Perplexity announces its own take on an AI shopping assistant

Perplexity is rolling out a new shopping feature to make buying things through its AI assistant easier and more personalized. The company’s new feature is free for all Perplexity users in the US and builds on Perplexity’s existing relationship with payment provider Paypal.

The new shopping experience lets Perplexity users conduct more personalized product searches, like asking “What’s the best winter jacket if I live in San Francisco and take a ferry to work?” Perplexity says its assistant can keep the context of your chat in mind as it searches for products, and incorporate details it’s learned about your life and preferences to tailor results. Once the assistant has found products it wants to show you, it can then present them in nicely formatted product cards, with pros and cons about each jacket, for example, and other relevant details pulled from reviews and guides.

If one of the products Perplexity finds seems like the right fit, you can also purchase the product directly through the company’s assistant, and pay with payment details stored in a PayPal account. This “Instant Buy” experience provided by Perplexity and PayPal extends to all merchants who offer PayPal as a payment method. While that sounds like it could make a key element of the shopping experience obsolete for these online stores (you never actually visit their website), Perplexity claims merchants still own the most important parts. “They have full visibility into who their customer is, can process returns, build loyalty, and own the post-purchase relationship, just as they would on their own sites,” the AI company says.

Perplexity’s push into online shopping is similar to the “shopping research” feature OpenAI recently added to ChatGPT, and new product recommendation features Google’s added to AI Mode in Google Search. While all these tools are pitched as a more personalized alternative to the shopping guides you’ll find on Engadget and other editorial sites, they often work under the same logic. By referring someone to a product, AI companies hope to receive a payment or a fee from the transaction if the person makes a purchase.

Ultimately, Perplexity is equally interested in offering an end-to-end solution, where it finds and purchases products without a human needing to step in. The company received a cease-and-desist from Amazon at the beginning of November for letting the agent in its Comet browser complete Amazon purchases on users’ behalf.