PayPal’s Honey to integrate with ChatGPT and other AIs for shopping assistance

After teaming up with Google on agentic commerce this month, payments giant PayPal announced Tuesday it’s adding new features to its PayPal Honey browser extension. The features will provide AI chatbot users, who are researching items they want to purchase, Honey’s product recommendations, pricing, and access to deals.

When users ask their preferred AI chatbot a shopping-related question, PayPal Honey’s extension will display links to the products the AI chatbot recommends, along with real-time pricing, merchant options, and offers, PayPal says. The system can also identify when the AI’s own recommendations may have left out major retailers and surface those additional options to the consumer.

The features are designed to help consumers better compare pricing and boost merchant sales through the addition of personalized offers, PayPal notes.

The agentic shopping integrations are designed to be AI agnostic, PayPal told TechCrunch, but will initially work with OpenAI’s ChatGPT with more to follow.

The company says the new features are part of its broader rollout of agentic commerce initiatives, which include the Google partnership, an agentic commerce offering, a remote MCP server, Agent Toolkit, as well as other, smaller deals — like an offer to use Perplexity’s premium service for a year for free, and free access to its new Comet browser.

Of course, the AI providers will be a competitor for products like Honey, as they move into making product recommendations and connecting users with merchants directly. For instance, just yesterday OpenAI announced a plan to take on Amazon and Google with its own agentic shopping system, which includes an “Instant Checkout” feature.

While OpenAI’s system initially only supports Etsy with plans for Shopify merchants “soon,” it’s a signal of what’s to come in the AI era. Instead of browsing the web or Amazon when looking for products and recommendations, users may start their shopping research in an AI chatbot, instead of just browsing the web, where Honey previously had traction, necessitating new products like this.

The AI features are launching after quite a bit of bad press for Honey. A YouTuber accused the company of stealing money from influencers by taking credit for sales that creators had driven. The revelation has even led to some lawsuits over the matter.