Episodes
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If you've bought anything online in India in the last ten years, you've seen the checkout page. You search, scroll, filter, add to cart, and eventually pay.
UPI simplified the payment part. But you still had to do everything else yourself.That's about to change with agentic commerce, says Harshil Mathur, the CEO of Razorpay.
Not just change but disappear entirely.
Imagine this. Let’s say you want to make cake one evening. An agent figures out the ingredients you need for the recipe, builds the cart, checks the pantry, and finishes the purchase. Without you ever opening an app.
This is the future two years from now, according to Harshil.And Razorpay is at the forefront of this transformation. In the last eight months alone, the company has built a UPI-OpenAI-Razorpay pilot for ordering groceries in chat, launched agentic payments across Zomato, Swiggy, and Zepto, rolled out a UPI Reserve Pay flow that practically kills the PIN, and built an agent studio on Claude for merchants to automate disputes, recoveries, and reconciliation.
As this future unfolds, there are some questions. What does agentic commerce actually look like end to end? Can India make a mark here like it did with UPI? Can the habits of consumers actually shift? If they do, who loses and who wins? Does this genuinely level the playing field for small businesses, or does it just entrench the platforms that already have scale? And what does any of this mean for the tens of millions of people who haven't touched e-commerce yet?
Harshil answers all of these questions on this episode of Zero Shot. Tune in!
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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.
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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.
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Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears.
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How many AI models can you name? Not how many you use… but how many you can actually name.
That question sets the ball rolling for this episode. In the next hour, Rohin puts Brady and Praveen—two people who use AI every single day for a living—through a cold read. There is no prep or script.What they couldn't answer is the whole point. Over the course of an hour, three daily AI users discover their stances on where their data goes, on the tools they default to, and their strategy with AI use.
The questions they had to answer:
What did you use AI for in the last 24 hours? Be specific.On a scale of one to ten, how AI proficient are you?Have you ever thought about where your conversations and data actually go?If you lost access tomorrow, what would you actually lose?Have you taught the AIs you use about yourself? Could you take that to a different tool?Does your company have an AI strategy, or does it just have AI users?Do you think using AI is making you sharper or duller?A year from now, do you want to be more valuable because of AI—or more replaceable?These questions around "intelligence independence" form the basis of The Ken's next live event on Saturday, 1 August, at the Bangalore International Centre.
Unlike prior waves of technology, the AI wave doesn't just impact all of us—be it as a country, a company, or a professional—it also extracts what is most valuable from us. Our knowledge. Our intelligence. It's the part of the AI equation we talk about the least. And we want to change that.
You can find the tickets here: https://the-ken.com/columns/zero-shot/the-best-time-to-think-about-intelligence-independence-was-four-years-ago-the-next-best-time-is-now/
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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.
---
Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.
---Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears.
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Missing episodes?
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It’s the end of 2025, so we don’t have a full episode of Zero Shot for you today.
This podcast launched in September, and we’ve produced 14 episodes for you so far. We’ve covered a wide range of topics, and our conversations—between Praveen, Rohin, and Brady—only work because you’re willing to sit with the complexities we wade into.
We know artificial intelligence will move fast in 2026, so we’ll keep asking the questions that matter in this AI hype cycle. We’re glad you’re coming along with us.
So, thank you, and we’ll be back next week.
As always, if you’d like to get in touch with any or all of our hosts, please drop us a note at [email protected]. We respond to all messages.
The cover art of Zero Shot is generated by AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.
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Join Brady Ng, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, and Rohin Dharmakumar of The Ken as they discuss the big ideas in artificial intelligence. You’ll get the macro view, explore their experiments in practical applications, go deeper than the news coverage you’ve seen, and hear about the implications of the latest developments. Nothing is off the table.
