Selling inside AI assistants: what agentic commerce means for Indian brands
What changed
In September 2025, OpenAI introduced Instant Checkout in ChatGPT along with an open Agentic Commerce Protocol. Merchants share a structured product feed, and checkout happens inside the chat. OpenAI's documentation says access is limited to approved partners.
In January 2026, Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard for AI agents to handle discovery and checkout, with checkout in its AI Mode starting with US retailers and wider rollout planned.
Why structured data decides who gets recommended
AI assistants prefer products they can read clearly: accurate titles and descriptions, current price and stock, identifiers, images and genuine reviews. A product that exists only as a web page with no price is harder for AI to recommend with confidence.
What Indian brands can do today
You don't need to wait for checkout to reach India to benefit:
- Keep one clean product master and generate feeds from it automatically.
- Add product, FAQ and organisation schema to your website.
- Collect genuine reviews after every purchase, for example on WhatsApp.
- Write clear answers to the questions buyers ask before they purchase.
- Let customers buy inside your own WhatsApp bot and website chat.
A word of caution
No one can guarantee a position in an AI answer. Anyone who promises that is guessing. What you can control is the quality and freshness of the information AI reads about you.