India’s payment authority National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and fintech firm Razorpay have collaborated with OpenAI to launch AI-driven payments on ChatGPT. This initiative, which is in its pilot state, will enable people to make payments on ChatGPT via India’s homegrown payments network Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Agentic AI payments like this allows users to complete transactions without leaving the AI platforms. “With agentic payments, we are transforming AI assistants from simple discovery tools into full-fledged shopping agents,” said Harshil Mathur, CEO of Razorpay.
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The 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.
Banking partners for the pilot include Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank. Tata-owned e-commerce platform BigBasket is among the first platforms to allow shopping using the AI platform. “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.
Other AI companies, like Google and Perplexity had also launched their versions of AI-enabled payment services earlier this year. Google had launched the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol developed with leading payments and technology companies to securely initiate and transact agent-led payments across platforms.
With this, the company established a payment-agnostic framework for users, merchants, and payments providers to transact with confidence across all types of payment methods. Google collaborated with a diverse group of organizations for this, including American Express, Coinbase, Etsy, Mastercard, Paypal, and Salesforce.
Perplexity partnered with Paypal to enable direct purchases within its chat interface. Through the partnership, users will be able to check out instantly with PayPal or Venmo when they ask Perplexity Pro to find products, book travel or buy tickets.
OpenAI also recently launched a shopping system that allows ChatGPT users to make Etsy, and soon Shopify purchases through conversations. Its “Instant Checkout” feature available to ChatGPT Pro, Plus, and Free logged-in users, allows the purchase of products from U.S.-based Etsy sellers with more than one million Shopify merchants like Glossier, Skims, Spanx, and Vuori “coming soon.” This development places OpenAI in competition with search engines like Google, and e-commerce platforms like Amazon.