cities with specified needs, such as size, pet-friendliness, proximity to shopping and other activities — and is usually planned and booked in advance on a strict time frame.
These factors make travel amenable to automation, which can cut time and the expense of using a third party, Gill said.
"By embedding PayPal into high intensity moments like travel, we want to attract both selection and user stickiness," Gill said. "Those are the keys for monetization and loyalty."
PayPal, which has also embedded AI into its
"Will everyone use this? No," Gill said, adding that PayPal has found that users who have adopted the initial agentic AI tools have been able to accelerate the speed and depth of their engagement.
To assuage concerns over relying on agentic AI to shop and make payments, PayPal has developed controls and choices for consumers and merchants that govern how much authority an AI agent has to execute transitions. "For something like credentials, you may want that in a secure digital vault rather than with an 'agent,'" Gill said.
For PayPal, linking agentic commerce to its app creates a new channel for generating transactions and keeping the payment within the PayPal ecosystem, according to Aaron Press, a director at IDC Insights.
"Other platforms also have their own wallets that can streamline the process, but no other wallet or alternative is as widely accepted as PayPal," IDC's Press told American Banker.
Agentic AI's fertile ground
Travel arrangements and itineraries have emerged as a "killer use case" for AI, and so it makes sense to target that vertical early on, Aaron McPherson, principal at AFM Consulting, told American Banker.
"Given the sums at issue, I think users will want to check the results of the agent before agreeing to the itinerary, but it can certainly save a lot of time vs. current methods," McPherson said.
With integration with the user's calendar and email, such agentic AI solutions can become even more powerful, he said.
"I expect Travelocity and Expedia, not to mention the airlines, will need to respond to this soon," McPherson said.
Payments is just one element for the payment companies and banks that are chasing agentic AI business.
"The AI is working through a process of discovering options, choosing what to buy and purchasing. Payment is one step in that process," Press said. "As a result, payment service providers are looking to be the payment system of choice for these AI platforms in order to capture the transactions and revenue."
What is an agentic AI?
Agentic AI refers to an advanced form of artificial intelligence that is designed to perform tasks with minimal or no human interaction. For example, the technology can be trained to make a purchase without a shopper triggering a checkout or perform intuitive customer service or sales.
It's an upgrade from generative AI, which used large language models to produce original content.
Banks and other financial institutions are developing uses for both agentic and generative AI, reducing manual work for internal tasks while improving customer engagement.
