India rolls out pilot for e-commerce payments via ChatGPT

(Reuters) -India's payments authority National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and fintech firm Razorpay have collaborated with Microsoft-backed OpenAI to launch AI-driven payments on ChatGPT, the companies said on Thursday. The initiative, currently in the pilot stage, will allow users to make purchases on ChatGPT, facilitated by India's homegrown payments network Unified Payments Interface (UPI). 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," said Harshil Mathur, CEO of Razorpay. 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," the companies said in a statement. The service will use UPI's newly launched 'reserve pay' feature, which allows users to reserve funds for specific merchants. UPI, India's leading fast payments network, processes over 20 billion transactions every month. Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank are the banking partners for the pilot, and Tata Group-owned e-commerce platform Bigbasket is 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. Cashfree, Razorpay's local rival, also said on Thursday that it has launched its agentic AI payments solution for merchants. (Reporting by Ashwin Manikandan in Mumbai and Kashish Tandon in Bengaluru; Editing by Sumana Nandy, Mrigank Dhaniwala and Eileen Soreng)

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