The news: PayPal’s Honey browser extension will start recommending products based on users’ conversations with chatbots, per a press release.

Here’s how it works: When users ask chatbots to recommend different products, Honey will find the products that the chatbot surfaces across different platforms so that users can compare prices and deals.

The feature is “AI service agnostic,” a spokesperson told EMARKETER. Users cannot ask the chatbot to buy things for them through Honey; rather, the feature finds the chatbot’s recommendations at different retailers on the web.

At launch, users will have to follow Honey’s link to the merchant’s website to complete the transaction. However, the PayPal spokesperson said the feature will soon include a built-in “Buy with PayPal” button so that consumers can go directly from product discovery to checkout.

Why this matters: The race is on to capture volume from genAI product queries.

Consumers are rapidly warming to AI-based product discovery. Eighteen percent of consumers called genAI their “preferred source for purchase recommendations”—outranking social media, search engines, and retailers’ own websites.

As chatbot product discovery bleeds into agentic commerce transactions, payment providers are rushing to ensure they’re not disintermediated or left behind.

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched the in-chat checkout function on Monday, in partnership with Stripe.
• PayPal has its own in-chat project with Perplexity.
• Visa and Mastercard are also trying to crack the agentic commerce code.

Our take: PayPal’s chatbot-agnostic approach to genAI commerce will be a smart play for expanding Honey’s reach and association with the burgeoning agentic commerce industry, which could make it an even more valuable partner for AI platforms down the pike.

• Consumers don’t trust AI to make purchases for them. By keeping the selection and checkout processes squarely in the province of the user, Honey gets to reap the benefits of the rise in AI-enabled product discovery without the associated risks of agentic commerce.
• Relying on the Honey browser extension rather than striking individual partnerships with each major AI platform is also a far more expedient pathway to broaden Honey’s reach across AI-based shopping—though it does require shoppers to already be Honey members and have downloaded the Honey browser extension.