Synopsis
PayU is ramping up its AI-led payments push, building infrastructure for agentic commerce as UPI volumes surge and digital transactions scale. The company is focusing on trust, compliance, and automation to enable seamless, high-frequency payments, while expanding AI use cases across merchant onboarding, risk management, and customer support.Listen to this article in summarized format
At the same time, generative AI is transforming how users discover products, interact with services, and make purchase decisions. Together, these shifts are driving the next phase of digital commerce: AI-led payments.
AI is no longer limited to search or customer support. It can help book flights, pay bills, place grocery orders, renew subscriptions, and complete UPI transactions on behalf of users, often without requiring them to open an app or manually complete checkout. This shift toward agentic commerce is turning payments from a visible action into an invisible, embedded layer of everyday life.
For payment companies, this creates both opportunity and responsibility. As digital commerce moves from screens to conversations and from user-led clicks to AI-assisted actions, payment infrastructure must evolve. Growth will depend not just on speed or convenience, but on whether platforms can make users, merchants, banks, and regulators trust AI systems to move money securely and compliantly. For companies like PayU, the key questions are simple: can users trust AI to handle payments accurately, securely, and without overstepping? Can merchants rely on automated transactions while meeting the same compliance standards as manual ones? etc.
PayU
is betting big on AI-powered digital payments. At the core of PayU’s strategy is infrastructure that is building trust for the agentic commerce, which means it is not just enabling AI to pay; it is making the digital payments safe, visible, and everywhere, so merchants and consumers can actually trust it. For this shift. PayU’s gateway MCP Server helps backend payment services become easier for developers and AI systems to discover and deploy.
The trust layer
PayU’s GenAI strategy is rooted in a clear conviction: the winner in agentic commerce will not be the company with the most APIs, but the one that makes users and merchants comfortable letting AI handle their money. Its AI stack focuses on machine-speed fraud and risk management, agentic payment rails, compliant token-backed checkouts, and intelligent orchestration for high-frequency, low-value transactions such as UPI payments, utility recharges, daily commutes and grocery purchases, where digital trust is built and tested most.
Within PayU, every product and engineering team operates with an AI-first mindset. Engineers have delivered what previously took an entire quarter within a single week using GenAI-assisted workflows as a signal that the underlying assumptions of what a fintech platform can build and how fast it needs to be rethought entirely.
As AI takes centre-stage at PayU, the company’s priorities are clear: agentic commerce, merchant-facing solutions, AI-powered workflows, and a complete reimagining of how software is developed. The compounding effects of generative AI will let the firm ship more products, embed more intelligence, and move faster. All of that translates to a broader offering and, ultimately, more revenue.
Voice payments for India’s next 500 million users
In March 2026, PayU announced a strategic partnership with CoRover.ai, the creator of BharatGPT, to launch AI-powered voice payments across more than 100 Indian languages and dialects. One-of-the-first collaborations between a sovereign LLM provider and a payment aggregator in India, it integrates PayU's payment gateway with CoRover's conversational AI platform, enabling users to complete UPI transactions simply by speaking and no app, no interface, no payment detail to enter manually.
The technology is already live on Afterlife, India's first digital succession planning platform, and on Kanhaji.ai, an AI-driven devotional platform, two very different use cases pointing at the same underlying shift: commerce is migrating into conversation.
"The biggest challenge in AI payments today is trust, not technology. Trust and compliance are non-negotiable, especially when AI agents are handling payments. India’s digital payments infrastructure (UPI) sets the stage for global AI payments adoption. PayU is enabling mass adoption safely and compliantly," says Manas Mishra, Chief Product Officer at PayU and Wibmo. "India's next 500 million users who are voice-first and conversational deserve the same security and reliability. Strong fraud detection and compliance are built into the system from the start," he added.
Removing friction from the merchant's first step
In April 2026, PayU launched its AI-Powered Outbound Voice Call Assistant to tackle one of fintech's most persistent friction points: merchant onboarding. The system proactively reaches out to merchant leads in English and Hindi, guiding them through onboarding via natural conversation, collecting key business details, enabling faster verification, and escalating to human account managers only when needed. It is part of a broader ambition to become an AI-native platform across the full merchant lifecycle, with multi-language scale and expansion into KYC recovery and cross-sell to follow. PayU claims it currently serves over 450,000 merchants across 100-plus payment methods in India.
AI as operating muscle
Behind the headline partnerships, PayU has been embedding GenAI across how it operates. With AI models as first responders and AI-led spam filtration, PayU says its turnaround time on support tickets has dropped by 30%, which has led to opening up of crucial time with AI agents. The company is reportedly targeting 60-70% automation of support responses. On the risks side, PayU says its AI-driven fraud monitoring has contributed to an 80% reduction in fraud and chargeback losses, while enabling top-category merchant onboarding within 2-3 days. Internally, PayU uses all cutting-edge AI tools, giving all product managers and engineers access to AI-native workflows and plans to halve Level 1 code review time through AI-assisted development.
The future PayU is building
PayU’s long-term thesis is both specific and bold: the internet is shifting from human-readable pages and apps to a network where AI agents interact directly with backend systems. Entering card details, choosing UPI apps, and navigating checkout flows could soon become relics of an earlier era, replaced by device-native, agentic, tokenised payments settled directly between banks and institutions.
PayU has made AI a core pillar of its strategy and is already testing use cases to drive the next phase of innovation. As digital commerce accelerates in India, the company expects to outpace that growth, backed by the deep consumer trust built by existing merchant platforms. That trust, it argues, is hard to replicate and remains a key moat, especially as AI begins to take a more active role in spending decisions.
(This article is generated and published by ET Spotlight team. You can get in touch with them on [email protected])
