India’s digital payment share has increased over the years, with the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) growing to over 750 million daily transactions. With an aim to reach over a billion daily transactions, Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees UPI, thinks AI would be heavily involved in the next phase for user growth, fraud prevention, and credit distribution.

During an interview with TechCrunch at Mumbai Tech Week (MTW) 2026 last month, Asbe said AI could drive the next half a billion users with NPCI, India’s central bank, and the government working together.

“AI will be used very effectively when we look at the next wave of UPI, and that includes all aspects, including reaching new users. We must use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud, and to find mules. AI must also be used to provide credit to all the users and merchants who have digital footprints,” he said. “We must use AI to look at the voice and multilingual solutions to make onboarding simpler.”

Many companies have talked about voice as an interface being important in India for chatting with companies or systems. Asbe believes that it is early days for that, as voice models will need to be more accurate. NPCI launched a voice assistant-based interactive system in 2023. Asbe noted that adoption for that yet to take off, and with the right use case, voice can become a critical component in the payment ecosystem.

AI in finance and regulations

In the U.S., startups and public companies are racing to add AI to finance. Coinbase and Robinhood now allow agents to trade on users’ behalf, and OpenAI lets you load personal account data into ChatGPT to get financial advice. NPCI has shown some demos around agentic commerce and payments with Razorpay last year. However, there hasn’t been a wider rollout of some of these capabilities.

NPCI’s CEO thinks that with robust regulations and a framework, India can also adopt AI-powered finance. He said that there should be enough protection for users and mitigation for risk — and in case something goes wrong, the system should be able to look at the instructions and consent given by the user to an agent.

Besides the usage of models, Asbe thinks that the Indian finance ecosystem has an opportunity to build small language models.

“We believe that the models will differentiate from each other based on the data sets that are made available to them,” he said. “We have a very rich data set in our ecosystem. I think there is a big opportunity for Indian companies — the banks, FinTechs, and the ecosystem — to create small language models which are sharp, specific, and as deterministic as possible.”

Last year, NPCI launched a model called FIMI to solve user disputes. Asbe noted that it is serving over a million users to cancel mandates and resolve issues, and is scaling fast.

UPI competition

NPCI has long sought healthy competition between UPI apps, but data suggests that Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay have over 80% of the market share. The regulator’s plan to cap an app’s market share at 30% is set to take effect on December 31, 2026, unless it defers the deadline date again.

During the conversation, Asbe said that UPI apps have very low switching costs and most core features are shared. He noted that PhonePe and Google have poured millions into their apps to attain their market position. He said that if new apps find viable business models within the fintech ecosystem, their share will rise.

“I believe that there are multiple issues why we see this concentration risk exist, and one of the important reasons is the availability of a viable commercial model. The moment we see the commercial model being available to the ecosystem, I believe newer players will start investing very heavily,” Asbe said.

In 2024, the payment body spun off its BHIM UPI app to make it more competitive and grow its usage. While its transaction volume has grown, its overall market share is around 1%. Asbe said that with BHIM, there is no particular target market share NPCI is eyeing. But it wants to make it a sovereign and secure alternative to other apps, Asbe said.

India is one of the biggest digital economies, and investors around the world will be looking at the regulatory landscape to put money into newer fintech solutions and make the market more competitive.

Instagram users could soon see more ways to tune their content, according to a recent post from Instagram head Adam Mosseri.

Specifically, Mosseri was showing off new ways that users might access Your Algorithm, a feature that allows them to specify which topics they want to see more of, and less of. Instagram launched Your Algorithm last year and has been introducing it to more areas of the app.

“We want to evolve Your Algorithm from a setting to something that feels central to your experience on Instagram,” Mosseri said. He also noted, “Some of this is testing now, some is coming soon, some might not work.”

The examples in his post include one where pulling down in your Instagram feed eventually brings up the Your Algorithm menu, and another where swiping up from a Reel could bring up a similar customization prompt. A third shows buttons beneath each Reel to indicate whether or not  you want to see more Reels like it.

The most popular comments on Mosseri’s post all make the same request. As one user put it, “WE JUST WANT OUR ALGORITHM TO SHOW THE PPL WE FOLLOW.”

Not everyone is buying Elon Musk’s vision for orbital data centers. 

Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of Softbank, argued at a recent shareholder meeting that building data centers in space won’t do much to cut costs and will take too long when “in the battle for AI, the next few years will be far more important than what might happen a decade or so from now.”

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed Son’s remarks as part of a broader discussion that included OpenAI’s plans for custom chips, chipmaker Groq’s new $650 million funding, and much more.

Kirsten noted that it’s “very ironic” that Son is playing the skeptic here, given SoftBank’s “long history of wild bets.”

Sean, meanwhile, said that when Musk talks about “making a constellation of satellites — satellites that need to be replaced every few years as well —  to make up an ‘orbital data center,’” he’s just “guaranteeing that much more business” for SpaceX.

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Sean O’Kane: Listen, neo-clouds are the new oil, and everybody who wants to make money is pivoting to a neo-cloud. I’m proud to announce that TechCrunch is now a neo-cloud, give us all your money.

I mean, this is the thing you do. It seems like there are so many players that are compute constrained, so anybody who has a shot at being able to lease out that compute is taking it, whether that’s Groq, a company that was semi-hollowed out by Nvidia, or Allbirds, which went into bankruptcy and and emerged from it as a new neo-cloud provider instead of selling shoes — Tim Fernholz did an interview with the new CEO of of that new effort that I would definitely recommend people go read. 

Or whether you’re SpaceX, where your idea was: I’m gonna build an AI platform that’s gonna have an addressable market the size of U.S. GDP, but before we get there, we’ll just rent out our compute.  And we saw this continue to happen with SpaceX, where it’s not as big as the deals that they’ve struck with Google or Anthropic, but they just signed another deal, [their] first post IPO deal, to rent out compute to another smaller player. They’re continuing down that road. 

You know, I can see this being a business for Groq in the near term. The question with all of these is how durable is it in the long term.

Anthony Ha: If we’re talking about SpaceX and their AI business and data center business, we also have to talk about these comments that Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, made recently, where he basically said: What is the point of data centers in space? Which is a question we’ve asked on this show. 

And it speaks to, again, this sense in the industry of being really, really compute constrained — they need to build as many data centers as possible, [and] there’s all kinds of reasons why that is proving to be challenging here on Earth, so maybe space is the answer. But I think Son makes some pretty fair points about: All this stuff we’re talking about, even if it all works — and the costs are going to be very, very serious to make it work — this is not happening for years and years and years, so this is not a solution to any immediate problem, as far the current need for data centers goes.

Kirsten Korosec: I just want to point out that SoftBank has a long history of making wild bets. I think it says something when Son comes up and asks the question that a lot of people have asked. 

I mean, there are a lot of VCs and founders [who] have been swept up into the idea of orbital data centers and it seems like suddenly everyone’s on board. When just a couple of years ago, I think, if someone had mentioned that, it would get slapped down a little bit. So I do think it’s an important part of the process that someone who has a pretty high profile is asking that question. But it is very ironic to me that he is the one asking it, because if you look at his pitch deck, they’ve thrown a lot of money at some pretty bold ideas.

Sean: WeWork! Listen, we’re going to be saying this for a lot over the next couple years. The idea of putting these things in space is going to be an interesting engineering challenge and certainly an interesting economic challenge. 

Anthony, what you said is definitely right to a certain extent. Elon Musk is a person who hates red tape and you know, there are no NIMBYs in space so of course he’s going to try and do that. 

To me, it comes down to: The business as it stands now for SpaceX, especially its launch business, is just overwhelmingly reliant on Starlink. The reason that they are 80 or 90% of the launch market globally is not just because they’ve done all these things that are better than pretty much every other launch provider around the globe, it’s also because they have Starlink that is driving up that number. If you remove Starlink from the equation, they would be closer to — I don’t know, maybe 20% or 30% of the launch market, or 40%, but it certainly wouldn’t be 90%. 

And when you talk about making a constellation of satellites — satellites that need to be replaced every few years as well —  to make up an “orbital data center,” quote unquote, you’re just guaranteeing that much more business for your launch business. And I just can’t stop myself from coming back to that point.

Kirsten: I want to really quickly say that [SpaceX’s] other big business is renting out their compute, by the way. So back to the chip conversation. We’ve come full circle.

Anthony: One of the other themes that may run through this episode is this idea of talking your own book. This is not a new phenomenon. Executives at tech companies, or any other company, what they’re predicting for the future is ultimately the future that is going to be advantageous to their business. 

But I think it’s something that’s just always worth remembering when we’re having these conversations about big AI companies, because it is this moment of incredible uncertainty, and we’re all wondering: What does the job market look like in the future? What effect is this going to have on the environment? What are the skills I need to learn? 

All these AI CEOs or AI investors, they all have thoughts on that. And it’s not that they’re wrong or that they are being deliberately misleading, but in each case, there’s an asterisk to these predictions. In Musk’s case, he’s talking about something that would be very good for SpaceX’s business. In SoftBank’s case, they are very, very heavily invested in data center projects here on Earth. Sam Altman is the other notable figure who’s rolled his eyes a bit at the orbital data center idea — and again, he and Elon Musk obviously have a long and complicated history together.

All of which is to say that there’s just no objective, impartial observers here. It’s all these people with baggage and tremendous amounts of money at stake.