Consumers already use the world’s largest real-time payments system for groceries and essentials, but AI agents could soon assume the heavy lifting for routine transactions on India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
According to Reuters, India is developing the Unified Agent Protocol to facilitate agentic commerce on UPI. The framework could incorporate existing elements like UPI Circle, which allows accountholders to delegate payment authority to a secondary user, in this case an AI agent.
The agentic protocol could also include the existing Reserve Pay feature, which enables customers to block funds for multiple debits. Many financial institutions limit these blocks to 10,000 rupees ($105.44) for up to 90 days, though the caps could be adjusted for agentic payments.
These features could come into play because low-value, frequent purchases are expected to be the initial use case for agentic UPI transactions. However, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)—which administers the real-time payments system—is planning to accommodate more complex use cases for AI agents in the future.
Crossing Several Milestones
Should NPCI move forward with its ambitions, it would represent several milestones for agentic commerce.
UPI has become the flagship instant payments system and a dominant force in global financial services. The platform accounted for roughly 81% of global real-time payments last year, and the network’s transaction volume has continued to soar. In August, UPI processed almost 25 billion transactions worth 29.82 trillion rupees ($314.21 billion).
Given this massive retail footprint and NPCI’s continued drive toward global expansion of the system, the addition of agentic payments to UPI would represent one of the most notable real-world deployments of the technology to date.
Serving as the Blueprint
Much of the system’s rapid rise to prominence can be attributed to widespread consumer adoption and merchant acceptance.
However, perhaps the most important factor driving UPI’s growth is the avid backing of India’s government. The nation has been a significant innovator in financial services, and launching agentic payments on UPI would make India one of the first countries to install a national infrastructure for agentic transactions.
Until now, most agentic commerce initiatives have been driven by the leading payments companies—most notably by Visa and Mastercard—and the infrastructure to support these frameworks has been built by tech giants like OpenAI and Google.
A government-led agentic ecosystem would set India apart and—much like UPI—serve as the blueprint for other countries to emulate.