Razorpay’s Harshil Mathur bets on AI to make commerce conversational again

Soon, you will be able to ask your fridge to buy a packet of milk for you. That, according to Harshil Mathur, Co-founder and CEO of Razorpay, is not a distant scenario but a logical extension of what he calls “agentic commerce”—payments embedded directly into conversational AI interfaces.

This week, Razorpay launched Agentic Payments on Claude in partnership with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), enabling users to order from Zomato, Swiggy, and Zepto within a chat interface at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi.

The rollout builds on an earlier integration unveiled with OpenAI at the Global Fintech Festival 2025, marking what the company describes as a sustained push into AI-native commerce.

For Mathur, the shift is less about a new checkout button and more about reimagining how commerce happens. “The chat environment is just a starting point,” Mathur said in an interview with YourStory on the sidelines of the event. “The chat first model allows you to discover the way you expect to do.”

He contrasted conversational commerce with traditional app-based interfaces. “Apps are typically built in a specific format that there is a search bar here, there’s a text, here you go, and you discover in the format the app expects to do,” he said.

By comparison, he added that conversational interfaces mirror how people behave in physical stores. “When you walk into a retail store, there’s no search bar—you simply go in and say, ‘I want this,’ and the retailer gets it for you,” Mathur said.

“I think the chat model allows you to do this chatting and say, 'Hey, I want to cook halwa at home.' And then it says, 'What do I need?' It tells you the ingredients you need. 'Okay, can you help me buy it?' It helps you create your cart, and you can just purchase it,” he added. The chatbot could even have context on what you already have in your pantry when you order.

Mathur said, “AI shouldn’t stop at recommendations — it should finish the job”

He continued, “AI can allow us to build those interfaces which are natural to people with a voice-first model, with a multilingual-first model and an assistant model... This is right now. We’re just piloting it, but I believe it can be a massive opportunity for India over the next 5 to 10 years.”

Mathur described the current phase as early but active. “We open it up for beta... we’ve got... 10s of 1000s of customers reaching out to us saying, 'How can we be enabled for the pilot?' So, we’re slowly rolling it out.”

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Razorpay’s agentic integration uses UPI Reserve Pay to allow users to set spending limits and complete purchases within the same conversation without repeated PIN prompts.

The feature is slowly rolled out to Razorpay’s gateway customers. “Anyone who’s using architecture can just reach out to our team, and we’ll enable it,” he said.

Meanwhile, Cashfree Payments also launched its own conversational commerce push, branded “Cashfree Here,” at the AI Summit.

The Bengaluru-based fintech company unveiled a payments extension designed specifically for AI applications built on OpenAI’s Apps SDK and Anthropic’s MCP framework. The extension functions as a native payments layer inside conversational interfaces. Users can complete transactions within the chat, keeping the interaction continuous from discovery to decision to payment.

Card payments are secured using passkey-enabled biometric authentication supported by Mastercard, replacing traditional one-time password flows. The aim is to reduce friction and make card payments viable within a conversational interface, where multiple redirects or delays can interrupt the flow.