Deepinder Goyal says AI chat interfaces won't displace Zomato's food delivery business

Deepinder Goyal says AI chat interfaces won't displace food delivery and quick commerce business

Eternal founder Deepinder Goyal believes AI chat interfaces won't displace food delivery and quick commerce apps, arguing that habitual transactions and brand recall offer strong defenses. He asserts AI will instead widen the company's moat by making its platforms more accessible to a broader Indian audience, particularly in tier-II and -III cities. Eternal founder Deepinder Goyal dispelled fears that artificial intelligence (AI) chat interfaces could displace food delivery and quick commerce apps, while making the case that the technology will help widen the company's moat by bringing more Indians on its platforms. In a letter to shareholders, Goyal drew a comparison with Google's decade-long attempt to pull transactional behaviour into its own ecosystem for booking flights, hotels, shopping and food ordering. "They had the largest demand surface on earth, billions of searches a day, and the strongest distribution advantage in the history of the world. And yet Booking.com is still here. Expedia is still here. Amazon is still here. The vertical apps that consumers had built habits around didn't get displaced," he wrote. "General-purpose interfaces are good for general-purpose queries. They are poor interfaces for complex, high-frequency, habitual transactions," he said, noting that customers who order on Zomato four times a week or restock groceries on Blinkit every other day will not change those habits and switch to a chat window. He also pointed to brand recall as a structural defence. When someone is hungry, they think Zomato. When they need groceries in minutes, they think Blinkit. He argued that such a mental real estate will not be dislodged easily, and is the main reason why the company runs separate apps focussed on building distinct super brands rather than collating all of it into a single super app. However, Goyal did not swipe away the threat entirely. "Agentic commerce is similar to, and also different from, Google's attempt at owning transactions. At this point, we believe there is nothing to panic about," he said. But how does AI help Eternal? Goyal said the company is the largest deployers of AI in demand prediction, route optimisation, supply-chain management, customer experience, fraud detection and catalogue quality control. Smelling an opportunity in the technology for more than just cutting costs for Eternal, Goyal said conversational interfaces could significantly lower the barrier to participation for older users, non-native language speakers, first-time online buyers, and consumers in tier-II and -III cities who struggle with conventional app flows. "AI lets us serve people and businesses that were previously too hard, too small, too fragmented, or too operationally expensive to serve well," Goyal wrote. "Our moat remains the physical world. AI makes that moat wider by allowing more of India to participate in it."

Deepinder Goyal Says AI Not a Threat to Zomato

"AI is our friend, not a threat," Eternal (formerly Zomato) co-founder Deepinder Goyal wrote in the company's Q4FY26 letter released April 28. Eternal has expanded its OpenAI partnership, built a system allowing AI to place food orders on a user's behalf, and joined a live agentic payments platform doing exactly that. Indian law has no framework for when it goes wrong. Goyal draws on Google's history to make his case. Despite Google's scale and distribution advantage in pulling transactional behaviour into Google Flights, Hotels, Shopping, and restaurant ordering on Maps, vertical apps retained their users. "And yet Booking.com is still here. Expedia is still here. Amazon is still here," he wrote, arguing that general-purpose interfaces are poor substitutes for apps consumers have built habits around. He does not claim the threat is impossible. "If something similar didn't work in the past, it doesn't mean it won't work in the future," he wrote, before concluding: "At this point, we believe there is nothing to panic about." He added the company would keep its eyes open "without an iota of complacency or wishful thinking." He makes three arguments for why Eternal's platforms are resilient: Eternal claims to already be one of India's largest AI deployers. Goyal claims Eternal is "one of the largest deployers of AI in India," with systems already live across demand prediction, route optimisation, supply chain management, fraud detection, and partner support. "These systems are trained on billions of real interactions, where the cost of getting something wrong is immediate and measurable," he wrote, drawing a distinction between Eternal's operational AI and general-purpose chat interfaces. The bigger argument: does AI expand the market or expose it? "AI lets us serve people and businesses that were previously too hard, too small, too fragmented, or too operationally expensive to serve well," Goyal wrote. Conversational interfaces, he argues, let customers "express intent in full sentences rather than two-word search queries, which is a far richer signal to convert against," meaning a stronger basis for matching users to relevant results and driving purchases. What Eternal has built toward this includes: Agentic commerce on Zomato is already live. Razorpay and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) announced agentic payments on Claude in February 2026, allowing users to order food from Zomato, Swiggy, and Zepto without leaving a conversation. Under the system, users set a one-time spending limit upfront and an AI agent then completes transactions on their behalf within those limits using Unified Payments Interface (UPI) flows. Zomato is already one of the platforms on which this system operates. Indian consumer protection law has no answer for what happens when this goes wrong. Three frameworks are relevant and all fall short for specific reasons: The users Goyal names are the least protected. Goyal argues conversational interfaces lower friction "especially for older users, non-native language speakers, first-time online buyers, and tier 2 and 3 city consumers who may struggle with app flows." These are also the users least likely to understand they have delegated a transaction to an AI system, least likely to read consent flows carefully, and least equipped to navigate a dispute when something goes wrong. Goyal's market expansion argument and his dismissal of regulatory risk point in opposite directions: the bigger the expansion into these user segments, the more acute the protection gap becomes. Platforms are moving faster than the law. When agents initiate transactions autonomously, responsibility splinters across developers, deployers, cloud providers, and integrators, with no framework for cascading liability, audit trails, or clear attribution. MediaNama has reported on this governance gap in detail. MediaNama tested Swiggy's MCP integration when it was released and found platforms drawing the line cautiously, with gated access, confirmation steps, and cash-on-delivery-only payments indicating where companies are limiting AI autonomy for now. The caution is commercial, not regulatory. At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, experts called for three infrastructure pieces to make agentic commerce trustworthy: an Aadhaar equivalent as a foundational identity layer for AI agents, a UPI equivalent for how money flows between agents, and an Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) equivalent as an interoperable platform. None of these exist yet, and neither MeitY nor the Ministry of Consumer Affairs has issued any guidance on agentic commerce liability or consent frameworks. Goyal wrote that "at this point, we believe there is nothing to panic about." The users he wants AI to bring onto Eternal's platforms may not have the same luxury.