India's e-commerce is entering agentic era with AI-led shopping
What's the story
Leading e-commerce platforms and brands in India are working on their own artificial intelligence (AI) storefronts. The move is aimed at leveraging the potential of agentic commerce on large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini. Companies such as Flipkart, Bigbasket, AJIO, and Firstcry are among those working on this development. Agentic commerce refers to AI-powered shopping where AI agents autonomously handle product discovery, selection, ordering and payment for consumers.
Payment integration
Payments enabled on LLMs by fintechs like Razorpay
The push for agentic commerce has been fueled by fintechs enabling payments on LLMs. Razorpay is using the UPI Reserve Pay protocol to facilitate this new form of commerce. The company has partnered with platforms like Zomato, Swiggy and Zepto and is running pilots with 15-20 merchants. "These deployments represent the early AI-enabled commerce flows where conversational interfaces handle product discovery, cart creation, and payment initiation, with the final confirmation still performed by the user," said Khilan Haria of Razorpay.
Brand readiness
Brands are getting ready for agentic commerce
While the adoption of agentic commerce currently remains low in India, brands are preparing for its future. Nitin Pulyani, SVP and Head of Product at Cashfree Payments, said "discovery was already happening on LLMs but there was no central payment system on platforms like ChatGPT to enable shopping." He added that now with payments enabled, brands are creating their own model context protocol (MCP) to stay ahead in their categories.
MCP development
Swiggy has built its own MCP
Quick commerce platform Swiggy has already built its own MCP, allowing users to order food and groceries on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini without using the Swiggy app. An MCP is an open-source standard that enables AI models to communicate with external services such as shopping and payment apps. Keshav Kumar, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Bigbasket, sees long-term potential in agentic commerce especially for recurring and time-sensitive use cases in grocery shopping.
Sector exploration
Travel sector also exploring agentic commerce
The travel sector, which is highly searched on LLMs, has also started exploring agentic commerce. Last week, Skyscanner launched its app on ChatGPT to let users search for flights using conversational AI. However, Pulyani said that currently this new form of commerce is limited to larger companies. He added that there is a need for a solution that everyone can adopt without much effort so they can be present on LLMs too.