Juspay’s Ishan Sharma on AI agents, and building from India for the world

At the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, The Economic Times sat down with Ishan Sharma, Head of Business Development at Juspay, India’s first unicorn of 2026, for a candid conversation on the future of digital payments.In this exclusive interview, Sharma reflected on:> 12 years of solving payments at a current scale of 350 million transactions/day, a scale that Sharma noted, “even Silicon Valley doesn’t match”;> Why brands such as Maruti Suzuki and Decathlon are moving to the digital payment fold;> The rise of agentic commerce, and why letting AI pay on your behalf “could get a little dystopian”;> India’s regulatory advantage: “RBI thinks about much more things that we sometimes are not able to”;> The global ambition: “Can we go to the developed world and say we can match your tech, and even perform better?”> And why, above all, “open” is the word that defines Juspay’s philosophy.Watch the full interview to understand how Juspay is betting big on a future where invoices auto-pay, agents transact on behalf of users, and Indian-built infrastructure powers commerce from Bengaluru to Berlin.