Fintech giant Razorpay partners with OpenAI to help Indian brands advertise on ChatGPT

Indian fintech company Razorpay has partnered with OpenAI to help Indian businesses advertise on ChatGPT through Razorpay Engage, its growth marketing platform.

Under the partnership, Razorpay Engage will help businesses prepare product catalogues, structure product feeds, launch advertising campaigns and measure their performance on ChatGPT Ads.

Early participants include Fastrack, Traya, Tata Neu, Rivaah by Tanishq, Shaadi.com, Axis Max Life, Tanishq, Palmonas and Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), according to Razorpay.

The move comes after OpenAI expanded ChatGPT Ads to India. On 31 August, OpenAI announced that advertisers in India could buy ChatGPT Ads directly through its Ads Manager, as part of a wider international expansion of its advertising platform.

How product discovery is changing

The companies are looking to tap into a shift in how people use AI to research products and make purchasing decisions.

Instead of relying only on keyword-based searches, users can describe what they are looking for, explore different options and refine their requirements through conversations with ChatGPT.

For advertisers, this means a product could become relevant in several different conversations depending on a user's needs and context. Razorpay said the quality and structure of product information therefore become important when businesses prepare their catalogues for this type of advertising.

Nitin Bawankule, head of enterprise sales, India, at OpenAI, said “ChatGPT is changing how people discover products and make decisions. Instead of searching through a fixed set of options, people can describe what they need, explore possibilities, and refine their choices through conversation.”

“Ads can help brands show up meaningfully in those moments, while preserving the trust people place in ChatGPT. Through our collaboration with Razorpay, we want to make it easier for Indian brands to explore this new channel and learn how conversational discovery can create new opportunities for growth,” he said.

What Razorpay Engage will do

Razorpay Engage will provide businesses with technology and operational support to set up and manage advertising campaigns on ChatGPT.

Its role will include assessing catalogue readiness, improving and structuring product feeds, creating and managing campaigns, and measuring and optimising their performance.

Razorpay said Engage will also use an AI agent built around ChatGPT Ads best practices to help create and manage campaigns across different contexts in which consumers may encounter a company's products.

The agent will monitor campaign performance and make adjustments, while the Razorpay Engage team will provide human oversight in cases where judgement is required.

Rahul Kothari, COO at Razorpay, said “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. For businesses, we believe that opens up an entirely new moment to be discovered.”

Kothari said Razorpay Engage would handle the preparation and management of ChatGPT Ads, allowing businesses to test the advertising channel without having to develop the expertise internally from scratch.

Tanishq among early participants

Tanishq is among the companies already testing the advertising format.

Pelki Tshering, chief marketing officer at Tanishq, said “Our first ChatGPT ads campaign is an interesting new chapter for Tanishq. For a high-consideration category like jewellery, understanding how consumers discover and make decisions is as important as reaching them. We’re excited to see how these insights can help us as AI-led discovery evolves.”

Razorpay describes Engage as a payments-integrated growth marketing platform focused on customer acquisition and retention. The ChatGPT collaboration extends the platform to another advertising channel as businesses experiment with reaching consumers through AI-led conversations.

ChatGPT Ads are still relatively new. OpenAI began expanding the advertising product internationally this year and made self-service access available to advertisers in India through Ads Manager in August.

OpenAI said advertisements on ChatGPT are clearly labelled and kept separate from its responses. It also said advertising does not influence the answers ChatGPT provides.

Through the collaboration, Razorpay Engage will provide the technology and operational support Indian businesses need to prepare, launch and manage campaigns on ChatGPT Ads.