India’s agentic AI dream for fintech needs an infrastructure relook | Artificial Intelligence News
India’s agentic AI dream for fintech needs an infrastructure relook | Artificial Intelligence News
Publish Date: 2026-07-05 11:53:00
Source Domain: www.business-standard.com
Today, the industry has edged closer to production. But the biggest challenge to widespread deployment is no longer artificial intelligence (AI) itself. Instead, it is the financial and commerce infrastructure that was built decades ago for deterministic software and human interactions — not autonomous AI agents.
Agentic commerce is expected to evolve in three phases; starting with assistive, progressing to guided, and eventually
reaching autonomous flows.
But before AI agents can routinely shop, transact or negotiate on behalf of users, banks, payment processors and merchants will need a new layer of infrastructure governing permissions, authentication, authorisation, auditability and liability. Building that invisible plumbing is fast emerging as the industry’s next major challenge.
“On payments, agents acting on a consumer’s behalf will need clear consent and spending controls before adoption can move beyond pilots, and that requires regulatory clarity, not just better technology. Discoverability also changes character: platforms must be as legible to a machine as they are to a person today, or they risk losing transactions they would otherwise win,” said Keshav Kumar, chief product and technology officer, BigBasket.
There are challenges around edge cases too. What happens when an agent, which was assigned to spend no more than ₹5,000 for a pair of shoes, spends more than twice the amount instead? Multiple interactions will need to be captured in a central registry to ensure accountability and enable verification across different use cases.
Who created an AI agent? How is that agent identified and authenticated? What actions has a user authorised it to perform? And once consumers begin deploying multiple agents for different tasks, can today’s payments and commerce infrastructure cope with a world where autonomous agents, and not humans, are initiating multi-cart transactions?
“Payments have…
