business · 2026-10-06
Razorpay teams with OpenAI to sell ads on ChatGPT
Photo: via Inc42 Media
Razorpay will help Indian brands like Tanishq run ads on ChatGPT. This matters because shopping is moving from search engines to AI chats, and Razorpay wants to be the middleman for that new space.
Why is Razorpay, a payments company, involved?
Razorpay is a payments company, but it runs a platform called Engage that helps brands manage marketing campaigns. In a ChatGPT conversation, a product can come up in many different ways, so a catalogue needs structuring an AI can understand. Engage handles that work and campaign management for brands like Tanishq, so they don't build the capability in-house.
Why can't brands just buy these ads directly from OpenAI?
They can, in theory. OpenAI lets advertisers buy directly through Ads Manager. But brands come to Razorpay for the operational work: preparing product catalogues so an AI can understand what they sell, structuring feeds, managing campaigns and measuring performance. Doing that manually at scale across dozens of different conversation contexts is difficult, so Razorpay provides that layer.
Is advertising on ChatGPT already normal elsewhere?
We could not find a reliable answer to this yet.
How do ads show up inside a ChatGPT answer?
A sponsored ad appears at the end of ChatGPT's answer to your question, labelled "Sponsored" and visually separated from the response. OpenAI matches ads by topic relevance, not just who pays most. If you ask about affordable jewellery, a jewellery brand's ad may appear after the answer you receive.
Why is a payments company building ad tools at all?
Razorpay is building ad tools because consumer product discovery is shifting from search engines to conversational AI, where people ask ChatGPT for buying advice. Ads inside those answers are a new moment where brands can be found. Razorpay's COO said the next customer may not search or scroll, they may ask an AI assistant for help deciding what to buy. Razorpay sees this as an early layer in commerce, tying discovery to its payments infrastructure.
Who else is trying to own this space besides Razorpay?
Cashfree, a payments firm, launched Agentic Payments in October 2025 to embed shopping in chat, then added Cashfree Here with Mastercard and Swiggy. Pine Labs, another payments firm, launched its Payment Protocol in June 2026 for AI-completed UPI payments and is building an AI ads agent with Google Cloud. Amazon Pay, the payments arm of Amazon, also introduced Smart Wallet for agent payments.
Source: inc42.com