Paytm Intelligence: Vijay Shekhar Sharma's Plan To Turn Payments Scale Into An AI Business

Paytm is taking its artificial intelligence to banks, lenders and insurers. Called Paytm Intelligence, or Pi, the enterprise service unveiled at the Global Fintech Fest in September offers AI agents to financial institutions. It is how founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma plans to turn the scale Paytm has built in payments into an AI business.

Pi will initially serve clients in India and the UAE. Its agents work across sales, customer service and operations, from assessing what a customer needs to running campaigns, winning new customers and cross selling to existing ones. Paytm has already begun offering Pi to a few customers.

These are agents Paytm already runs on its own business. At the AGM, Paytm President and Group CFO Madhur Deora told shareholders that all of the company's merchant sales work, including loan collection, is now powered by AI agents, and that its consumer acquisition and retention efforts also run on AI. Pi offers lenders and insurers the same kind of capability.

This is where Paytm's scale comes in. At the core of Pi is a financial services AI model that Paytm has been developing for about two years. It draws on the numerical data the company has gathered over years of processing transactions and studying customer behaviour, and it can predict fraud, creditworthiness and whether a claim is credible.

Sharma first spoke about the idea at last year's Global Fintech Fest. He said he was working on AI products and planned to give them a brand of their own, since the Paytm name is so closely tied to payments. Pi arrived at this year's edition, and at the company's 26th AGM days later, he told shareholders: "We have called it Paytm Intelligence, that is Pi."

Pi also fits Sharma's view of where technology is heading. On September 7, the day before the Fest opened, he wrote on X: "In 2027, organizations and businesses will rush to launch agents, just as they launched websites and apps in the early internet and mobile-internet days." Pi puts Paytm in the business of building those agents for others.

Pi covers the large end of the market. At the small end, Paytm launched its AI Soundbox at last year's Fest, taking AI straight to merchants already using its payment devices, with an assistant that can talk to them in 11 local languages. "We believe AI can help small businesses scale faster and enable large enterprises to operate with greater efficiency and intelligence," Sharma said at the launch.

Paytm spent years learning how India pays. With Pi, it wants other businesses to put that knowledge to work.

Published on: Wednesday, October 07, 2026, 05:03 PM IST