Amazon Pay Enables AI Agents to Make UPI Payments

Amazon Pay introduced its Smart wallet feature on Wednesday, which permits AI agents to initiate Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions for users. The company also rolled out biometric authentication and offline tap-to-pay capabilities to improve payment success rates and enable transactions without an internet connection.

Currently, agentic UPI payments are available for flight ticket bookings, with plans to expand to additional merchants and use cases. Girish Krishnan, director of payments at Amazon Pay India, stated that the initiative is a collaboration with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and travel aggregator ixigo.

Krishnan highlighted that a key challenge for AI agents has been the inability to complete purchases due to a lack of authorization mechanisms for non-human actors in the payment ecosystem. Amazon Pay's Smart Wallet addresses this by implementing a consent-based framework, allowing users to authorize specific agents for payments at approved merchants.

Users can configure these agents through the UPI Manage page in Amazon Pay, setting spending limits and usage policies. Once configured, agents can autonomously complete transactions within these parameters. However, Amazon Pay has not yet clarified whether third-party AI agents can be authorized or if they require pre-approval by Amazon.