On October 5, Razorpay announced that its marketing platform, Razorpay Engage, now enables Indian brands to set up and manage advertising on ChatGPT. The agreement builds on its partnership with OpenAI and includes nine brands: Tanishq, Fastrack, Traya, Tata Neu, Rivaah by Tanishq, Shaadi.com, Axis Max Life, Palmonas, and Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS).
What is Razorpay offering?
Engage will handle the preparation and operation of ChatGPT Ads for advertisers. Razorpay says this covers:
- Assessing whether a brand’s product catalogue is ready for ChatGPT
- Cleaning up and structuring product feeds
- Creating and managing campaigns
- Measuring and optimising performance
Razorpay will use an AI agent based on ChatGPT Ads best practices to create and manage campaigns across various user contexts. The agent will track performance and make ongoing adjustments, with Razorpay staff providing human oversight as needed.
Why do brands need an intermediary?
ChatGPT recently launched its ad channel in India. OpenAI started displaying ads to logged-in adults on the Free and Go plans at the end of August, initially partnering with WPP and Omnicom.
Razorpay emphasises that brands featured in AI chat responses require well-structured product data, which can be difficult to manage manually at scale. COO Rahul Kothari noted that shoppers are likely to rely more on AI assistants for purchase recommendations instead of traditional search or browsing, creating a new discovery channel for brands.
How this builds on Razorpay’s ChatGPT commerce work
The ad product extends a longer effort to make ChatGPT a sales channel:
- Storefronts and checkout: Razorpay has been working with OpenAI and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on infrastructure for ChatGPT-native storefronts, catalogue syncing and, eventually, completing purchases inside the chat.
- Pilots: In August, Razorpay said it was working with about 50 brands and several ecommerce marketplaces on agentic-commerce pilots.
- Setup time: The company claims its technology cuts the time for a Shopify merchant to set up a ChatGPT storefront from roughly eight to 10 weeks to about 30 minutes by automating catalogue syncing and submission. This is Razorpay’s own figure.
- Payments: It has been experimenting with UPI Circle and UPI Reserve Pay for in-ChatGPT purchases. Payment credentials are kept away from the AI model, and transactions require user consent.
Razorpay has developed ChatGPT-native storefronts and agentic payments in collaboration with OpenAI and NPCI and launched pilots with approximately 50 brands in August. Razorpay has described its strategy as building a “distribution layer” across merchant websites, independent agent platforms and LLM platforms, rather than betting on ChatGPT alone.
Razorpay’s wider AI push
October 2025: Razorpay and OpenAI piloted “Agentic Payments” on ChatGPT, enabling users to complete purchases within the AI environment. The pilot involved Razorpay’s banking partners, Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank, and used UPI Circle and UPI Reserve Pay. The initial integration was with BigBasket, allowing users to order groceries through ChatGPT. All payments required explicit user consent and authentication through their regular UPI app.
March 2026: Razorpay launched Agent Studio, built on Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK, to automate payment operations such as failed-transaction recovery, dispute responses and subscription management.
Agentic Experience Platform: An AI-native layer meant to simplify how businesses onboard to Razorpay, integrate payments and manage financial workflows.
Launch agents: Abandoned Cart Conversion, Dispute Responder, Subscription Recovery and Cashflow Forecaster. Other listed capabilities include settlement summaries delivered through messaging apps.
Integrations: Businesses can connect platforms such as Shopify, Shiprocket, WhatsApp, ElevenLabs, Slack, Tally and QuickBooks.
No-code builder: The “Build Your Agent” feature lets businesses create agents in plain English by describing the task, choosing the systems it can access and setting rules. The builder is in beta, and Razorpay plans to evolve the platform into an open ecosystem for developers and fintech partners.
August 2026: Razorpay announced Vulcan, designed to manage routing, fraud detection, risk management and checkout within a single AI system rather than relying on separate models. Razorpay emphasised that Vulcan is not a large language model. Vulcan can select the most effective payment route, detect fraud across merchants and assess return-to-origin risk for cash-on-delivery orders. Razorpay plans to extend its use to authentication and lending.
Razorpay reports an 8–10% improvement in payment success rates. The company also states that Magic Checkout enabled 40% more shoppers to access their preferred UPI app, resulting in 100,000 to 200,000 additional monthly purchases. Early adopters include Blinkit, Bachatt and redBus. These results are based on Razorpay’s internal data and have not been independently verified.
What remains unclear
The announcement leaves several points open:
- Fees or pricing for Engage’s ChatGPT Ads services
- Whether any of the nine brands have live campaigns and, if so, with what results
- How Razorpay’s role differs from that of OpenAI’s agency partners, WPP and Omnicom
- When in-chat purchases will go live
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