India pilots AI chatbot-led e-commerce with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude in the mix (techcrunch.com)

India has launched a nationwide pilot that lets consumers shop and pay directly through AI chatbots, led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude integrations coming soon. The program is a partnership between the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), OpenAI and fintech Razorpay, and uses NPCI’s new UPI Reserve Pay (which pre‑blocks funds for future debits) together with UPI Circle (which delegates UPI authentication) so transactions can complete inside the chat interface without switching apps. Razorpay built the merchant integration layer; initial partners include Bigbasket and telecom Vi, with Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank powering the banking layer. Razorpay says users will pre‑authorize amounts and authenticate with two‑factor methods, and AI vendors will not get access to raw payment data. For the AI/ML community this is a major real‑world test of “agentic” commerce: enabling models to discover, recommend and execute purchases end‑to‑end. It ties large language models directly into high‑frequency payments infrastructure (UPI handles ~20 billion monthly transactions), raising questions and opportunities around UX, safety, latency, data minimization, and standardized agent payment protocols (OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, Google’s Agent Payments, and vendors like Cashfree are already building compatible solutions). If adopted, conversational agents could become a primary shopping interface—boosting engagement and retention—but will require robust authorization, privacy safeguards and merchant integration standards to scale safely.