How much time does PayPal have left when AI takes over the "shopping path"?

Original Title: AI: PayPal's $200M Wake-Up Call in AI Commerce
Original Author: LUKE SPILL, FintechBlueprint
Translation: Peggy, BlockBeats

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

For fintech companies like PayPal and Stripe, the ability to embed AI's underlying protocols in commerce will determine whether they can continue to sit at the table; for banks and the crypto industry, the window of opportunity is equally short.

Here is the original text:

Last week, PayPal acquired Cymbio, a platform that helps merchants complete sales across various AI interfaces, including Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. Market insiders estimate the deal to be worth between $150 million and $200 million. It is widely believed that this is a key strategic move by PayPal to maintain competitiveness in the field of Agentic Commerce.

As AI agents continue to compress and reconstruct the traditional e-commerce funnel, PayPal is transitioning from a typical Web2 payment tool to more upstream and core business processes such as product discovery, catalog distribution, and order orchestration. This shift almost completely 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 is embedding settlement capabilities directly into Copilot.

The shopping infrastructure centered around "machines" rather than "human users" is being rewritten at an unprecedented pace. Agentic Commerce is fulfilling the expectations of exponential growth in a real-world manner. Predictions from various parties are both astonishing and increasingly convergent:

McKinsey predicts that by the end of this decade, Agentic Commerce is expected to generate $1 trillion in revenue in the U.S. retail market, accounting for about one-third of all online retail sales.

Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2030, Agentic Commerce will drive U.S. e-commerce spending to between $190 billion and $385 billion, corresponding to a 10%–20% market penetration rate.

Bain predicts that by 2030, the market size of Agentic Commerce will reach between $300 billion and $500 billion, accounting for about 15%–25% of total online retail.

Existing adoption data indicates that we are at the inflection point of an exponential growth curve: by November 2025, 23% of U.S. consumers will have made a purchase using AI.

Cymbio May Become PayPal's "Middle Layer" in AI Commerce

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

• Synchronizing product catalogs across different markets and channels
• Real-time management of inventory availability
• Routing orders to merchants' existing OMS (Order Management System) and fulfillment systems
• Allowing merchants to continue as the legal entity of the transaction (Merchant of Record)

Among these, the Store Sync product allows merchants' product catalogs to be directly discovered by AI agents like Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, with plans to integrate ChatGPT and Google Gemini next.
The ability of AI agents to complete transactions hinges on the requirement that product data, pricing, inventory, and fulfillment information must be machine-readable and highly reliable.

From "Checkout" to "Agentic Commerce Workflow"

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

In the Agentic Commerce system, AI systems can complete product discovery, option comparison, and even place orders on behalf of users, while PayPal is responsible for identity verification and payment authorization.

After integrating Cymbio, PayPal covers the entire link:

• Discovery: Products are recommended and presented within AI agents
• Decisioning: Options are continuously narrowed through conversational interactions
• Checkout: PayPal completes identity verification and payment
• Fulfillment: Orders are directly injected into the merchant's system for execution

Protocol Wars: Service vs. Standards

As PayPal advances Agentic Commerce in the form of "products and services," Google and Shopify are building a cross-functional, standardized Agentic Commerce protocol system.

The key points are:

• Google is embedding UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) directly into Search and Gemini
• Shopify 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 "single-point capabilities" to "protocolized networks."

The goal of UCP is to control the "routing layer" of AI commerce, rather than directly owning or operating the commerce itself.
This is more of a defensive layout: by making this layer a "free" public protocol and introducing strong network effects, it prevents any single competitor from monopolizing the core control of the AI commerce system.

Thus, PayPal is not directly competing with UCP but is actively embedding itself within this system.
Google has made it clear that the checkout capabilities based on UCP will support multiple payment service providers, including PayPal and Google Pay.

In other words, UCP aims to become a "neutral highway," while PayPal hopes to be an indispensable toll booth and payment node on this highway.

OpenAI and Stripe are the main competitors in this field.
As early as September, Stripe and OpenAI announced the launch of Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, supported by the underlying Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).

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

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

• Publish product catalogs for direct access by AI agents
• Choose which AI agents to sell through
• Process payments, risk control, and dispute resolution through Stripe
• Relay 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—similar to its path of becoming the default payment API for internet companies.

In this context, PayPal and Stripe are clearly in direct confrontation:
What both are competing for is not just payment itself, but the key control points when AI agents actually "execute transactions."

Comparing the Three Systems Together

(Here, a horizontal comparison of UCP / ACP / PayPal + Cymbio usually occurs:
Who controls the routing layer, who controls the protocol, who controls payment and fulfillment execution—and the sources of their respective network effects.)

If you wish, I can help you organize the next section into a comparison table or a highly summarized "landscape judgment," clearly stating the roles and games of the three parties.

Key Takeaways

Three points stand out:

• Commercial behavior will become conversational and can be executed by agents
  Purchasing will no longer be a process completed by users through incremental clicks, but rather understood by AI in conversations and completed on their behalf with authorization.

• Merchants "integrate once, distribute everywhere"
  Merchants do not need to adapt for each platform individually; they only need to complete one integration for their products to reach users through multiple AI agents and channels.

• Payment will become embedded infrastructure, no longer the endpoint of transactions
  Payment will no longer be "the last step button," but a foundational capability deeply embedded in discovery, decision-making, and fulfillment processes.

Proactive Response from Payment Networks

By the way, Mastercard announced in January 2026 that it is researching "AI business rules," essentially trying to get ahead and participate in defining the governance framework during this transformation.
Payment networks clearly realize that before AI agents complete transactions on a large scale, the authority to set rules and standards will determine future positioning.

As we pointed out in our analysis in January this year: banks, fintech companies, and the crypto industry must ensure they are "at the table," rather than being included afterward.

If financial institutions cannot embed themselves in these platforms in advance, their financial functions may ultimately be internalized by Big Tech.

The Situation and Choices of Different Camps

For Banks

Traditional banks lack the technical infrastructure to compete directly with Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft at the Agentic Commerce level. However, they still possess three key resources: payment clearing channels, customer credit relationships, and compliance and regulatory experience.

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

For Fintechs

Companies like PayPal, Stripe, and Adyen realized early on that merely doing payments is no longer sufficient to solidify their long-term position.

Therefore, they are proactively moving upstream into: commerce orchestration, merchant services, and the infrastructure layer of the AI era.

For Crypto

So far, the announced Agentic Commerce protocol system is almost entirely based on traditional financial paths: credit cards, Google Pay, PayPal, Stripe, etc., occupy core positions.

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

Whether this is a significant strategic oversight or an intentional exclusion remains to be seen.

For crypto companies, the opportunity window is very clear: if they can build payment tracks that are natively compatible with AI agents (instant settlement, programmable currency, global reach) and successfully embed themselves in AI platforms before the protocols are solidified, they could achieve a leapfrog over traditional finance; conversely, they may be permanently excluded from the system.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, PayPal is striving to catch up with Stripe and adapt to rapidly changing consumer behavior.
As people increasingly make daily life decisions within AI platforms, these platforms will gradually evolve into brands' "default virtual storefronts."

Whoever can embed the infrastructure behind these storefronts will continue to stay at the table.

PayPal's stock price has been sluggish for some time, down about 37% from its 52-week high. Investors continually question whether the company still possesses structural relevance in the long term, and the rise of the Crypto + AI narrative has only intensified these concerns.

In this context, the diversified layout around Agentic Commerce is not an aggressive choice but a "necessary cost" to maintain relevance. For PayPal, this is not a luxury but a mandatory entry fee: only by completing this shift can it continue to remain at the core of the next generation of business infrastructure.