Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to just about everything, just about everywhere, and its reach is raising eyebrows—and ire—just about everywhere it goes. Now, payments stock PayPal (PYPL) is teaming up with Perplexity in a bid to bring more AI to the shopping experience. It has its points, but investors seem to be of a mixed mind about this development, giving PayPal shares just a fractional boost in Wednesday’s trading session.
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The team-up between Perplexity and PayPal, reports note, will bring the ability to make purchases directly from a chat session. Whether booking travel arrangements to a place being discussed, tickets to a concert for a personality, or anything in that vein, the PayPal / Perplexity arrangement will make it happen. In fact, the whole thing is expected to be one-click simple when it goes live.
Perplexity has been working to branch out in this field for some time now, including being part of a shopping feature that worked with several different services like Shopify (SHOP). And naturally, PayPal is working to be a part of AI, competing against several different platforms to be the payment processor of choice. And as more and more users turn to AI agents to buy things on their behalf, having a trustworthy payments system is vital to seeing that development get built out.
Tap-to-Pay Hits Europe
Meanwhile, PayPal is augmenting its position in Europe as well, as PayPal takes advantage of recent regulations that open up the near-field communications (NFC) chips on iPhones and similar Apple (AAPL) devices. The development started in Germany earlier this month, when PayPal noted that iPhone users in the country would start seeing cashback payments by using the PayPal app.
Now, the plans are reaching fruition, and the service is becoming available to end users. That is, of course, good news for both users and PayPal, who will be able to handle more kinds of payments and make money accordingly.
Is PayPal a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on PYPL stock based on 15 Buys, 16 Holds and two Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 13.13% rally in its share price over the past year, the average PYPL price target of $82.18 per share implies 13.3% upside potential.
