India, Oct. 15 -- Digital payments have been built on a simple premise for years: A person decides, a machine does. The logic is still apparent even if we have standing instructions or auto-debits. A person gives authorisation for a defined merchant, amount or schedule. That's about to be complicated by agentic payments.

India is now getting ready for a future in which AI agents can make small purchases on behalf of their users via the Unified Payments Interface. NPCI is working on an agentic-payments framework and an AI-agent registry to identify and track approved agents. The use cases are intentionally simple, like groceries or everyday items. That is sensible. UPI is already huge, with over 24.5 billion transactions processed in Augu...