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 transactions but part of an embedded infrastructure. This article uses PayPal's acquisition of Cymbio as a starting point to outline the new competitive landscape under the rise of Agentic Commerce: Google and Shopify are attempting 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 the 'payment button' to a key node in 'business workflow.'
For fintech companies like PayPal and Stripe, whether they can embed AI's underlying protocols in their business will determine if they can continue to stay at the table; for banks and the crypto industry, the window of opportunity is equally brief.
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Last week, PayPal acquired Cymbio, a platform that helps merchants complete sales across various AI interfaces, supported channels include Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. Market sources estimate the deal is worth between $150 million and $200 million. The outside world generally believes this is a key strategic move by PayPal to maintain competitiveness in the field of Agentic Commerce.
Thus, as AI agents compress and reconstruct the traditional e-commerce funnel, PayPal is transitioning from a typical Web2 payment tool to more upstream and core business processes like product discovery, catalog distribution, and order orchestration. This shift almost completely validates our analysis from this January regarding exponential growth, power law effects, and increasing returns to scale in Agentic Commerce.
At the same time, the industry's infrastructure is rapidly taking shape:
Google and Shopify are driving the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP);
OpenAI and Stripe are jointly advancing the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP);
Microsoft has embedded settlement capabilities directly into Copilot.
Shopping infrastructure centered around 'machines' rather than 'human users' is being rewritten at an unprecedented speed. Agentic Commerce is manifesting exponential growth expectations in a real-world manner. The forecasts given by all 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 market penetration rate of 10%-20%.
Bain predicts that by 2030, the market size of Agentic Commerce will reach between $300 billion and $500 billion, accounting for approximately 15%-25% of total online retail.
Existing data indicates that we are at the inflection point of exponential growth: by November 2025, 23% of U.S. consumers will have made a purchase using AI.
Cymbio may become PayPal's 'intermediate layer' in AI commerce
For PayPal, Cymbio's potential positioning is as an intermediary infrastructure layer within the AI commerce system. Its core value propositions include:
Synchronize product catalogs between different markets and channels
Real-time management of inventory availability
Route orders to merchants' existing OMS (Order Management Systems) and fulfillment systems
Allow merchants to continue as the legal entity for transactions (Merchant of Record)
Among them, the Store Sync product allows merchants' product catalogs to be discovered directly by AI agents like Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, with plans to connect to ChatGPT and Google Gemini next.
The reason AI agents can complete transactions is that product data, prices, inventory, and fulfillment information must be machine-readable and highly reliable.
From 'Checkout' to 'Agentic Commerce Workflow'
PayPal processes a total payment volume of over $17 trillion annually, with more than 142 million active accounts. In a traditional model, PayPal's core leverage point is at the moment the payment occurs.
In the Agentic Commerce system, AI systems can execute product discovery, plan comparison, and even place orders directly on behalf of users, while PayPal handles identity verification and payment authorization.
After integrating Cymbio, PayPal has covered the entire link:
Discovery: Products are recommended and presented within AI agents
Decisioning: Continuously narrowing options through conversational interaction
Checkout: Authentication and payment completed by PayPal
Fulfillment: Orders are directly injected into merchants’ systems for execution
Protocol conflict: Services 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 is:
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 'protocol networks.'
The goal of UCP is to control the 'routing layer' of AI commerce, rather than directly owning or operating the business itself.
This is more like 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.
Therefore, PayPal is not competing directly with UCP but is actively embedding itself in 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 the indispensable toll station 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 actively initiate purchase requests through structured APIs, with Stripe issuing shared payment tokens to enable payment confirmations under agent authorization. This allows AI, once authorized, to complete the entire transaction process from ordering to payment on behalf of users.
Stripe subsequently launched the Agentic Commerce Suite in December 2025, allowing merchants to:
Release product catalog for direct access by AI agents
Autonomously choose which AI agents to sell through
Process payments, risk control, and dispute resolution through Stripe
Return order events to existing business systems
Stripe is projected to handle 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 payments themselves, but the key control points when AI agents actually 'execute transactions.'
Comparing the three systems together
(This usually leads to a horizontal comparison of UCP / ACP / PayPal + Cymbio:
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 directly help you organize the next section into a comparison table or a highly summarized 'pattern judgment,' clarifying the roles and games of the three parties all at once.
Key Takeaways
Three points stand out particularly:
Commercial behavior will become conversational and can be executed by agents
Purchasing is no longer a step-by-step process completed by users, but is understood by AI in conversation and completed on behalf of the user with authorization.
Merchants 'access once, distribute everywhere'
Merchants do not need to adapt to each platform separately; they only need to complete one integration for products to reach users through multiple AI agents and channels.
Payments will become embedded infrastructure, no longer just the endpoint of a transaction
Payments are no longer the 'last step button,' but a foundational capability deeply embedded in the discovery, decision-making, and fulfillment processes.
Proactive responses 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: before AI agents complete transactions on a large scale, the authority to establish rules and standards will determine their future position.
As we pointed out in our analysis this January: 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 early on, their financial functions may ultimately be internalized by Big Tech.
The situations and choices of different factions
For Banks
Traditional banks lack the technological infrastructure to compete head-to-head with Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft at the Agentic Commerce level. However, they still hold three key resources: payment clearing channels, customer credit relationships, and compliance and regulatory experience.
These assets ensure 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 a long-term position.
Thus, they are actively moving upstream to enter: commerce orchestration, merchant services, and the infrastructure layer of the AI era
For Crypto
The Agentic Commerce protocol system released so far is almost entirely along 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 some sporadic experiments involving Stripe or Coinbase.
Whether this is a huge strategic oversight or a deliberate exclusion remains to be seen.
For crypto companies, the opportunity window is very clear: if they can build payment tracks natively adapted to AI agents (instant settlement, programmable currency, global reach), and successfully embed themselves in AI platforms before the protocol is solidified, they may achieve a leapfrogging of traditional finance; conversely, they risk being permanently excluded from the system.
Conclusion
Fundamentally, PayPal is striving to catch up with Stripe and adapt to rapidly changing consumer behaviors.
As people increasingly make everyday life decisions within AI platforms, these platforms will gradually evolve into brands' 'default virtual showcases.'
Whoever can embed the infrastructure behind these showcases can stay at the table.
PayPal's stock price has been sluggish for a while, down about 37% from its 52-week high. Investors continually question whether this company still has 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 offensive choice, but a 'necessary cost' to maintain relevance. For PayPal, this is not just an added benefit, but a mandatory entry fee: only by completing this shift can it possibly remain at the core of the next generation of commercial infrastructure.#支付系统 #Paypal $BTC $ETH
