Remember when PayPal was just that thing you used to buy questionable items on eBay? Well, the digital payments dinosaur just pulled off something pretty slick, and investors are throwing money at it like it’s 1999.
PayPal’s stock jumped 11% on Tuesday after announcing they’re buddying up with OpenAI to let ChatGPT users pay for stuff without leaving the chat. Yeah, you read that right – you can now go from “Hey ChatGPT, find me a new coffee maker” to actually buying said coffee maker without opening seventeen different tabs like some kind of digital caveman.
Here’s the deal: PayPal is becoming the first wallet to integrate directly into ChatGPT. So when you’re chatting with your AI overlord about shopping on Shopify, browsing Etsy for that perfect handmade whatever, or even grabbing groceries from Walmart (because apparently ChatGPT does grocery shopping now), you can just tap a few buttons and boom – purchased with your PayPal account.
“By partnering with OpenAI and adopting the Agentic Commerce Protocol, PayPal will power payments and commerce experiences that help people go from chat to checkout in just a few taps,” said PayPal CEO Alex Chriss, probably while doing a little victory dance in his office.
Now, why should you care? Well, PayPal has been having what we might politely call a “rough year.” The stock was down 10% year-to-date before this announcement, which in tech terms is like showing up to a Tesla convention in a horse and buggy. They’ve been watching from the sidelines as the AI revolution happened around them, probably feeling like that friend who still doesn’t understand TikTok.
But this partnership is actually pretty smart. Think about it – while everyone else is trying to build their own AI from scratch (looking at you, every other tech company), PayPal just waltzed up to the cool kid at school and said, “Hey, want to be friends?” And OpenAI, being the popular kid who’s already hanging out with Shopify, Etsy, and Walmart, was like, “Sure, why not?”
For OpenAI, this is another step in their master plan to make ChatGPT your personal shopping assistant, life coach, and probably your therapist too. They’re basically trying to become the everything app that Elon keeps tweeting about but for people who actually want to use it.
The timing couldn’t be better for PayPal. As retail gets more AI-integrated (because apparently we needed robots to help us buy things we don’t need), having a direct line into the most popular AI chatbot is like getting VIP access to the future of commerce.
So while PayPal might not be the flashiest fintech anymore, they just proved they’re not ready to be put out to digital pasture. Sometimes the best strategy isn’t to reinvent the wheel – it’s to make sure your wheel works really well with everyone else’s shiny new AI car.
Wall Street seems to agree. An 11% pop in one day? That’s the market’s way of saying, “Finally, someone gets it.”