Press · Hindustan Times
How AI shopping agents will drive online sales
Hindustan Times explains agentic commerce for a general reader - with our co-founder Umang Chhaparia on India's readiness and what we build for brands.
What the piece covers
Hindustan Times uses a mattress purchase to explain agentic commerce: the assistant researches, compares and, soon, places the order and pays without the shopper opening a website. It sets the Indian context with Google's Universal Commerce Protocol in the US, a Business Standard report that the government is designing a Unified Agents Protocol for agent payments, and Adobe's finding that 60% of Indian consumers want personal AI agents to help them shop, the highest in Asia-Pacific, per the article.
Our co-founder Umang Chhaparia is the operator voice. The article reports his belief that Indians are keen to use AI shopping assistants and his estimate that the infrastructure is 25% ready, then quotes him on UPI Reserve Pay as the model for giving an agent a wallet with authorisation limits, on why agents will shop from a bigger spread of websites faster than people do, and on what we build: agentic storefronts that agents can talk to, mapped against competitors.
The piece names us as TruCommerce.ai and TruCommerce and lists clients in its own words; we repeat only the two already on our case-studies page, ITC and Amazon. Fireside Ventures' Adarsh Menon and Onetab.ai's Saket Dandotia carry the risks: falling site traffic, brands losing the direct customer relationship, and assistants that favour well-structured data over the better product.
On the record
“There are products like UPI Reserve Pay where the idea is to give a wallet to your agent, and authorization on the kind of transactions it can do,”
Umang Chhaparia, co-founder - on how far India's agent-payments infrastructure has got
“They can evaluate products from a bigger spread across websites, make informed purchases and also because of the speed at which they can do it,”
Umang Chhaparia, co-founder - on why shopping through a personal AI agent will take off in India
“We set up agentic storefronts for the brands so that agents can talk to them. We also map them against their competitors. AI agents shop differently. Earlier, brands had to worry about how to be on the top in a marketplace. Now they need to be within the purview of the AI agents,”
Umang Chhaparia, co-founder - on what TruCommerce builds for brands