The promise of conversational commerce in India just moved from demos to transactions. A pilot is live that lets a user ask for a product, compare options, and complete UPI payment inside the chat window. No app switching. No copy pasting UPI IDs. For a market that already runs tens of billions of monthly transactions on instant rails, this turns the chat box into a full storefront and checkout.
How it works
Inside a controlled sandbox, the assistant can surface catalog cards, place items in a cart, and trigger a UPI intent flow with user authorization. Partners provide the plumbing. NPCI supplies UPI rails and guardrails. Razorpay handles merchant orchestration and payment instrumentation. Banking partners process collects and mandates. A national grocer is the first merchant, which is smart because groceries create high-frequency data and clear success metrics.
Why this matters
The biggest drop-off in Indian ecommerce sits between discovery and payment. Removing app context switches reduces friction and improves conversion on impulse and routine buys. For merchants, agentic checkout promises higher repeat rates, richer preference data, and new retargeting surfaces. For users, it compresses errands into a single thread that remembers taste, budget, and delivery preferences.
Safety and compliance
This is where the rubber meets the road. Agent actions must be explicit, revocable, and logged. Payment steps should require clear user confirmation, time-bound tokens, and biometric or device-bound approvals where applicable. NPCI’s playbook already enforces step-up checks on riskier flows. Expect hard limits on ticket sizes during the pilot and explainers that show exactly what the agent can and cannot do.
What to watch in the next 90 days
Completion rates for cart-to-pay compared with app flows. Refund and replacement UX inside the chat. How well the assistant handles ambiguous requests in Indian English and regional languages. Merchant onboarding velocity. And of course, the share of users who return to the chat to reorder staples without browsing.
Strategic read
If the pilot scales, chat becomes a meta-app for Indian retail. That benefits merchants with strong supply chains and clean catalogs, banks that embrace conversational risk controls, and payment aggregators with robust dispute management. It also sets a bar for privacy and transparency that everyone else will have to meet.
Follow Tech Moves on Instagram and Facebook for pilot telemetry, merchant onboarding watchlists, and a plain-English explainer of agent permissions you can share with your compliance team.
