By Ashley Capoot
Publication Date: 2025-11-19 17:00:00
Davide Bonaldo | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Perplexity AI on Wednesday announced it will roll out a free agentic shopping product for U.S. users next week, as consumers ramp up spending for the holiday season.
“Most people want to still do their own research. They want that streamlined and simplified, and so that’s the part that is agentic in this launch,” Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, told CNBC in an interview.
The artificial intelligence startup has partnered with PayPal ahead of the launch, and users will be able to directly purchase items from more than 5,000 merchants through Perplexity’s search engine.
Perplexity initially released a shopping offering called “Buy With Pro” for its paid subscribers late last year. The company said its new free product will be better at detecting shopping intent and will deliver more personalized results by drawing on memory from a user’s previous searches.
Perplexity declined to share whether it will earn revenue from transactions that are completed through its platform.
The startup’s competitor OpenAI announced a similar e-commerce feature called Instant Checkout in September, which allows ChatGPT users to buy items from merchants without leaving the chatbot’s interface. OpenAI has said it will take a fee from those purchases.