In a significant advancement for digital commerce, PayPal and Google Cloud announced the launch of a new agentic commerce solution designed to enable merchants to deliver personalized, conversational shopping experiences across their digital surfaces. This joint offering brings together Google Cloud’s Conversational Commerce Agent with PayPal’s payments capabilities, allowing merchants to deploy rich, AI-driven commerce interactions while retaining full control over the agent’s brand tone, appearance, and customer relationship.
“With modern consumers demanding seamless, personalized shopping journeys from initial product discovery all the way to purchase, and with the rise of agentic AI, merchants now have an opportunity to deliver a truly assistive and cohesive experience across every touchpoint,” said Rohit Bhat, General Manager & Managing Director at Google Cloud.
“PayPal and Google Cloud are thrilled to bring agentic shopping experiences to life,” said Brian Peters, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships & Innovation at PayPal.
How the Solution Works
Merchants may adopt Google Cloud’s Conversational Commerce Agent or develop their own agents using Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK). The merchant agent engages with shoppers in natural, human-like conversations understanding complex queries, recommending relevant products, answering follow-up questions, and guiding the shopper from intent to purchase. Simultaneously, PayPal’s Agent connects securely via the open Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol with the merchant’s agent, and integrates with the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a payments layer built on top of A2A and Google’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), to provide trust, accountability and fraud controls.
In practice, when a shopper is ready to check out, the merchant’s commerce agent engages the PayPal Agent, which can surface payment-method recommendations and assess “buy now, pay later” eligibility. With the shopper’s consent, the merchant’s agent authorizes the transaction on a trusted surface with user intent clearly bound to the purchase. The architecture supports secure and verifiable digital credentials as part of the mandate-based framework for agent-led payments.
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Consumer Trust and Merchant Control at the Core
Trust, security and merchant control are foundational elements of the offering. The AP2 protocol is payment-method agnostic and designed in collaboration with more than 100 industry partners, enabling a common, secure language for AI agents to transact on behalf of users. AP2 introduces cryptographically signed “mandates” (Cart Mandate, Payment Mandate) that anchor user intent, ensure verifiability and establish an audit trail for agent-initiated transactions.
By leveraging open protocols such as A2A and AP2, PayPal and Google Cloud are offering merchants an out-of-the-box solution that significantly reduces the complexity of building agentic commerce infrastructure. At the same time, merchants retain ownership of the customer relationship, experience design and brand identity.
Implications for Merchants
The new agentic solution empowers merchants to:
- Rapidly deploy conversational commerce experiences on their own digital surfaces.
- Use AI-driven agents to engage consumers throughout the shopping journey from discovery to checkout.
- Maintain full brand control while tapping into PayPal’s payments infrastructure and Google Cloud’s AI and commerce-agent capabilities.
- Build trust across agents, merchants and payments channels via open, verifiable protocols and standards.