Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said the fintech major is gearing up to launch an AI-powered point-of-sale (PoS) device across its merchant network.
Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2025 on October 7, Sharma said the new devices will act as AI assistants for small businesses, capable of giving merchants real-time insights and suggestions based on their own transaction data.
“If I have a fashion store, I can ask, ‘How is my business going?’ or ‘Did I receive money from the bank?’ and get answers in my local language,” Sharma said, describing how the upcoming devices will work.
He added that the company has been building agents powered by AI that can interact with users in natural language and the new PoS machines will bring this technology to millions of merchants. “Every founder needs one teammate or co-operator, this AI will be that,” Sharma said.
According to Sharma, the company is developing its own smaller, optimised language model that will be trained on merchant data stored locally on the device. This approach, he said, will allow the device to run AI capabilities without needing an internet connection or costly inference tokens.
“We are taking large models, optimising their size, and creating a small model trained by us, based on merchant data within the device,” Sharma explained.
The Paytm founder added that the company’s various verticals, from payments to devices, will undergo AI enablement and sustain themselves much like how Amazon and Amazon Prime operate as interconnected yet independent ecosystems.
The move comes at a time when the fintech firm is looking to rebuild and diversify its business amid regulatory challenges. “I have worked in telecom, I have worked in payments, now I will work in AI,” Sharma said, underscoring the company’s pivot towards artificial intelligence as its next growth engine.
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