CAIT sounds alarm on ‘agentic shopping,’ trend, urges safeguards for Indian traders
CAIT has urged traders to prepare for the AI era by digitizing their product data, building cooperative online catalogs, and strengthening direct consumer relationships.
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The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has raised concerns over the emerging agentic shopping trend following OpenAI's recent announcement that allows users to purchase products directly through ChatGPT.
Building on this development, last month OpenAI announced Instant Checkout, a new feature that will allow users to make single-item purchases directly from merchants within ChatGPT.
While the feature has not yet entered India, CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal cautioned that agentic shopping could become another avenue for global tech giants to monopolize the Indian market.
He pointed out that AI agents tend to prioritize sellers with well-structured digital data--making small traders invisible in search results.
"Moreover, these AI platforms will own the consumer data, leaving small sellers unable to build repeat customers," Khandelwal said. "India must ensure that technology empowers traders, not eliminates them", Khandelwal added.
In light of these emerging technologies, CAIT has urged traders to prepare for the AI era by digitizing their product data, building cooperative online catalogs, and strengthening direct consumer relationships.
Notably, with growing industry momentum towards agentic shopping, Microsoft also launched a similar feature—the Copilot Merchant Program—in April this year, while another tech major, Perplexity AI, introduced an in-chat shopping and payments feature in 2024. This frictionless shopping experience has the potential to redefine online shopping — shifting away from traditional search engines like Google and e-commerce platforms toward AI-driven conversational agents that offer curated suggestions and instant checkout options.
In a blog post, OpenAI has mentioned that product results in ChatGPT are “organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user,” adding that it will charge merchants a “small fee” for completed transactions.
