AI summit: Razorpay, NPCI pilot AI-backed, fully automated conversational food and grocery orders using UPI

Agentic commerce powered by UPI

• Razorpay and NPCI launch AI-powered UPI payments pilot
• Users can order food or groceries and pay via UPI in one chat
• UPI Reserve Pay allows multiple payments without repeated PINs

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Fintech firm Razorpay and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) have introduced a pilot that allows consumers to place food and grocery orders through an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant or agent and complete payments using UPI within the same conversation.

The feature, currently being tested with a small group of users, enables transactions without requiring users to switch between apps for checkout.

Powered by AI-firm Anthropic’s Claude, the pilot enables transactions on popular apps Swiggy, Zomato and Zepto, and the feature was launched on February 20 at the India AI Impact Summit.

NPCI operates UPI, the country’s most popular digital payments platform. Razorpay is the payment aggregator that partners with these merchant firms to process these digital payments to place the orders on behalf of the consumers.

By using the AI platform, customers can order snacks from a preferred restaurant or groceries before a sports match, and the AI assistant identifies options, confirms the order and completes the payment using UPI after user approval.

While a typical UPI payments require PIN or a fingerprint for approving payments at the time of ordering, the AI solution uses what is called a UPI Reserve Pay, a feature that allows users to set a spending limit for a specific merchant.

Once approved by the user, multiple payments can be made within that limit without entering a UPI PIN for every transaction. Users can track spending in real time and revoke consent at any time.

“Today, the real challenge with AI-led commerce isn’t intelligence - it is trust. By combining UPI’s consent-based model with Razorpay’s payments infrastructure, we are making it possible for AI agents across India to transact in a way that is transparent, reversible, secure, and firmly under user control,” said Harshil Mathur, CEO and cofounder of Razorpay.

To be sure, Razorpay and NPCI had demonstrated an early version of this idea at Global Fintech Fest (GFF) last year. The latest pilot builds on that demonstration and integrates it with live merchant platforms.

“UPI was built to make digital payments simple, secure, and universal, and Agentic Payments takes that vision into the next era. With UPI Reserve Pay, users can give consent once and allow intelligent systems to transact on their behalf in a controlled, transparent way,” said Sohini Rajola, executive director for Growth at NPCI.

India’s digital payments ecosystem has expanded rapidly over the past decade, largely due to the success of UPI. The popular payments platform processes over 22 billion transactions worth over Rs 28 lakh crore every month.

Under the new pilot, the entire process from discovery to payment remains within a single chat interface. However, companies said safeguards remain in place, including spending caps and the ability to cancel permissions.