India trials AI e-commerce

India is piloting AI-driven e-commerce payments through ChatGPT, integrating the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to enable direct purchases within the chatbot. The initiative, spearheaded by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Razorpay, and OpenAI, aims to explore secure and autonomous transactions, potentially expanding the service across various sectors.

UPI's infrastructure, which processes over 20 billion transactions monthly, will empower AI agents to complete transactions safely under user control. Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank are participating as banking partners, with Bigbasket as one of the first e-commerce platforms to enable shopping via ChatGPT.

The pilot seeks to understand how conversational AI can simplify digital transactions, potentially transforming AI assistants into full-fledged shopping agents. NPCI also launched other initiatives, including AI-based UPI Help and UPI Reserve Pay.