How AI Agents Pay: Checkout in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode — Sam Parsons, PayPal

Your next customer might check out without ever visiting your site. Here's how the payment actually works. Sam Parsons, senior staff engineer at PayPal working on PayPal Enterprise Payments (formerly Braintree), walks through three ways merchants can accept payments initiated by AI agents. First, Instant Checkout in ChatGPT with the Agentic Commerce Protocol and a merchant-built MCP app. Second, Google AI Mode with the Universal Commerce Protocol and Google Pay, where merchants only stand up endpoints. Third, an MCP app with an external checkout page that gives full control. He demos each flow, explains how tokenization keeps card details out of the agent and the merchant's PCI scope, shows the integration points, and covers how tokens are limited by merchant, amount, currency and expiry. In this talk: • How the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ChatGPT) and Universal Commerce Protocol (Google) compare • What MCP apps are, and how merchants control the UI inside agents • How tokenization and constrained tokens keep agent payments safe • Trade-offs between in-agent checkout and an external checkout handoff SPEAKER Sam Parsons, Senior Staff Software Engineer, PayPal Enterprise Payments (Braintree) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjparsons/ Website: https://sjparsons.com/ LINKS PayPal Agent Ready overview: https://docs.paypal.ai/growth/agentic-commerce/agent-ready/overview Agentic Commerce Protocol integration: https://docs.paypal.ai/growth/agentic-commerce/agent-ready/agentic-commerce-protocol-integration Universal Commerce Protocol integration: https://docs.paypal.ai/growth/agentic-commerce/agent-ready/universal-commerce-protocol-integration Braintree docs: https://developer.paypal.com/braintree/docs CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:37 PayPal Enterprise Payments (formerly Braintree) 1:07 Three paths to agentic payments 2:07 Instant Checkout in ChatGPT (ACP) 3:06 The checkout flow 4:51 Demo: booking a hotel in ChatGPT 6:00 What tokenization does 7:00 Integration points 8:00 How the tokens are constrained 8:30 Google AI Mode (UCP) 9:54 No UI to build, just endpoints 11:14 Path three: MCP app with external checkout 12:09 Demo: checkout from Claude 13:23 Coming soon: elicitation 13:38 Choosing a path Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #AgenticCommerce #Payments #AIEngineer