akshay chugh

06 Sep 2026

Letting AI agents pay for you on UPI

NPCI is expected to launch the Unified Agent Protocol at the Global Fintech Fest next week in Mumbai. Basically, an agentic payments protocol over UPI. Reportedly, it will let an AI agent pay for you, without you approving every transaction.

From all my experience with x402, and my understanding of Stripe’s MPP and Google’s AP2, here’s my best guess at what will actually be announced.

NPCI x UAP: how agentic payments over UPI might work

This is of course one full year after last year’s GFF where we saw the OpenAI x Razorpay x BigBasket demo, shopping and paying on UPI.

Now, 2 major elements of this plumbing already exist on UPI today:

  1. UPI Circle - allow someone else pay from your account, up to a limit. (e.g. your child can pay from your account without sharing your PIN)
  2. Reserve Pay - set aside a fixed amount for a merchant, and let smaller payments draw from it.

So we already have primitives for delegated spending power and bounded spending. The missing piece is letting the agent actually decide when to spend that money, on its own, without us having to tap “Pay” every time.

Here’s the mental model I am using to think about what may get announced:

  1. Passport - is this a real, registered agent? Every agent gets checked against a central registry before it can spend (similar to ERC-8004 agent identity registry or Stripe’s identity envelope)
  2. Power of attorney - did you actually authorise this specific agent, and for how much? Rules on when it can pay, how much, and at which merchants. A pre-approved list, a bit like card mandates.
  3. Logbook - a record of everything the agent did, so a wrong payment can be traced and disputed.

We will most definitely start off with very small, maybe recurring, consumer use-cases. Ordering groceries. Reordering food. Paying for subscriptions.

What will be interesting is how NPCI plans to solve liability, disputes, chargebacks - the entire audit trail.

But what I find more interesting: how do we move on from ordering biryani and groceries to actually solving this for B2B payments.

For an agent to spend money safely, it needs guardrails. Approved vendors, POs, goods received confirmation, invoices, budgets, limits, audit trails, a record of everything. Every company already has all of this in some shape or form, lying in multiple excels, emails, whatsapps, software. The version where an agent is not just buying groceries, but paying a supplier invoice, matching that the invoice tallies with the PO, and pushing the transaction to ERP, is probably the most killer use case of Agentic payments.