Shopping used to begin with a search box and a page of blue links. Increasingly, it begins with a conversation. On 5 October 2026, the Bengaluru payments company Razorpay said it had tied up with OpenAI to sell advertising inside those conversations: Indian brands can now place ads in ChatGPT, and Razorpay will run the campaigns for them.
- Razorpay has become a partner for ChatGPT Ads in India, announced on its own blog on 5 October 2026.
- The work runs through Razorpay Engage, the company's growth marketing platform, which prepares a brand's product catalogue, launches the campaign and reports on how it performed.
- Campaigns are built and adjusted by an AI agent, with Razorpay's own team keeping human oversight of what it does.
- A first wave of brands is already in: Razorpay names Tanishq, Titan, Palmonas, Traya, Innovist, Tata Neu and Axis Max Life.
- Razorpay's argument is that customer acquisition is getting more expensive while shoppers skip the search box and ask an assistant instead.
What exactly has Razorpay announced?
Razorpay said on 5 October 2026 that it is working with OpenAI so Indian businesses can advertise on ChatGPT, and that the job will be done through Razorpay Engage, its growth marketing platform. In practice that means a brand does not have to learn a new advertising system from scratch. Engage takes the three awkward parts off its hands: getting the product data into a shape a conversational assistant can use, setting the campaign running, and measuring what came back.
Razorpay frames this as a new place for customers to find things, at a moment when the older places are getting costly. The company's post makes two points: the price of winning a new customer keeps climbing, and more and more people now put their question to an AI assistant rather than typing it into a search engine.
Which brands are advertising already?
Razorpay's own post names seven: Tanishq, Titan, Palmonas, Traya, Innovist, Tata Neu and Axis Max Life. Entrackr, reporting the same day, lists a slightly different set, adding Fastrack, Shaadi.com, Rivaah by Tanishq and the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies. Several of those sit under the same parent companies, so the two lists are best read as overlapping rather than contradictory.
How much of this is run by AI?
Most of the day-to-day work. Razorpay says the platform uses an AI agent that builds and manages campaigns, watches how they are doing and makes adjustments, while its own team supervises. That split, an agent doing the repetitive work and people checking it, is the pattern most companies are settling on when they put an AI system in front of a budget.
Why would a brand pay to appear inside a chat?
Because of how the question is asked. A search engine takes a few words and returns a ranked list. A conversation lets someone describe a situation, get options back, and narrow them down over several turns. According to Entrackr, Nitin Bawankule, OpenAI's head of enterprise sales for India, put it this way: instead of searching through a fixed set of options, people can describe what they need, explore possibilities and refine their choices through conversation. Entrackr also quotes Razorpay's chief operating officer, Rahul Kothari, who said the partnership lets businesses try ChatGPT Ads without first building the expertise themselves.
For readers who want to know what is actually happening underneath, two pieces are worth separating. ChatGPT is a language model: it generates its answer one piece at a time from what it has learned. But a model cannot know today's prices or whether an item is in stock, which is why a product catalogue has to be fed in and looked up at the moment of the conversation. That lookup step is retrieval, and it is the reason "structure your product feed" is the unglamorous first task in this whole arrangement.
What to watch
Neither Razorpay nor Entrackr published any figures: no prices, no number of advertisers, no reach. OpenAI has not posted its own announcement of the India arrangement that we could find, so for now this rests on Razorpay's blog and Entrackr's report. The things worth watching are what a campaign costs, whether ads inside a conversation are marked clearly enough for a reader to tell advice from advertising, and whether the first seven brands stay once the novelty passes.