Shop Directly On ChatGPT: How AI-Driven Payments Will Simplify Shopping

ChatGPT is set to go beyond just making shopping recommendations to actually enabling purchases. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and fintech startup Razorpay have partnered with OpenAI to launch AI-powered payments on ChatGPT.

The initiative is currently in its pilot phase and will allow users to make direct purchases within ChatGPT through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

As reported by Reuters, the move comes close on the heels of similar launches earlier this year by Alphabet's Google and Perplexity AI, which introduced their own AI-powered payment solutions.

The service employs agentic AI payments, which enable users to complete transactions without leaving the AI platform. Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence models that can perform tasks with minimal human intervention.

Though AI recognises the product, the user still needs to confirm the purchase with a PIN or OTP. While this adds security, it slows down the process and prevents the process from being fully automatic. Agentic payments remove this obstacle.

Using new features from NPCI, specifically UPI Circle and UPI Reserve Pay, the system allows users to pre-authorise their AI agent to make payments within set limits. This eliminates the need for repeated authentication, allowing the AI to act on behalf of the user.

The AI assistant is essentially transformed into a trusted shopping agent, which can execute payments securely and independently under the delegated authority of the user.

In a blog post, OpenAI said the system provides a frictionless shopping experience to consumers, who can transition from chat to checkout in a few taps. ChatGPT's Instant Checkout feature, powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol and developed with Stripe, currently supports purchases of single items in the US, with plans to add multi-item carts, more merchants and regions.

When users ask shopping-related questions like “best running shoes under Rs 1,000” or “gifts for a ceramics fan,” ChatGPT shows the most relevant products from anywhere on the internet. Results are organic and not sponsored. The products are ranked only on relevance, OpenAI said in the blog.

It added that once a user places an order, ChatGPT conveys the request to the merchant in an Agentic Commerce Protocol. The merchant either accepts or rejects the order, processes the payment through whatever system they currently use, and handles delivery and customer service as they do today.