Perplexity announces its own take on an AI shopping assistant (www.engadget.com)

Perplexity has launched a US-only shopping feature that lets its AI assistant perform context-aware product searches and complete purchases using PayPal. Free to Perplexity users, the assistant maintains chat context and personal details (e.g., climate, commute) to tailor recommendations, surfaces results as formatted product cards with pros/cons and review-guided details, and offers an "Instant Buy" checkout that charges payment details stored in a user’s PayPal account. The checkout works with any merchant that accepts PayPal, and Perplexity says merchants still retain visibility into customers, returns processing, loyalty, and post-purchase relationships. The move signals a push toward fully integrated, end-to-end shopping agents that combine retrieval, synthesis of reviews/guides, and embedded payments — a trend also seen in ChatGPT and Google’s recent shopping features. For the AI/ML community this raises practical engineering and trust questions: how to keep long-lived user context private and accurate, how to extract reliable product pros/cons from noisy reviews, and how to integrate payment flows securely. It also highlights growing commercial incentives (referral/transaction fees) for model-driven recommendations and regulatory/legal friction — Perplexity previously received a cease-and-desist from Amazon after its Comet browser completed Amazon purchases on users’ behalf.