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Razorpay Opens ChatGPT Advertising to Indian Brands

Posted on 6th Oct 2026 12:11:49 in Business, Digital Marketing

Tagged as: ChatGPT Ads, Razorpay, OpenAI, Digital Marketing, Indian Brands, AI Advertising

Indian businesses may soon find their next customer inside a chat window rather than on a search results page. On October 5, payments major Razorpay announced it has deepened its partnership with OpenAI to help Indian brands set up, run and optimise advertising campaigns on ChatGPT, the AI assistant that began showing ads in India at the end of August.

At the centre of the arrangement is Razorpay Engage, the company's growth marketing platform, which will act as a service layer for ChatGPT Ads — from checking whether a brand's product catalogue is ready for the format to measuring how campaigns perform once they are live. Nine brands are part of the first wave: Tanishq, Fastrack, Traya, Tata Neu, Rivaah by Tanishq, Shaadi.com, Axis Max Life, Palmonas and Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS).

What Razorpay Engage Will Do for Advertisers

According to Razorpay, Engage will provide both the technology and the operational groundwork that brands need to participate in ChatGPT Ads. That covers four broad jobs:

  • Assessing whether a brand's product catalogue is ready to appear inside AI conversations
  • Cleaning up and structuring product feeds so items can be matched to relevant user queries
  • Creating and managing ad campaigns, including placements in the different contexts where consumers encounter a brand's products
  • Measuring and continuously optimising campaign performance

The heavy lifting will be handled by an AI agent built around ChatGPT Ads best practices. The agent will create and manage campaigns, track their performance and make ongoing adjustments, with Razorpay's team providing human oversight wherever it is needed.

“The way people discover products is changing. The next customer may not search for a product or scroll through an ad; they may simply ask an AI assistant for help deciding what to buy,” said Rahul Kothari, Chief Operations Officer at Razorpay. “For businesses, we believe that opens up an entirely new moment to be discovered.”

Why Conversational Discovery Is a New Marketing Channel

The partnership lands at a moment when product discovery is shifting from keyword search towards conversation. Instead of typing short queries into a search engine, users increasingly describe what they want in natural language — their budget, preferences and use case — and refine their shortlist through back-and-forth dialogue with an AI assistant.

OpenAI's India rollout has moved quickly. ChatGPT Ads began appearing for logged-in adults on the Free and Go plans at the end of August, with advertising groups WPP and Omnicom as the first agency partners in the country. On August 31, OpenAI said advertisers could begin buying ChatGPT Ads directly through its Ads Manager in India. The company has also said the format crossed a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate in under 200 days, a pace that explains why brands and their marketing partners are paying close attention.

For businesses, the shift means product information and catalogues now have to be structured well enough to surface across a wide range of conversational queries. Razorpay has said managing that process manually, at scale, is difficult — which is precisely the gap Engage is built to fill.

Nitin Bawankule, Head of Enterprise Sales for India at OpenAI, said the collaboration would make it easier for Indian brands to explore advertising on the platform and to understand how conversational discovery could open up new growth opportunities.

The Nine Brands Leading the First Wave

The initial cohort spans jewellery, wearables, health and personal care, travel, insurance, fashion and education — a sign that brands in very different categories want early lessons from the format. Tanishq's first ChatGPT Ads campaign, for instance, was supported by the agency HiveMinds and is being used to study how consumers discover products and make purchase decisions as AI-led discovery develops.

Pelki Tshering, Chief Marketing Officer of Tanishq, said the campaign would help the jewellery brand understand how consumers are finding products and making purchasing decisions as the new channel evolves.

For now, the roster is dominated by large consumer names. The bigger signal for smaller businesses sits underneath: the infrastructure that makes advertising and, eventually, selling inside AI assistants work is maturing fast.

What It Means for Small and Mid-Sized Indian Businesses

Two developments from Razorpay's work are worth noting for any business that sells online.

First, the plumbing is getting simpler. Razorpay has said its technology can cut the time a Shopify merchant needs to set up a ChatGPT storefront from roughly eight to ten weeks of manual work to about 30 minutes, by automating catalogue syncing and submission. In August, the company said it was running agentic-commerce pilots with around 50 brands and several e-commerce marketplaces, in partnership with OpenAI and NPCI — the infrastructure that will eventually allow purchases to be completed inside the chat interface itself. Advertising is the first commercial layer on top of that stack, and it is already open to brands of every size.

Second, catalogue quality is becoming a marketing asset in its own right. In a conversational environment, a product surfaces because its data — name, category, attributes, pricing, availability and description — gives the AI enough context to match it to a user's question. Messy or thin product feeds mean missed queries, and missed queries mean missed sales.

The shift is not limited to brands advertising on ChatGPT. Platforms such as Justdial have integrated business discovery with ChatGPT, letting users find local services, ratings and contact details through conversation. That gives neighbourhood businesses another route to being found — provided their listings and details are accurate and complete.

A Checklist for Getting Discovery-Ready

Based on what Razorpay says brands need before they can run ChatGPT Ads, here is a practical starting checklist for small and mid-sized sellers:

  • Audit your product catalogue: make sure every item has a clear name, category, key attributes, price and stock status.
  • Write descriptions that answer real questions about material, size, compatibility and use case, instead of just listing features.
  • Remove duplicate, incomplete or stale entries that could confuse a system trying to match products to queries.
  • Keep pricing and availability in sync across your own store, marketplaces and product feeds.
  • Structure your feed the way advertising platforms expect, so it can be ingested and refreshed automatically.
  • Start with a small test campaign and measure what conversational placements actually deliver before scaling spend.
  • Keep a human in the loop: review creatives, claims and targeting before committing larger budgets.

None of this replaces the fundamentals of a good online store — clear pricing, honest claims, fast delivery and responsive support — but structured product data is quickly becoming the entry ticket for a new generation of discovery channels.

The Road Ahead for AI Advertising in India

For Razorpay, the move is another step beyond payments. The IPO-bound company has spent much of 2026 building towards agentic commerce, working with OpenAI and NPCI on storefronts and in-chat purchases, and the Engage platform now extends that ambition into advertising. For OpenAI, the partnership adds an experienced local partner that can bring Indian advertisers on board faster than a purely self-serve route would allow.

Conversational advertising is still young, and the way its performance is measured will keep evolving. But the direction of travel is clear: between search engines, social feeds and now AI assistants, consumers have one more place to ask what they should buy — and businesses have one more place to answer.

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