Synopsis
Indian ecommerce giants like Flipkart and Bigbasket are building AI storefronts to enable agentic commerce, allowing AI to shop autonomously on platforms like ChatGPT. Fintechs have enabled payments, paving the way for automated searching, ordering, and payment. Brands are preparing for this future, with quick commerce and travel sectors leading adoption.Listen to this article in summarized format
Simply put, agentic commerce refers to artificial intelligence-powered shopping in which AI agents autonomously shop on behalf of humans — starting from searching, selecting, ordering, and paying. Consumer firms ramped up their efforts after fintechs enabled payments on LLMs in February.
Razorpay, for instance, is enabling agentic commerce using UPI Reserve Pay protocol. It has tied up with platforms like Zomato, Swiggy, and Zepto and 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, chief product officer, Razorpay. “The opportunity for agentic commerce in India is potentially as large as, if not larger than, UPI.”
Experts said the adoption of agentic commerce is low in India, but brands are preparing for the future.
“Discovery was already happening on LLMs, but there was no central payment system on platforms like ChatGPT to enable shopping. Now that payments are enabled, it makes sense for brands to create their own model context protocol (MCP) because if the behaviour shift happens overnight, then they will be among the first in their categories,” said Nitin Pulyani, SVP and head of product, Cashfree Payments.
The scope
Quick commerce platform Swiggy was one of the first to build its own MCP, offering an option for users to order food and grocery on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini without using the Swiggy app. MCP is an open-source standard that allows AI models to interact with external services like shopping and payment apps, data sources, software, and more.
“We see real long-term potential (in agentic commerce). In grocery, many use cases are recurring, contextual, and time-sensitive, which makes the category well suited for AI-led assistance,” said Keshav Kumar, chief product and technology officer, Bigbasket.
Kumar explained that the near-term opportunity is to reduce friction through better discovery, basket building, recommendations, and substitutions. “Over time, this can evolve to more guided and delegated shopping,” he added.
Besides grocery, travel is another highly searched topic on LLMs. Last week, Skyscanner launched its app on ChatGPT allowing users to search for flights using conversational AI.
Queries sent to Flipkart, Ajio, and Firstcry did not elicit a response.
Enabling AI stores
According to Pulyani, currently agentic commerce is limited to the larger companies. “We have a role to play in making this mainstream by building a solution which everybody can adopt and without much effort, so they can also be present on LLMs,” he said.
OpenAI, Perplexity, and Gemini have already launched agentic commerce offerings in the US, but not yet in India. However, brands and payment firms are doing this by building their own connectors.
While bigger platforms have in-house capabilities to build the tech, startups like Asva AI and Consumable AI are helping companies, both big and small, build their AI storefront.
“AI storefronts bring the full website experience directly into the LLM. Brands need to have their MCPs to enable agentic commerce in India that ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity have rolled out in the US, making brands transactable on AI platforms,” said Viren Inaniyan, cofounder of Asva AI.
Bengaluru-based Asva helps brands build their own MCPs to sell within ChatGPT, Gemini, or any AI agent, with real-time catalogue, pricing, and checkout sync.
