Agent marketplace one of our large bets, says PayU CPO Manas Mishra | Artificial Intelligence News
Agent marketplace one of our large bets, says PayU CPO Manas Mishra | Artificial Intelligence News
Publish Date: 2026-06-21 12:23:00
Source Domain: www.business-standard.com
In an evolving AI world, what are your key focus areas?
Our AI strategy is broken into four buckets. First: The role of PayU in the larger trend of commerce shifting to agentic rails, and how we help consumers and merchants. Second: How we democratise access to AI and GenAI (generative AI) technologies for our customers who are banks and merchants.
Third: As we are seeing new trends emerging in AI in terms of fraud patterns or consumer behaviour, the products we have built over the years have to be AI-native ones. Fourth is improving efficiency and productivity of all functions in the organisation — product, engineering, operations, legal, and financial — to solve bottlenecks.
How do you see agentic flows play out for merchants?
When you think of the commerce journey there are two parts: Agentic commerce and agentic payments. Our systems have been designed with a view of a user who gives explicit consent; all products and processes are designed keeping that in mind. When it’s an AI agent, questions of trust, traceability, accountability, audits, all of them come into picture. This is where we are seeing pilots today, which are one-on-one and tightly coupled. We need an interoperable protocol in the market that can define how this would work.
Once commerce is solved, then comes agentic payments. In the agentic world, that doesn’t translate well and there is friction where a human in the loop is necessary to complete the payment. In the new world, the user could give a mandate to their AI agent, and it then should be able to execute it across different merchants. India has underlying frameworks for mandates, authentication and other guardrails; once they translate into the agentic world, we will be far advanced as a market. It is also a unified payments interface (UPI)-driven market, and the change will probably start there, and then cards would follow.
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