In a landmark move for digital payments, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and Razorpay have partnered with Microsoft-backed OpenAI to pilot AI-driven UPI payments on ChatGPT, marking a significant step toward agentic AI-powered commerce.
The initiative will allow users to make purchases directly within ChatGPT, leveraging India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) network. This aligns India with global tech leaders such as Google and Perplexity AI, which have launched similar AI-enabled payment systems earlier this year.
According to Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur, agentic payments transform AI assistants from “simple discovery tools into full-fledged shopping agents.” The pilot will test how UPI’s new ‘reserve pay’ feature can be used to empower AI agents to autonomously complete transactions safely and securely, while keeping users in control.
Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank are the pilot’s banking partners, while Bigbasket, owned by the Tata Group, is among the first e-commerce platforms enabling purchases through ChatGPT.
OpenAI’s international strategy head, Oliver Jay, emphasized the collaboration as a milestone in merging advanced AI capabilities with one of the world’s most trusted real-time payment systems. Meanwhile, Razorpay’s competitor Cashfree also announced its own agentic AI payments solution for merchants on the same day, highlighting the sector’s accelerating innovation.
