Google India is embarking on a journey underlining the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and personal finance, something no other standalone digital payments and UPI (unified payments interface) app has embarked on so far. Google Pay app in India is now integrating ‘Ask Google Pay’, which uses Google’s Gemini models with an intention to navigate a user through personalised financial advice, spend analysis or wealth guidance. Alongside, the Google Pay Flex co-branded credit card now adds SBI Cards as a partner, with a fully digital card accessible on RuPay and Visa card networks.
“The idea is that we want to bring the power of what we’ve done with Gemini in the general purpose outside world to the world of money. As you can understand, that brings with it a lot of sensitivities,” says Sharath Bulusu, Senior Director - Product Management, Google Pay, in an exclusive conversation with HT.
For Google Pay, how this AI layer was delivered to users, was a matter of extensive deliberation. “That is why instead of going the other way where we said, ‘hey how do we bring the context that Google Pay knows about you to Gemini’, we said ‘what if we could take the models and bring them to Google Pay.’ So then what happens is the data, your settings, everything stays within the world of Google Pay where a user understands the choices you’ve made with respect to money and gets to leverage the power of the model to answer questions,” Bulusu explains.
