What does Razorpay know about agentic AI that OpenAI, Amazon, Ebay don’t? |
“Hey Zomato… can I have some chai and samosa from Chaipoint please?”
It took one spoken sentence, on stage at The Lalit Ashok hotel in Bengaluru, for Zomato to place an order.
The app paused for a few seconds, then asked: “Awesome! Going ahead. Would you like to pay?”
“Yes, please.” And that’s it, the order went through.
No checkout page, UPI pin, or payment app. The room erupted with like it had just witnessed a magic trick. The feature is expected to go live in a month.
This was at Razorpay’s annual fintech summit, FTX26, on 12 March, where the company made its biggest bet yet on agentic payments. “Fifteen years ago, the world assumed India would follow the West into credit cards and NFCNear-field communication or NFC is the technology that allows your credit card or smartphone to talk to a payment terminal without physical contact, and powers Tap to Pay and digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay,” CEO Harshil Mathur told the audience. “We skipped all of it and built UPI. I’ll bet my money on this: India will do the same with agentic commerce.”
It was a striking claim, because in much of the rest of the world, the same trick was not quite landing.
Just a week earlier, OpenAI had rolled back its much-anticipated agentic commerce feature. Amazon blocked third-party AI agents and even sued some, like Perplexity’s Comet. Ebay and many more banned buy-for-me agents altogether.
Even China, the one country where agentic payments have reached real scale—Alipay processed 120 million Business Wireagentic transactions in a single week in February—is now scrambling to keep up with what it set in motion. In March, Beijing restricted the AI agent Openclaw on government devices and state-owned banks, and regulators began drafting safety standards for agent behaviour, for which they had no framework.