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How much time is left for PayPal when AI takes over the 'shopping journey'?

Article author: LUKE SPILL, FintechBlueprint

Article translation and source: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: As AI agents start to replace humans in product discovery, decision-making, and placing orders, the traditional e-commerce funnel is rapidly compressing. Payment is no longer the endpoint of a transaction but rather part of embedded infrastructure. This article uses PayPal's acquisition of Cymbio as a starting point to outline the new competitive landscape under the rise of Agentic Commerce: Google and Shopify are trying to control the routing layer with UCP, OpenAI and Stripe are capturing the agent execution layer through ACP, while PayPal is striving to shift from being just a 'payment button' to becoming a key node in 'commerce workflows.'

For fintech companies like PayPal and Stripe, whether they can embed themselves into the underlying protocols of AI commerce will determine if they can remain relevant; for banks and the crypto industry, the window of opportunity is equally brief.

The original text follows below:

Last week, PayPal acquired Cymbio, a platform that helps merchants complete sales across various AI interfaces, including channels such as Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. Market insiders estimate the deal was valued between $150 million and $200 million. This move is widely seen as a critical strategic step for PayPal to maintain its competitiveness in the field of Agentic Commerce.

Therefore, as AI agents continue to compress and reshape the traditional e-commerce funnel, PayPal is transitioning from a typical Web2 payment tool to more upstream and core aspects of commerce, such as product discovery, product catalog distribution, and order orchestration. This shift almost perfectly validates our analysis from January this year regarding exponential growth, power-law effects, and increasing returns to scale in Agentic Commerce.

Meanwhile, the industry’s infrastructure is rapidly taking shape:

Google and Shopify are promoting the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP);

OpenAI and Stripe are jointly advancing the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP);

Microsoft, on the other hand, is embedding settlement capabilities directly into Copilot.

Shopping infrastructure centered around 'machines' rather than 'human users' is being rewritten at an unprecedented pace. Agentic Commerce is delivering on the promise of exponential growth in tangible ways. Predictions from all sides are both astonishing and increasingly converging:

McKinsey predicts that by the end of this decade, Agentic Commerce is expected to generate one trillion US dollars in revenue in the US retail market, accounting for approximately one-third of all online retail sales.

Morgan Stanley forecasts that by 2030, Agentic Commerce will drive US e-commerce spending to reach between 190 billion and 385 billion US dollars, corresponding to a market penetration rate of 10%-20%.

Bain predicts that by 2030, the market size of Agentic Commerce will reach between 300 billion and 500 billion US dollars, accounting for approximately 15%-25% of total online retail sales.

Current adoption data indicates that we are at the inflection point of an exponential growth curve: as of November 2025, 23% of US consumers have used AI to complete a purchase at least once.

Cymbio could become the "middle layer" for PayPal in AI commerce.

For PayPal, Cymbio's potential positioning is as the intermediate infrastructure layer within the AI commerce ecosystem. Its core value propositions include:

Synchronizing product catalogs across different markets and channels.

Managing inventory availability in real time.

Routing orders to merchants' existing OMS (Order Management Systems) and fulfillment systems.

Allowing merchants to remain the legal entity of record for transactions (Merchant of Record).

Among these, the Store Sync product allows merchants' product catalogs to be directly discovered by AI agents such as Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. The next step is expected to integrate with ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

The prerequisite for AI agents to complete transactions lies in the fact that product data, prices, inventory, and fulfillment information must be machine-readable and highly reliable.

From 'Checkout' to 'Agentic Commerce Workflow'

PayPal processes over 1.7 trillion US dollars in payments annually, with more than 142 million active accounts each month. In the traditional model, PayPal's core leverage point occurs at the moment of payment.

Within the Agentic Commerce system, AI systems can perform product discovery, option comparison, and even place orders on behalf of users, while PayPal handles identity verification and payment authorization.

After integrating Cymbio, PayPal now covers the entire chain:

Discovery: Products are recommended and presented within AI agents

Decisioning: Options are progressively narrowed through conversational interaction

Checkout: PayPal completes identity verification and payment

Fulfillment: Orders are directly injected into the merchant’s system for execution

Protocol Debate: Service vs Standard

While PayPal is advancing Agentic Commerce in the form of 'products and services,' Google and Shopify are building a cross-functional, standardized Agentic Commerce protocol system.

The key lies in:

Google is directly embedding UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) into Search and Gemini.

Shopify, on the other hand, ensures that its millions of merchants only need to integrate once to reach multiple AI agents.

This means that the underlying infrastructure of AI commerce is evolving from 'point capabilities' to a 'protocol-based network.'

The goal of UCP is to control the 'routing layer' of AI commerce, rather than directly owning or operating commerce itself.

This is more of a defensive strategy: by making this layer a 'free' public protocol and introducing strong network effects, it prevents any single player from monopolizing the core control of the AI commerce system.

Therefore, PayPal is not competing head-on with UCP but is proactively embedding itself into this system.

Google has made it clear that checkout capabilities based on UCP will support multiple payment service providers, including PayPal and Google Pay.

In other words, UCP aims to become the 'neutral highway,' while PayPal hopes to be an indispensable toll station and payment node on that highway.

OpenAI and Stripe are the main competitors in this field.

As early as September, Stripe and OpenAI announced the launch of Instant Checkout within ChatGPT, which is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).

ACP allows AI agents to proactively initiate purchase requests through structured APIs, with Stripe issuing shared payment tokens to facilitate payment confirmation under agent authorization. This enables AI, once authorized, to complete the entire transaction process on behalf of users from placing orders to making payments.

Stripe then launched the Agentic Commerce Suite in December 2025, allowing merchants to:

Publish product catalogs for direct access by AI agents

Independently choose which AI agents to sell through

Process payments, risk control, and dispute resolution via Stripe

Send order events back to existing business systems

Stripe processed over $1 trillion in payments in 2024, serving millions of businesses worldwide. Its competitive strategy is very clear: to become the 'default wallet' and 'action execution layer' for AI agents—a path highly similar to its earlier role as the default payment API for internet companies.

Against this backdrop, PayPal and Stripe are clearly in direct competition:

What they are competing for is not just the payment itself, but the critical control point when AI agents actually 'execute transactions'.

Comparing the three systems together

(This usually leads to a horizontal comparison among UCP / ACP / PayPal + Cymbio:

Who controls the routing layer, who controls the protocol, who controls the payment and execution of fulfillment - and their respective sources of network effects.)

If you'd like, I can directly organize the next section into a comparison table or a concise summary of the overall competitive landscape, clearly laying out the division of labor and dynamics between the three parties in one go.

Three impacts stand out in particular:

Commercial activities will become conversational and executable by proxy.

Purchasing will no longer be a step-by-step process completed by users clicking through; instead, it will be handled by AI that understands needs during conversations and completes tasks on behalf of users upon authorization.

Merchants 'connect once, distribute everywhere'

Merchants do not need to adapt separately for each platform; they only need to complete one integration, and their products can reach users through multiple AI agents and channels.

Payment will become embedded infrastructure rather than the endpoint of a transaction.

Payment is no longer 'the final button' but a fundamental capability deeply embedded into discovery, decision-making, and fulfillment processes.

Early response from payment networks.

By the way, Mastercard announced in January 2026 that it is studying 'AI commercial rules,' essentially attempting to get ahead by participating in defining the governance framework of this transformation.

Payment networks clearly realize that before AI agents conduct transactions on a large scale, the authority to establish rules and standards will determine future positioning.

As we noted in our analysis in January this year: banks, fintech companies, and the crypto industry must ensure they have 'a seat at the table' rather than being included after the fact.

If financial institutions fail to embed themselves in these platforms in advance, their financial functions may eventually be internalized by Big Tech.

Different camps' situations and choices.

Traditional banks lack the technological infrastructure to compete head-on with Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft in the realm of Agentic Commerce. However, they still hold three key resources: payment clearing channels, customer credit relationships, and compliance and regulatory expertise.

These assets ensure that banks will not disappear, but they must reposition themselves.

Companies like PayPal, Stripe, and Adyen realized early on that merely processing payments is no longer sufficient to secure a long-term position.

As a result, they are proactively moving upstream into commerce orchestration, merchant services, and the infrastructure layer for the AI era.

To date, the published Agentic Commerce protocol systems are almost entirely based on traditional financial pathways, with credit cards, Google Pay, PayPal, and Stripe occupying central positions.

In UCP, ACP, and Store Sync, cryptocurrencies and stablecoins are largely absent, except for some sporadic experiments involving Stripe or Coinbase.

Whether this represents a massive strategic oversight or an intentional exclusion remains to be seen.

For crypto companies, the window of opportunity is clear: if they can build a payment rail natively adapted for AI agents (instant settlement, programmable money, global accessibility) and successfully embed it into AI platforms before the protocols become completely solidified, they could leapfrog over traditional finance. Otherwise, they risk being permanently excluded from the system.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, PayPal is striving to catch up with Stripe and adapt to rapidly evolving consumer behavior.

As people increasingly rely on AI platforms to make everyday decisions, these platforms will gradually become the 'default virtual storefront' for brands.

Whoever can embed themselves in the infrastructure behind these storefronts will remain a key player in the game.

PayPal's stock price has been lackluster for some time, down approximately 37% from its 52-week high. Investors continue to question whether the company will remain structurally relevant in the long term, while the rise of the Crypto + AI narrative has only heightened these concerns.

Against this backdrop, diversifying into Agentic Commerce isn't an offensive move but rather a 'necessary cost' to maintain relevance. For PayPal, this isn't just an added bonus but an unavoidable entry fee: only by making this shift can it hope to remain at the core of the next generation of commercial infrastructure.

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