India’s National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and fintech firm Razorpay have teamed up with OpenAI to introduce AI-powered payments through ChatGPT, the companies said on Thursday. The initiative is currently in its pilot phase and will allow users to make purchases directly within ChatGPT using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s homegrown digital payment system.

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.

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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.

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"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.

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