Facing roadblocks: The checkout question for AI commerce in India

Marketplaces fear autonomous agents could bypass discovery and recommendations

Digital payments companies in India, which are building infrastructure to enable artificial intelligence (AI) agents to autonomously shop and transact, are running into a key hurdle. Digital commerce platforms, they say, are in no hurry to open up their checkout flows to these agents. 

Fully autonomous commerce — from discovery to checkout — is at least two to three years away, according to senior payments executives, who caution that if digital commerce platforms remain closed to AI agents, the entire model may struggle to take off. 

“Across events and conferences, it is the payments companies that are talking about agentic commerce, not the commerce players. We don't hear marketplaces say their inventories are agentic-first,” a senior executive at a digital payments company quipped. 

The reluctance to go truly agent-first is not accidental. AI agents are disintermediating by design — they bypass the recommendation engines and discovery algorithms that platforms have spent years, and fortunes, building. 

This is one of the key challenges India’s payments executives are trying to solve: convincing platforms to find a way to support agentic commerce. “Agents will bring disintermediation to commerce platforms. That’s why large platforms may not necessarily like it. Why would any user go to a commerce platform if the agent is going to find a good deal, discover items, and relay feedback based on my choices and preferences?” a senior financial technology (fintech) industry executive said, adding that most platforms’ efforts around agentic use cases are currently limited to chatbots. 

Executives spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are privately discussing the industry’s bottlenecks with commerce companies. 

AI agents for consumers could originate from merchant applications (apps), consumer-facing payment apps, AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude, or dedicated agentic platforms such as Hermes Agent and OpenClaw. 

In theory, these agents hand power back to users by compressing the discovery and checkout process. A shopper hunting for the right pair of shoes can spend hours comparing designs, sizes, brands, prices, and discounts — and that is on a single platform. India alone has a dozen digital marketplaces, and even then, a user may not get the best offer. 

An agent, given the same request, could do all of that in minutes and, if properly authorised, complete the purchase within preset limits. The saving is not just time. Agents also reduce the impulse buying that human shoppers are prone to. 

Where a person may be steered towards a stream of “recommended items” they never needed, a focused agent simply does not, and every purchase it declines to make is a sale the platform loses. 

An agent could also be empowered to monitor product and service prices continuously and initiate a purchase at the best possible price, again squeezing margins for commerce platforms. 

At the core of it, the frustration among fintech companies is that while they are preparing the rails for agentic commerce, they do not expect transaction volumes to trickle in anytime soon. 

To add to the conundrum, they believe more of the economic value in the future will come from enabling end-to-end agentic use cases, leaving payments as merely a settlement function. That means payments firms are investing disproportionately in building infrastructure for a future in which their role could become less valuable. 

“A lot of the economic value is moving up the value chain even before payments. Eventually, what is payment becoming?  Payments are just a settlement function. Everyone has to move up the value chain,” a third fintech industry executive said. 

To be fair, commerce platforms are also contending with real security risks: agents can be manipulated, and their vulnerabilities can be probed and exploited. Opening their systems to AI agents is, on safety grounds alone, a genuine gamble. 

Last year, ecommerce giant Amazon sued AI platform Perplexity, demanding that it stop allowing its AI browser agent, Comet, to make purchases online on users’ behalf, according to a Bloomberg report. 

Amazon accused Perplexity of committing computer fraud by failing to disclose when Comet was shopping on behalf of a real person, in violation of Amazon’s terms of service, the report said. 

That said, while agentic commerce grabs headlines, few users have been able to use it to its full potential. Executives believe the next phase of adoption will depend on improving the overall user experience. 

“Companies are investing in chatbots today, but in what direction? It looks like after the chatbot, the rest of the checkout experience remains the same. Eventually, they are operating within their own catalogue rather than expanding the search, which still leaves much of the work to the user,” a fourth person, who is in talks with ecommerce platforms in India to enable agentic flows, said.