Agentic commerce: Shopping without hassle

Agentic commerce could well be the future of online shopping, where AI not just shops for you, but also pays for you within limits you set

- Ajinkya Kawale

It's a busy Tuesday evening. You're stuck in a late work call and suddenly realise that you're out of milk, fruits, and bread. Instead of opening an app, searching, adding items to cart, applying coupons, and making a payment... you simply tell all this to an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant.

Within seconds, the order gets placed and paid for automatically, saving you all the hassle.

That's the future of agentic commerce-where AI not only shops for you, but also pays for you within limits you set.

As digital commerce shifts to agentic rails, enabling agentic payments closes the loop-creating a truly end-to-end, autonomous shopping experience.

Recently, Tata-backed digital commerce platform BigBasket, along with OpenAI, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), and fintech Razorpay have partnered to enable this end-to-end flow, in one of the earliest use cases to implement the agentic experience at scale.

While still under pilot stage, users can now tell AI agents like ChatGPT what they want, get personalised orders, and complete payments via UPI Reserve Pay-securely preauthorising the order within set spending limits.

"The payment flow needs to be fully ironed out. Some of the use cases we're anchoring on, like reordering usual items, require training and updating the model to ensure a seamless, low-edit customer experience. Building, testing, and refining those models takes time," said Preeti Jain, head of product and design, BigBasket.

The focus, Jain added, was on small ticket items to gauge how users interact with agentic shopping and payments experience.

The secret sauce of a refined agentic payment experience hinges on NPCI's latest launch in the form of UPI Reserve Pay.

A user-defined amount is first blocked for a specific merchant, such as BigBasket. When a payment is triggered on ChatGPT via UPI Reserve Pay, the amount is debited from those pre-blocked funds.