India’s payments authority, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), is rolling out a pilot plan to enable AI-driven payments for e-commerce on ChatGPT in collaboration with OpenAI and the country’s top fintech firm Razorpay.
The initiative, announced by the companies on Thursday, will employ India’s homegrown payments network Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to allow users to make purchases on ChatGPT.
UPI, India’s leading fast payments network, processes over 20 billion transactions every month. Key to its popularity is its ease of use and ability to instantly transfer funds between two bank accounts.
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Indian authorities say the UPI infrastructure “is now the world’s largest retail fast payment system”, processing more payments than credit and debit cards combined in the country.
India’s pilot will evaluate how the service can be expanded across verticals and how UPI can be used to enable AI agents with payment credentials “to autonomously complete transactions on behalf of users in a safe, secure, and user-controlled manner,” Razorpay and OpenAI said in a statement.
The service will use UPI’s newly launched ‘reserve pay’ feature, which allows users to reserve funds for specific merchants. Tata Group-owned online grocery shopping platform Bigbasket will be among the first platforms to allow customers to shop through ChatGPT.
“We’re excited to work with NPCI and explore how we can combine advanced AI with UPI, one of the world’s most trusted real-time payment networks,” Oliver Jay, managing director of international strategy at OpenAI, said.
The move follows leading AI companies, including Alphabet’s Google and Perplexity AI, launching their versions of AI-enabled payment services earlier this year.
Agentic AI payments enable users to complete transactions without leaving the AI platforms. Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence models that require minimal human intervention to complete tasks.
“With agentic payments, we are transforming AI assistants from simple discovery tools into full-fledged shopping agents,” Harshil Mathur, CEO of Razorpay, said.
Cashfree, Razorpay’s key rival in India, also said on Thursday that it has launched its agentic AI payments solution for merchants.
- Reuters, with additional editing and inputs from Vishakha Saxena
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