Klarna's Agentic Shift: When AI Goes Shopping, KLAR Will be the Guide

Klarna Group plc KLAR recently made a big move into the future of shopping by unveiling its Agentic Product Protocol, an open standard that lets artificial intelligence agents instantly find and understand products online. Instead of siloed catalogs and incompatible data formats, Klarna’s protocol creates a common language for AI systems to read product information, prices, stock levels and descriptions from across the web.

At its core, the protocol gives AI assistants access to a live, structured feed containing over 100 million products and 400 million prices across 12 markets, all normalized for agents. Merchants connect once via Klarna’s API, and their offerings become discoverable to any supported AI without reformatting listings, whether the data comes from Google Merchant, Shopify, Amazon, Facebook, or even CSV/JSON files.

This is important because AI is rapidly becoming the first place people go to ask what they can buy or where they can find the best price. But most systems struggle with fragmented product data. Klarna’s protocol gives them a single, standardized way in, making comparison, recommendation and discovery far smoother.

For buy now, pay later service provider Klarna, this is not just a tech flex; it positions the company as infrastructure for the AI-powered commerce era. By shaping how products are surfaced and understood by intelligent assistants, Klarna can deepen its role between shoppers, merchants and AI platforms, potentially boosting transactions through its network and strengthening long-term growth.

This builds on recent moves such as launching its own stablecoin, KlarnaUSD and partnering with Privy to co-develop a simple, secure crypto wallet, steps that should further embed Klarna into everyday shopping journeys.

Peers Flexing Tech Muscle

Among Klarna’s peers, PayPal Holdings, Inc. PYPL has already moved aggressively into stablecoins to stay competitive in digital payments. It launched PayPal USD (PYUSD), an Ethereum-based stablecoin that lets users buy, sell, and transfer tokens within PayPal and to select external wallets. Visa Inc. V is also investing heavily in stablecoin infrastructure, setting up a dedicated Stablecoins Advisory Practice and running multiple pilots. Last month, Visa introduced a program enabling instant USD-backed stablecoin payouts via Visa Direct, allowing creators and gig workers to receive earnings directly into crypto wallets. These underscore accelerating institutional adoption of blockchain-based settlement across payment networks worldwide.

Klarna’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Shares of Klarna have declined 13.3% over the past month, underperforming the broader industry’s 6.3% growth.

From a valuation standpoint, Klarna trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 66.17X, higher than the industry average of 21X. Klarna carries a Value Score of D.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Klarna’s 2025 bottom line is pegged at a loss of 57 cents per share, followed by 188.5% improvement next year.

The stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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