For years, online shopping in India has followed one path: see an ad or search, open a store, add to cart, pay by UPI. A newer path is being tested, where the customer never opens the store at all. They ask an AI assistant, and the assistant finds the product and pays for it.
What has actually been announced
On 9 October 2025, NPCI (the body that runs UPI), Razorpay and OpenAI announced a pilot that lets people shop and pay inside ChatGPT without switching to another app or website. TechCrunch reported the details:
- It uses two UPI features. UPI Reserve Pay lets a user block a set amount for future payments to chosen merchants. UPI Circle delegates UPI authentication so the payment can finish inside the chat.
- Razorpay built the merchant side. Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank handle the banking side.
- The first merchants were BigBasket for groceries and Vi for mobile recharges.
- The AI company does not get access to payment data, and the user pre-authorises payments.
- Razorpay said it had also completed a proof of concept with Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.
One honest caveat: this started as a pilot with two large merchants. We have not been able to confirm how widely it is available today, so do not expect orders from AI assistants to show up in a small store’s dashboard tomorrow.
Why a small brand should still care
An AI assistant cannot browse your store the way a person does. It cannot admire your photography or be persuaded by a nice banner. It reads your product data: names, prices, variants, stock, delivery details and policies. If that data is messy, the assistant has nothing reliable to recommend.
That is the part you can fix now, and it helps your human customers and your ads today, whether or not AI shopping takes off.
What to do now
- Clean up product titles. Say what the product is: material, type, size. “925 silver oxidised jhumka, 4 cm” is better than “Beautiful earrings for women”.
- Keep price and stock accurate. Out-of-stock products that still show as available are a problem for people and for software.
- Write real descriptions. Weight, dimensions, care, what is in the box, how long delivery takes.
- Make policies easy to find. Returns, exchange, COD and shipping charges, in plain words.
- Use a standard payment gateway. New payment methods usually reach the big gateways first.
None of this is exciting. It is the same boring work that makes a store convert better today, which is why it is worth doing.