OpenAI has partnered with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to pilot the newly launched ‘Reserve Pay’ feature on Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
The collaboration marks a major step towards integrating conversational artificial intelligence with India’s real-time payment infrastructure, transforming how consumers discover, shop, and pay online.
The ‘Reserve Pay’ feature allows users to reserve funds for specific merchants, ensuring seamless payments once transactions are confirmed. This innovation is expected to streamline the checkout experience, particularly in scenarios involving delayed fulfillment or high-demand products, where traditional instant payment mechanisms pose challenges.
Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank are serving as the banking partners for the pilot program, while Tata Group-owned Bigbasket has become one of the first e-commerce platforms to allow customers to browse and purchase products directly through ChatGPT.
This integration effectively merges discovery and transaction into a single conversational flow, allowing customers to interact with ChatGPT to find products, reserve payments, and complete purchases without leaving the chat interface.
Commenting on the collaboration, Oliver Jay, Managing Director of International Strategy, OpenAI, said, “We’re excited to work with NPCI and explore how we can combine advanced AI with UPI, one of the world’s most trusted real-time payment networks. India’s digital ecosystem is uniquely positioned to lead the next wave of AI-powered commerce, and this partnership represents a major step in that direction.”
By bringing AI into this ecosystem, the partnership aims to demonstrate how conversational interfaces can make digital payments more intuitive, secure, and context-aware.
The pilot is also expected to lay the foundation for agentic AI-powered commerce, where digital assistants autonomously help users manage spending, compare prices, and make personalised purchase recommendations based on preferences and budgets.
Industry experts view this as the beginning of a broader trend toward AI-native financial experiences, where payments and commerce seamlessly integrate with user intent and conversation.
Homegrown payment solution providers such as Cashfree and Razorpay have announced their own agentic AI-based payment solutions for merchants, enabling end-to-end conversational transactions and personalised checkout experiences.
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