Razorpay Becomes the On-Ramp for Indian Brands Entering ChatGPT Advertising, Deepening Its Bet on AI Commerce

Razorpay, one of India's most valuable fintech companies and a long-anticipated candidate for a public listing, has moved to position itself at the front door of a new advertising market. On 5 October 2026 the Bengaluru-based company said it is working with OpenAI to help Indian businesses advertise on ChatGPT, using Razorpay Engage, its growth marketing platform, as the operational layer between advertisers and OpenAI's advertising product.

Under the arrangement, Razorpay Engage will help brands prepare product catalogues and structured product feeds, launch campaigns on ChatGPT Ads and track how those campaigns perform. A first set of Indian advertisers is already on board, spanning jewellery, beauty, wellness, education and financial services. The names include Tata group retail and consumer brands Tanishq, Rivaah by Tanishq, Titan, Fastrack and Tata Neu, as well as hair-care company Traya, demi-fine jewellery label Palmonas, skincare brand Innovist, matrimony platform Shaadi.com, life insurer Axis Max Life and the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies.

The announcement is modest in financial terms, as no commercial figures were disclosed, but it is strategically significant. It gives one of India's largest payment processors a role in the earliest stage of the consumer journey, where shoppers are now increasingly turning to AI assistants rather than search engines to decide what to buy.

From keyword search to conversation

For two decades, digital advertising in India, as elsewhere, has been organised around keywords. A shopper typed a query into a search engine, and brands bid for the right to appear beside the results. Conversational assistants change that dynamic. A user asking ChatGPT for a gift under a certain budget, or for skincare suited to dry skin, is expressing intent in natural language and expects a considered answer rather than a list of links.

For brands, appearing credibly inside those exchanges requires a different kind of preparation. Product data has to be complete, consistent and machine-readable. Campaigns need to anticipate the many ways in which a consumer might describe a need. Measurement has to account for a journey that may begin in a chat window and end on a brand's own website or in a physical store. That operational burden is the gap Razorpay is seeking to fill.

What Razorpay Engage will actually do

According to the company, Razorpay Engage will provide the technology and operational infrastructure that businesses need to get started on ChatGPT Ads. Its work begins with catalogue readiness: cleaning and structuring product feeds so that they can be surfaced in conversational contexts. It then extends to launching campaigns and reporting on results.

The platform also deploys an AI agent built around ChatGPT Ads best practices. Razorpay says the agent will create and manage campaigns, monitor performance and make adjustments, while members of the Razorpay Engage team provide human oversight where larger decisions are required. The design reflects a pragmatic reality: most Indian marketers, particularly in mid-sized consumer brands, do not yet have in-house teams with experience in conversational advertising.

Razorpay chief operating officer Rahul Kothari framed the partnership as a way for businesses to experiment with the new channel without first building the specialist expertise themselves. OpenAI's head of enterprise sales for India, Nitin Bawankule, said in the joint announcement that ads can help brands show up meaningfully in moments of product discovery while preserving the trust people place in ChatGPT, a balance that will be closely watched by regulators and users alike. Tanishq's chief marketing officer, Pelki Tshering, described the jewellery brand's first ChatGPT campaign as a new chapter for the company.

The OpenAI timeline in India

The tie-up builds on a rapid sequence of moves by OpenAI in what has become one of its most important user markets. The company launched a low-cost ChatGPT Go subscription in India in August 2025 to widen adoption. In October 2025, the National Payments Corporation of India, OpenAI and Razorpay began piloting agentic payments, allowing users to shop and pay through ChatGPT using the Unified Payments Interface. Razorpay built the merchant integration layer for that pilot.

OpenAI then expanded self-service access to ChatGPT Ads in India through its Ads Manager on 31 August 2026. The Razorpay announcement arrived on the same day that OpenAI widened the advertising experience inside ChatGPT more broadly, according to industry reports, underlining how quickly the format is moving from experiment to mainstream product.

Why a payments company wants to sell advertising

At first glance, a payment gateway acting as an advertising intermediary looks like a stretch. In practice, it fits a strategy that Razorpay and its peers have been pursuing for several years. India's mandate that UPI transactions remain free of merchant fees has compressed the economics of core payment processing. Fintechs have responded by building software and value-added services on top of their merchant relationships, from payroll and banking to marketing tools.

Razorpay already sits inside the checkout flows of a large base of Indian online businesses and holds rich data on how those businesses sell. Extending into discovery allows it to offer merchants a more complete loop: help them be found in conversational interfaces, then process the payment when the customer is ready to buy. If agentic commerce matures as its backers expect, the company that manages both ends of that loop could capture a disproportionate share of value.

There is also a defensive logic. If consumers increasingly complete purchases inside AI assistants, the traditional checkout page on a merchant's website, where payment gateways have historically been embedded, may lose importance. Securing an early and visible role in OpenAI's commerce ecosystem in India helps Razorpay remain relevant however the user interface evolves.

Questions for advertisers and regulators

The model is not without open questions. Advertisers will want clear evidence that conversational placements deliver incremental sales rather than simply redirecting demand they would have captured anyway. Measurement across AI interfaces remains immature, and attribution standards have not yet settled.

Consumer trust is the more fundamental issue. Users approach AI assistants for impartial guidance, and any perception that commercial placements are crowding out neutral answers could erode that trust. OpenAI has emphasised that ads should not compromise the integrity of responses, and India's advertising and consumer protection frameworks, including rules on disclosure of paid content, will apply. How clearly sponsored suggestions are labelled is likely to become a focus for both the industry and policymakers.

Data governance is a further consideration. India's Digital Personal Data Protection framework sets expectations on how consumer data can be used for targeting, and brands working through intermediaries will need assurance that campaign optimisation respects those limits.

What it means for India's digital economy

For India's consumer brands, the partnership lowers the barrier to experimenting with a channel that could become as important as search and social media. For Razorpay, which has been preparing for a public listing, it adds a fresh growth narrative beyond payments at a time when investors are scrutinising how fintechs will sustain revenue in a zero-fee UPI environment.

For the wider ecosystem, the announcement is another sign that India is becoming a testing ground for AI-led commerce. Payments infrastructure, a vast base of first-time digital shoppers and aggressive adoption of AI assistants together create conditions that few other markets can match. Global technology companies have noticed, and local fintechs are racing to ensure that they, rather than foreign platforms alone, shape how that market develops.

The early roster of advertisers, led by some of the Tata group's best-known consumer names, suggests that large brands are willing to test the format. The more telling indicator will come over the next several quarters, when smaller direct-to-consumer companies decide whether ChatGPT Ads justify a meaningful share of their marketing budgets. If they do, the companies that make the channel easy to use will be well placed, and Razorpay intends to be among the first of them.