Now You Can Shop Through ChatGPT: India Pilots AI Payments With NPCI, Razorpay, & OpenAI
India is piloting a first-of-its-kind feature that lets users shop and pay directly through ChatGPT, powered by NPCI’s UPI network in partnership with Razorpay and OpenAI.
ChatGPT Payment: India is taking a significant leap toward the future of AI-driven commerce. In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and fintech leader Razorpay have joined forces with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, to pilot payments directly through the popular AI chatbot.
A New Era Of 'Agentic AI' Payments
The pilot, announced on Thursday, will allow users to make purchases within ChatGPT using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s widely adopted real-time payment system. The idea is simple but revolutionary: users can discover and buy products without ever leaving the chat window.
This concept is powered by “agentic AI,” an emerging form of artificial intelligence designed to act independently and handle tasks like shopping and payments with minimal user intervention. “With agentic payments, we are transforming AI assistants from simple discovery tools into full-fledged shopping agents,” said Harshil Mathur, CEO of Razorpay.
Testing The Waters For AI-Commerce Integration
The NPCI-Razorpay-OpenAI collaboration aims to assess how such AI-based transactions could scale across industries. The pilot will specifically test how UPI can securely empower AI systems to process payments “on behalf of users in a safe, secure, and user-controlled manner,” according to the joint statement.
To facilitate this, the pilot will leverage UPI’s new ‘reserve pay’ feature, which lets users earmark specific funds for selected merchants. This innovation could make conversational commerce through AI not just convenient but also highly controlled and transparent.
Early Partners And Industry Momentum
Major banking players like Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank have come on board as key partners for the project. Meanwhile, Tata Group’s Bigbasket has become one of the first e-commerce platforms to enable purchases through ChatGPT, signalling how traditional online shopping could soon merge seamlessly with AI-driven assistance.
“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,” said Oliver Jay, managing director of international strategy at OpenAI.
The experiment comes as global tech giants like Google and Perplexity AI roll out similar AI-enabled payment systems. Even as the pilot unfolds, the ripple effect is already visible; rival fintech Cashfree has also announced the launch of its own agentic AI payments solution for merchants.
With UPI processing over 20 billion transactions every month, India’s experiment with AI-led commerce could set the stage for a new era of conversational payments, where talking to a chatbot might just be the easiest way to shop.
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