Beyond The Scan: How Conversational Payments Will Redefine Transactions

It wasn’t long ago when entering a sixteen-digit credit card number into a browser felt like an act of extreme faith. We have come a long way from that early skepticism about providing sensitive details online to a world where "invisible" payments power everything from our OTT subscriptions to quick commerce shopping.

While the last decade was defined by mobile wallets and the ubiquity of QR codes - exemplified by India's UPI revolution - we are now witnessing a fundamental shift in the interface of commerce itself, all thanks to AI.

In this new frontier, chat interfaces are turning into active point-of-sale terminals. We are seeing this with OpenAI’s recent push into "agentic commerce," where ChatGPT doesn't just recommend products but builds tailored buyer's guides and facilitates the transaction. To that end, OpenAI has partnered with Stripe to establish a new “Agentic Commerce Protocol” to standardize the way conversational payments happen on the web. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman noted regarding this shift toward AI agents, the goal is to move toward a future where software can "understand a user's true goals, and help them achieve them," effectively allowing users to delegate the "heavy lifting" of commerce to an intelligent proxy.

'Future Of Payments Isn't About Smarter Algorithms'

This shift isn't limited to smartphones. In India, the "Hello UPI" initiative is democratizing access by enabling telecom-based voice payments. Users on any phone can now simply speak to transfer money, proving that the future of payments isn't just about smarter algorithms, but about using the most natural interface we have: our voice.

Tech companies have shifted their focus from desktop and browser operating systems, which dominated the early 2000’s, to voice-first operating systems. Conversational assistants like Siri, Google Assistant and Meta AI have become more ubiquitous and embedded in our daily lives than ever before. B2B enterprises like Oracle have also doubled down on establishing proprietary Digital Assistants to address their primary use cases. This signals a changing of the guard in operating systems that will dominate the next decade.

With agentic commerce protocols becoming more integrated across platforms, it is easier to imagine a world where we begin a shopping journey on WhatsApp with a small business owner, to asking an embedded agent to find relevant and competitive products across ecommerce platforms like Amazon that will have their own shopping Assistant, Rufus, then deliver targeted results and help in comparing options. Making a payment can be as simple as saying, “Hey Siri, place the order and have it delivered with two-day shipping.” This drastically reduces the friction of a typical shopping experience that includes product discovery, online and offline research for availability, comparison, price match as well as payment and shipping. 

This is further elevated when multimodal products like Meta’s Ray Ban glasses are thrown in the mix. Imagine finding an outfit you like at a shopping mall only to realise that it is out of stock for your size. The glasses can begin an online search experience for the outfit using your conversational input and even identify nuances in the outfit that you like, while having your parent or friend lend you the money to purchase the outfit if it proactively finds that you have a limited balance in your checking account. 

‘Technology To Empower Consumers’

With the latest version of Apple’s AirPods Pro powering real-time language translation, you can chat with a local vendor abroad selling fruits, negotiate a price you think is fair, and have the assistant wire the money in the local currency from your linked checking account.

Technology, at its best, exists to break barriers and empower consumers. Nowhere is this more critical than in rural regions, where the digital divide has been most stubborn. With smartphone penetration hovering around 60% to 70% globally, and limited literacy combined with UI complexity, voice-first AI agents are a real game changer. They allow users in remote areas to bypass complex app navigation entirely, turning a daunting checkout experience into a simple conversation in their local dialect.

Similarly, this is a massive leap forward for accessibility. For the visually impaired or those with motor disabilities, chat-based and voice-activated commerce removes the friction of small buttons and visual captchas, offering a safer, more autonomous way to transact.

Ultimately, this revolution creates an entry point for the millions who may be illiterate or non-native English speakers. By removing the requirement to read and type, we are effectively opening the doors of online commerce to the entire world, not just the tech-savvy.

Day by day, Netflix’s typical science fiction shows are turning into a reality. We are moving towards a world where conversational transactions abstract the complexity of multiple platforms working behind the scenes to power frictionless transactions. The real challenge here lies in these platforms being horizontally integrated. A provider that establishes the protocols, APIs and mechanisms to support this infrastructure will help foster an economy that underpins this vision.

As with any technological revolution fueled by healthy competition, the ultimate winner is the consumer. But this shift goes deeper than convenience; by moving digital payments beyond the rigid screen-tapping of a smartphone and into a more natural, conversational rhythm, we are fundamentally rewriting who can participate in the digital economy.

Authors: Rahul Chavan, Jay Rungta

Bio: Rahul Chavan is a Lead Product Manager at PayPal in New York, specializing in Conversational Agentic AI for FinTech consumer instruments.
Bio: Jay Rungta is a Manager of Web Solutions Engineering at YouTube in New York, specializing in payment intelligence and monetization.

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