Perplexity says its AI personal shopper ‘puts you first’

Perplexity is ramping up its AI shopping experience going into the holiday season, just like OpenAI and Google, with a free AI-powered shopping feature that is available now to US users. Its AI assistant looks similar to what we’ve seen from ChatGPT’s shopping research, as users type in what they’re looking for and refine the results with follow-up questions. The recommended products show up as cards with specs and reviews, and users can buy products directly through Perplexity from merchants that support PayPal.

If you ask for a jacket to wear on your commute by ferry across the Bay to San Francisco, Perplexity says the chatbot will remember this past interaction to inform its recommendation when you later ask for boots. It’s available now on the desktop and web, with mobile access via iOS and Android due in “the coming weeks.”

Perplexity says its “Instant Buy” partnership with PayPal allows merchants to stay in the retail loop and build relationships with customers, “just as they would on their own sites,” perhaps as a way to address what The Verge EIC Nilay Patel has described as “the DoorDash problem.”

Perplexity’s announcement post takes digs at search bars that it says “fail at exploration” and editorial outlets that “prioritize affiliate revenue over matching readers to the exact products they’ll love” (maybe you could take a look at our Black Friday guide and see how it measures up?). Online shopping, Perplexity says, tends to focus on speedy checkouts, “not the joy” of shopping. Instead, Perplexity says its AI assistants, also called agents by other companies, “understand intent, remember preferences, and act as extensions of how users would approach a task on their own.”