India has kicked off a pilot to let consumers shop and pay directly through AI chatbots, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT leading the rollout and integrations with Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude in development, as the South Asian nation becomes the next major market for global AI companies.
On Thursday, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the federal body behind the country’s widely used Unified Payments Interface (UPI), partnered with OpenAI and fintech firm Razorpay to enable consumers to shop and pay directly through ChatGPT. Razorpay confirmed to TechCrunch that the pilot is being rolled out nationwide and will become widely available in the coming months.
The experience is built on UPI Reserve Pay — a new NPCI protocol that allows users to block a specific amount of funds for future debits to designated merchants — and UPI Circle, a solution that delegates UPI authentication, enabling payments to be completed directly within ChatGPT without switching to external apps or websites. Razorpay has developed the merchant integration layer that allows businesses to transact through AI chatbots.
Tata Group-owned online grocer Bigbasket and telecom operator Vi are the initial merchant partners for the new pilot, allowing customers to shop for groceries or purchase mobile recharge plans directly through ChatGPT. Additionally, Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank are powering the banking layer.
India, the world’s most populous nation and home to over a billion internet subscribers, is already one of OpenAI’s top markets for ChatGPT. OpenAI has been looking to grow its footprint in the country, launching a sub-$5 ChatGPT Go plan in August to attract more subscribers. The commerce pilot is part of its broader push to deepen engagement and tap into India’s rapidly expanding digital economy.
“It’s not just a payment experience,” said Razorpay co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur, in an interview. “It’s a whole new discovery and commerce experience.”
UPI is already a massive success in India, powering over 20 billion transactions each month and serving as the country’s leading digital payments channel. Still, the new AI-led experience could help NPCI drive further adoption by embedding UPI into everyday commerce if consumers embrace chatbots as a new interface for shopping.
Mathur told TechCrunch that the company has also completed a proof-of-concept for the new agentic payment experience with Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. These integrations will go live for consumers in a few weeks, he said.
Razorpay is also in talks with merchants other than Bigbasket and Vi and is expecting a broader rollout in the next couple of months, Mathur said.
Like OpenAI, both Google and Anthropic are seeing a surge of new users from India. While Google already has a deep local presence — with mass-market products like Android, Search, and YouTube — OpenAI and Anthropic are now taking steps to establish a footprint in the country as they work to localize their AI offerings for Indian users.
India’s current plan with agentic payments does not involve any specific revenue-sharing model for partners involved. However, the move would help AI companies including OpenAI achieve greater user retention.
Mathur confirmed to TechCrunch that AI companies will not get access to the payment data under the new setup, and users will pre-authorize the amount transacted through chatbots through two-factor authentication.
Last month, OpenAI introduced an “Instant Checkout” experience and its Agentic Commerce Protocol, developed in partnership with Stripe, to help businesses and merchants connect with consumers using AI agents. Similarly, Google launched its Agent Payments Protocol to enable AI agents to make transactions on behalf of users.
“This is still an early, forward-looking concept, but one with tremendous potential. Its adoption will naturally grow in line with how fast shopping agents take off,” Reeju Datta, co-founder of Cashfree Payments, told TechCrunch.
In addition to Razorpay, online merchant payments startup Cashfree Payments has launched its Agentic Payments MCP that can help merchants enable payments directly through their shopping agents. Cashfree’s solution supports all major payment methods including cards and UPI. However, in the case of Cashfree, merchants need to develop shopping agents on their own to integrate them with MCP.
The startup demonstrated the experience through a video showing a chatbot enabling users to buy an iPhone.
Datta declined to name the initial merchants working on the agentic shopping experience, saying only, “we are exploring this with a few large enterprise merchants across categories like e-commerce and lending.”
